CARMEN

This is probably the cinema's best version of Carmen, shot on location in raw, rocky Spanish settings and exuding a hot-house atmosphere of sexual passion and repression which stems more from Merimee's original than from Bizet's opera. Feyder gives it a real tragic flow, culminating in an extraordinary death scene; the bullring episodes have a sweaty authenticity; and the camerawork is very free and mobile. Flaquel Meller makes a
glowering, fate-obsessed Carmen with Louis Lerch as a more stolid Don Jose.