Capriciousness can become cruelty.  It does with Carmen in Charles Vidor’s The Loves of Carmen (1948) based, like the opera, on the Prosper Merimee story.

The gypsies in the film, of whom beautiful Carmen is one, are truly thieves.  Carmen’s Spanish lover, who finds out too late that Carmen is married, becomes one too, after the husband’s death.  Will Carmen stay with the man?

This pretty-looking but often cornball and obvious period piece is rescued by the charisma and fire and gorgeousness of Rita Hayworth (Carmen).  Glenn Ford is miscast as the Spanish lover, Don Jose, but Hayworth makes doggone sure she isn’t miscast.  She’s even good in a fight scene with another woman, and her general energy complements the suitably staged physical conflicts between men.  Artificial as it is, the movie confirms what it means for an actress to be a star in a way Jane Fonda or Debra Winger or Michelle Pfeiffer never was.

Carmen itself is flawed if rather entertaining.  In any case, it offers something better than the fake spirituality of another Hayworth film, Salome.

Cover of The Loves of Carmen

The second episode of Jane the Virgin (on Monday, Oct. 20) was as well-written as the first.  This CW series is the new Desperate Housewives—i.e. the new plebeian, seriocomic soap—but so far it’s better than Housewives.  It’s livelier and more amusing and, well, somehow a little less plebeian.  Too, it’s moving (in the second episode), notwithstanding the gimmicky tear falling in slow-mo from the eye of Yael Grobglas’s Petra.

Gina Rodriguez is appealingly fine as Jane, resourceful and not as conventional as she could be.  Yara Martinez also impresses as a doctor named Luisa, strikingly subdued in pain and fear.  Among the men, Jaime Camil never overdoes his comic vigor as a telenovela star.

The ratings for Jane have been decent.  Let’s hope the show remains decent.

Anthony Mann’s Bend of the River (1952) is a rugged, natural beauty-loving Western, but much about the narrative doesn’t hold up.

Surely a pack of hostile men would not ride their horses into an unoccupied area with a burning campfire and thus risk an ambush from their enemies.  Surely Jimmy Stewart’s cowboy would refuse the further services of scalawags who try to overturn his plans to deliver food to a settlement.  And a few other befuddling things go on as well.  Adapting someone’s novel, scenarist Borden Deal should have known better:  The plotting makes this movie impure in a way that a Western flick like Shane is not.

Bend is a rich movie, yes, but that’s only owing to what the director, Mann, has done.

Cover of Bend of the River