Loves of Carmen

Is there a good copy of this film to be found? Fox films from the late silent and early sound eras are hard to find in good condition because so many were lost in a vault fire in the late 1930s. The copy I looked at seems to have been drawn from a super-long-play VHS tape. Even so, you can see what is going on, with Dolores Del Rio, as Carmen, a wild, fiery, stupid woman, destroys naive Don Alvarado and eventually captivates bullfighter Victor McLaglen.

The casting is excellent, and director Raoul Walsh's penchant for over-the-top comedy comes to the fore -- he was fond of quoting Jack Pickford, who sad Walsh's idea of a light comedy was the burn down a brothel. Even with the energy the three leads bring to the production, however, I found it getting a bit tiresome towards the end. Was this creature capable of thinking about what was going to happen more than three seconds after the moment?

Even so, even with a bad print, Del Rio was an amazing young woman, dark and earthy. In this period there was no one on the screen more beautiful than she. Combined with an ability to act, she keeps this movie going almost to the end.