Returns Policy
If you are unhappy with your purchase, you can return it to us within 14 days. More details
MovieMail's Review
Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford are perhaps best known for Gilda, a near-mythic Argentina–set noir lit by Rita’s femme fatale fireworks, including a famous striptease sequence. The Loves of Carmen, filmed previously with Dolores del Rio, came two years later, and while it’s rooted in the 19th century and shot in glorious Technicolor, it has notably noirish trappings, with a thick vein of fatalism running through its centre and Rita cast once more as a moral vacuum.
Ford plays a Spanish soldier, newly arrived at a Seville barracks. He’s a gentleman, destined for a government role if he can steer clear of wine and women. No chance. Five minutes in he meets Carmen and the die is cast. Carmen, of course, is Hayworth. She’s a gypsy, the product of a ‘lawless and unhappy breed’, according to the film’s titles. We first meet her sitting on a wall, coquettishly eating an orange, her long legs swinging. ‘There’s nothing so good to the taste as a thing that’s been warmed by the Spanish sun,’ she says. Flirting relentlessly, she runs rings around the smitten Ford.
An army buddy tries to warn him. ‘She’s bad all the way through. She lies as easily as other people drink water,’ he says, but it’s no good. A deadly duel later, Ford’s running for his life, a price on his head. These metropolitan sequences are really flavourful, with a fine evocation of time and place, thanks to sumptuous sets and some 1,200 extras. The duel is particularly interesting, the shadow of crossed swords falling on Hayworth as Ford and his superior fight for her love.
This eye for the unusual is evident throughout, culminating in a delicious final pull-away: the camera descending a staircase littered with red roses, as the film’s favourite omen – the black cat – strolls across the screen. It’s a fine wrap-up to a fascinating movie that suggests amoral, seductive women weren’t unique to 1940s America, while serving as a dry run for another of Ford’s lovelorn psychos – 3.10 to Yuma’s Ben Wade.
And if it can’t quite match Gilda, it’s still a welcome chance to see Columbia’s signature stars doing what they did best. Indeed, this was the studio’s biggest grosser of 1948.
'There's nothing so good to the taste as a thing that's been warmed by the Spanish sun,' says Rita Hayworth's Carmen, licking her lips as she eats an apple as she sits on a wall and swings her legs. Glenn Ford's dragoon doesn't stand a chance and soon he has betrayed his honour, been cashiered from the service, and turned to a life of crime in this Technicolor adaptation of Prosper Mérimée's famous novel.
