Carmen Jones was a CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color motion picture that had begun shooting within the first 12 months of Twentieth Century Fox's venture in 1953 to the widescreen format as its main production mode.

Carmen Jones was released in October 1954, exactly one year and one month after Fox's first CinemaScope venture, the Biblical epic The Robe, had opened in theatres.

In 1992, Carmen Jones was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

[2][3] Set during World War II, the story focuses on Carmen Jones, a "shameless vixen" who works in a parachute factory in North Carolina.

This is much to the dismay of Joe's fiancée Cindy Lou, who had agreed to marry him during his leave prior to his reporting for flight school and an eventual officer's commission.

Husky believes she is back to finally be with him, but she refuses his advances before leaving, so he tells his entire entourage that they are cut off financially until they produce Carmen (whom he nicknames Heatwave).

[4] When he saw it, Otto Preminger dismissed it as a series of "skits loosely based on the opera", with a score "simplified and changed so that the performers who had no operatic training could sing it."

He hired Harry Kleiner, whom he had taught at Yale University, to expand the story beyond the limitations imposed upon it by the Bizet opera and Hammerstein's interpretation.

[6] Preminger realized no major studio would be interested in financing an operatic film with an all-African American cast, so he decided to produce it independently.

He anticipated United Artists executives Arthur B. Krim and Robert S. Benjamin, who had supported him in his censorship battles with The Moon Is Blue, would be willing to invest in the project, but the two felt it was not economically viable and declined.

[7] Following the completion of his previous film, River of No Return, Preminger had paid 20th Century Fox $150,000 to cancel the remainder of his contract.

[8][9] He was surprised when Fox head Darryl F. Zanuck contacted him and offered to finance the new film while allowing him to operate as a fully independent filmmaker.

[10] On April 14, 1954, six weeks before principal photography was scheduled to begin, Preminger was contacted by Joseph Breen, who was in the final months of his leadership of the office of the Motion Picture Production Code.

[12] Because he was sensitive to the issue of racial representation in the film, Preminger had no objections when Zanuck urged him to submit the script to Walter Francis White, executive secretary of the NAACP.

Harry Belafonte, a folk singer who recently had introduced calypso music to a mainstream audience, had only one film to his credit.

Finally, numerous African American actresses, from Eartha Kitt to Joyce Bryant, were tested for the role of Carmen.

Initially thrilled by the prospect of playing one of the best film roles ever offered an African-American woman, Dandridge quickly began to doubt her ability to do it justice.

Preminger had opted to remain in California for the shoot, with El Monte doubling for the Southern exteriors and the Chicago interiors being filmed at the Culver Studios.

Principal photography was completed in early August, and Preminger and the Fox publicity studio began promoting both the film and its star.

[28] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film "a big musical shenanigan and theatrical tour-de-force" and added, "In essence, it is a poignant story.

But here it is not so much poignant as it is lurid and lightly farcical, with the African American characters presented by Mr. Preminger as serio-comic devotees of sex ...

The incongruity is pointed when these people break into song to the wholly surprising and unnatural aria airs from Bizet's opera.

And whatever illusions and exaltations the musical eloquence might remotely inspire are doused by the realistic settings in which Mr. Preminger has played his film ...

"[29]Variety wrote that Preminger transferred the play from stage to screen "with taste and imagination in an opulent production" and directed "with a deft touch, blending the comedy and tragedy easily and building his scenes to some suspenseful heights.

Its color outdoes nature by several tints and tones....Possibly never has the music of George Bizet been so fulsomely treated as it is here in stereophonic sound....Technically, 'Carmen Jones' is superb.

It's too bad that slightly less may be said of its content....We've grown to accept the thesis that a Hollywood musical is just that—a gay mish-mash of nothingness, strung together by an idiotic story and some song and dance numbers.

"[31] In a 2007 review in The Guardian, Andrew Pulver rated the film as three out of five stars and said, "Underneath its obvious charms—slinky Dorothy Dandridge, brawny Harry Belafonte and a handful of memorable numbers relocated from Bizet's original—the 1954 film version of Oscar Hammerstein's all-black Broadway musical now feels like a relic from the gruesome social straitjacket that was segregation; every frame, you feel, is freighted with the tension imposed by the never-appearing white folks.

"[32] TV Guide rated the film three out of four stars, calling it "intermittently successful" and "saved by a terrific cast" despite "Preminger's heavy-handed" direction.

[34] Dorothy Dandridge became the first African American to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress, but lost to Grace Kelly for The Country Girl.