Right here is a wonderful article on Belafonte’s performing profession by Peter Bradshaw (The Guardian) who writes, “The star with the beautiful calypso voice was additionally a naturally passionate actor who appeared in heists, colonial confrontations – and even the final love triangle on Earth.”
In the midst of the twentieth century, Harry Belafonte was on the dizzying excessive level of his gorgeous multi-hyphenate superstar: this good-looking, athletic, Caribbean-American star with a stunning calypso singing voice was on the prime of his recreation in music, motion pictures and politics. He was the million-selling artist whose straightforward and sensuous musical stylings and lighter-skinned picture made him acceptable to white audiences. However this didn’t cease him having a fierce display presence and a fair fiercer dedication to civil rights. He was the good friend and comrade of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King Jr – and his crossover success, by the way, by no means stopped him being topic to the ugliest sort of bigotry from racists who noticed his fame as a sort of infiltration. His legendary Banana Boat Track with its keening and much-spoofed call-and-response refrain “Day – O!” is definitely concerning the brutal evening shift loading bananas on to ships, a part of an exploitative commerce with its roots in empire.
His good friend and rival Sidney Poitier (there’s room for debate in precisely how pleasant their rivalry actually was) could have outpaced him within the contest to develop into Hollywood’s first black American star, being maybe in a position to venture gravitas extra naturally and reassuringly. However Belafonte, for all his emollient proto-pop performances on vinyl, was arguably extra naturally passionate. Crucially, his nice film breakthrough was with an all-black forged (although with the white director Otto Preminger) in Carmen Jones. On this 1954 movie, Belafonte constructed on the display chemistry he had had with the sensational star Dorothy Dandridge of their earlier movie collectively, Brilliant Street (a highschool film with Belafonte as the college’s headteacher, anticipating Poitier’s Blackboard Jungle and To Sir, With Love).
Three years later, in Robert Rossen’s Island within the Solar – tailored from the novel by Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn – Belafonte sang the catchy, dreamy title music however had a spikier dramatic position because the up-and-coming commerce unionist within the fictional West Indian island, confronting the white colonial ruling class. Once more, Belafonte was forged with the much-loved Dandridge however his implied harmful liaison is with a white lady, performed by Joan Fontaine, linked with the household that runs the plantation. This was the sexual suggestion that had the movie pulled from most film theatres within the US south.
[. . .] Coming on the finish of the Nineteen Fifties, Robert Sensible’s Odds Towards Tomorrow was that rarest of issues: a noir starring a black man. Belafonte was Ingram, the membership singer with crippling money owed who’s inveigled into serving to rob a financial institution, alongside a hardbitten skilled felony and racist, the position taken by veteran participant Robert Ryan. It was a pairing to savour, Belafonte collaborating within the white/black crime duo that Hollywood typically discovered expedient when it got here to accommodating a black character in a up to date US context. Belafonte’s casting as a singer within the story has a efficiency and elegance.
However maybe Belafonte’s strangest however most distinctive position got here within the 1959 post-apocalyptic sci-fi fantasy The World, The Flesh and The Satan during which he’s Burton, the mining engineer trapped miles beneath the floor of the earth after a calamitous cave-in. However he has escaped the consequences of an atomic disaster and when he lastly scrambles to the floor, Burton finds that he’s apparently the one human left alive – apart from one white lady and one white man, with whom he lastly has a surreal however gripping contest for the girl’s affections.
And so Belafonte finds himself in a quite daring political what-if film: an apocalypse is the one approach to make acceptable the thought of interracial love, and but even right here racism and white male paranoia rears its head. Making this the situation for sexual rivalry is in some way impressed though the decision is a bit of tame. In some methods, the futurist film anticipated his position reverse John Travolta within the race-reverse fantasy White Man’s Burden from Japanese film-maker Desmond Nakano, during which Belafonte is the plutocrat with a privileged place in an anti-white world and Travolta is the white manufacturing unit employee who will get in hassle by means of by accident seeing the boss’s spouse in a state of undress – a weird however shrewd satirical contact.
[. . .] But for all this, Belafonte arguably discovered true freedom as a black artist within the motion pictures when it got here to having a black director – and this got here with Poitier himself who directed himself and Belafonte within the uncared for (and now rediscovered) 1972 traditional Buck and the Preacher, the pair giving nice performances to match Butch and Sundance. Belafonte’s was most likely the efficiency of his profession because the itinerant opportunist chancer and thief, nicknamed The Preacher, who makes widespread trigger with Poitier’s extra upstanding frontiersman to defeat a murderous white posse.
This movie, and the next motion comedy Uptown Saturday Evening, once more directed by Poitier with Belafonte because the scrappy hoodlum and gangster, gave Belafonte his stake within the blaxploitation revolution and confirmed what a troublesome, black comedian participant he could possibly be. His capability for menace was exploited by Robert Altman in his 90s jazz age confection Kansas Metropolis during which he was wonderful because the mobster and playing kingpin who’s about to execute an underling (performed by Dermot Mulroney) for betraying him and for having the unhealthy style to put on blackface as a disguise.
All this, and later cameos reminiscent of his look in Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman add as much as a tremendous film profession, although maybe one during which he by no means fairly achieved a single breakout starring position to match his music profile or his significance as a political campaigner. However he amassed a dwelling legend standing: the fighter, the powerful man and the romantic hero.
For full article, video, and pictures, see https://www.theguardian.com/movie/2023/apr/25/harry-belafonte-staggering-screen-career-sci-fi-love-triangle
[Shown above: Pulled from cinemas in the south … with Joan Fontaine in Island in the Sun. Photograph: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images.]