Bizet's opera Carmen was transposed and transported from Spain to a Jacksonville, Florida army base in the forties, the libretto rewritten by Oscar Hammerstein II for an all black-American cast. The Broadway play was a hit in 1943, and some eleven years later it was put on the CinemaScope screen by Otto Preminger. Dorothy Dandridge is Carmen, a fiery seductress in a hot-pink skirt who works at a government parachute factory; Harry Belafonte is Joe, an upright G.I. headed for flying school until the sultry-hipped siren bids him come-hither. Incredibly, both Dandridge's and Belafonte's songs were dubbed, and only Pearl Bailey was allowed her own voice. "James Baldwin commented that the movie depended 'very heavily on a certain quaintness, a certain lack of inhibition taken to be typical of Negroes...' As Baldwin pointed out (and he was echoed by others), 'the implicit parallel between an amoral Gipsy and an amoral Negro woman is the entire root idea' of Carmen Jones" (Daniel J. Leab, From Sambo to Superspade).