Blow On 'Em Sugar

The Screen Test That Made Carmen

Of all the foot moments ever captured in a mainstream feature film, one has never left me. It comes from Carmen Jones (1954), and it belongs to Dorothy Dandridge.

Dandridge was one of the most beautiful women of Hollywood’s Golden Age, and her feet were every bit the equal of her face. Watching a woman like that slip free and flash those toes, so casually and so confidently, stopped me cold the first time I saw it. It still does.

This fetish is made of many elements, and very few films, fetish productions included, have ever woven them together as naturally as this scene does. In 1954, no less. In a matter of seconds you get bare feet, freshly painted red toes, worship, a cigarette, and an unmistakable current of dominance and submission.

“Blow ’em on, sugar,” Dandridge purrs, and from across the room she kicks one bare leg straight up toward a very cool Harry Belafonte, toes freshly lacquered and pointed right at him. He doesn’t hesitate. He crosses the room, catches her foot in his palm, and cradles it like something precious. “Make ’em dry faster,” she adds. He hands her his cigarette, and while she smokes, he bends over her toes and blows, slowly and willingly, exactly as he’s told. She watches him with the calm of a woman who never once doubted she would be obeyed.

There is elegance in it. Class. Nothing about it is crude. It is pure, and that purity is exactly what makes it so charged.

The Woman Who Wasn’t Supposed to Be Carmen

Nobody imagined Dorothy Dandridge as Carmen, least of all Otto Preminger.

When she first went to see him, she arrived the way she lived: polished, poised, and buttoned up, in a demure dress with gloves and a Peter Pan collar. Preminger looked at her and saw a lady. He told her she might do for Cindy Lou, the sweet, dutiful girl next door, but Carmen was out of the question.

It was her sister Vivian who told her the truth. Preminger couldn’t see Carmen because Dorothy hadn’t shown him Carmen. Next time, she needed to walk in sexy.

So the Dandridge women went to work. Her mother Ruby taught her to move her hips when she walked. At Max Factor, Dorothy painted on heavy lipstick and pulled on a tousled wig, an off-the-shoulder top, and a provocative skirt. Then she added the finishing touch: she went to the gym and worked herself to exhaustion so she would arrive looking like a woman who had just rolled out of someone’s bed. And she made sure to show up late.

When she walked through the door, Preminger reportedly exclaimed, “My God, it’s Carmen!” He ordered a screen test for the title role that day, though by then it was little more than a formality. The part was hers. (I think he was one of us.) The two also began a romance that would last four years.

Chemistry Built on Trust

What you feel between Dandridge and Belafonte on screen wasn’t manufactured on set. The two had known each other from their early years of chasing work, and that familiarity is all over this scene. It’s why his surrender looks so easy and her command looks so natural.

They also shared the weight of working in a segregated Hollywood, where Dandridge could headline the most exclusive nightclubs in the country yet wasn’t allowed to sit in the audience. Behind the scenes she kept friendships across the color line, with Ava Gardner and, by many accounts, Marilyn Monroe. Hollywood lore even has Dandridge calling James Dean her “play brother,” with Dean standing up for her against the racism of the era. In the 1950s, friendships like that were a quiet act of defiance, and the wrong studio executive finding out could have cost her everything.