Carmen Jones

For originality, it gets 10 out of 10. Director Otto Preminger teamed up with writers Oscar Hammerstein II and Harry Kleiner, as well as an all-star cast, to take Bizet's operatic masterpiece and turn it into a contemporary (circa 1954) story set in an army base in the Deep South featuring an all African-American cast. In execution, however, the marks aren’t that high for the final film, and primarily for one reason: The singing stinks, or at least it looks so unnatural coming out  of the mouths of the cast it’s impossible to watch without snickering at it. Lip-synching is part of almost every movie musical, and when it works it’s magical. Here, though, the operatic nature of the songs coming out of the mouths of stars Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belefonte makes them look absurd, especially when compared to the way they look and act when they aren’t singing.