By Raquel Stecher
Harry Belafonte was born on March 1, 1927 in Harlem, New York City. He moved to Jamaica with his mother at the age of 8 and moved back to NYC to attend high school at the age of 13. He dropped out of high school to serve in the Navy and shortly thereafter he began his career as a singer and actor. He got his start at the American Negro Theatre where he met his best friend, fellow Caribbean performer Sidney Poitier.
Belafonte took the show business world by storm. He had the looks, the talent, and the charisma to charm audiences in his live and on-screen performances. Belafonte broke the mold and showed the world that it was possible for a Black man to be sexy, something that centuries of racial prejudice helped repress.
Journalist Jason Ankeny wrote: “Belafonte’s staggering talent, good looks, and masterful assimilation of folk, jazz and world beat rhythms allowed him to achieve a level of mainstream eminence and crossover popularity virtually unparalleled in the days before the advent of the civil rights movement – a cultural uprising which he himself helped spearhead.”
Belafonte is best known for his singing career. He was named the King of Calypso and with his albums Belafonte and Calypso released in 1956, he started a nation-wide craze for Calypso music. Belafonte is also an actor. In addition to his numerous television appearances, he has acted in 14 feature films. He got his start in Hollywood with the low-budget drama Bright Road (1953). It was the first of three films he would make with actress Dorothy Dandrige. In this film, he plays the principal of a segregated elementary school in Alabama. Dandridge plays a caring teacher who reaches out to a troubled young student.
A year later, Belafonte would appear in the film that would prove to be the pinnacle of his acting career. Carmen Jones (1954) is Otto Preminger’s adaptation of the Oscar Hammerstein musical. Released by 20th Century Fox in glorious Technicolor, this WWII-based drama features Belafonte as Joe, a Corporal in the Army who falls for the tempestuous Carmen Jones despite the fact that he has a fiancee Cindy Lou (Olga James). Belafonte oozes with charisma in this film. Unfortunately, they dubbed his musical numbers with another singer’s voice, despite the fact that Belafonte was a talented singer in his own right.
A few years later, he appeared with Dorothy Dandridge in another 20th Century Fox production, Island in the Sun (1957). In this drama about interracial relations and romance and set in a tropical locale, Belafonte plays David Boyeur, a politician who falls for a wealthy white woman Mavis Norman (Joan Fontaine). The film elicited controversy and Fontaine received death threats for her love scenes with Belafonte.
Frustrated with the film roles he was being offered (he even turned down a part in Otto Preminger’s 1959 musical Porgy and Bess), Belafonte started his own film production company Belafonte Enterprises, Inc. He produced two films with his new company, the first being the post-apocalyptic drama The World, The Flesh and The Devil (1959). Belafonte stars as Ralph Burton, a coal miner who is trapped underground during an atomic war that wipes out most of humanity. Above ground he meets two survivors Sarah (Inger Stevens) and Benson (Mel Ferrer). Released by MGM, this film was on the right track to be progressive in its depiction of race but, unfortunately, some major script alterations changed the direction of the film, much to Belafonte’s frustration. That same year, Belafonte produced the excellent film noir Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) directed by Robert Wise. Belafonte stars as Ingram, an African-American con man who has to work alongside white racist Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) in a bank heist. The film also stars Ed Begley and Shelley Winters.
Belafonte took a break from filmmaking and skipped the entire decade of the 1960s by keeping busy with albums, musical performances, and TV specials. He returned to make The Angel Levine (1970), directed by Jan Kadar. In this indie film, Belafonte plays the title character, a guardian angel sent to help a Jewish tailor (Zero Mostel) in New York City.
He then made two films, directed by and co-starring his best pal Sidney Poitier. The first was Buck and the Preacher (1972) . Belafonte had always wanted to make a Western and this was a great project for him. Set in post Civil War America, Belafonte plays Willis Rutherford, a fake preacher who teams with Buck (Sidney Poitier), a soldier turned pioneer who leads a wagon train of other African-Americans west to Kansas. He joined Poitier again for Uptown Saturday Night (1974). This hilarious comedy about two best friends who go to an illegal gambling club only to be robbed of their wallets, one of which contains a winning lottery ticket. Belafonte plays Geechie Dan Beauford, the leader of a local mob. He modeled the character after Marlon Brando in The Godfather.
Belafonte made two cameos in The Player (1992) and Ready to Wear (1994) but wouldn’t return to film acting until 1995 when he made White Man’s Burden. Directed by Desmond Nakano, Belafonte stars opposite John Travolta in this race drama that imagines a world where African-Americans are the privileged majority and Caucasians are the disenfranchised minority. Never heard of this one? It’s because it was a critical and commercial failure and has mostly been forgotten. The following year, he was in Robert Atlman’s Kansas City (1996), a film about the Kansas City jazz scene of the 1930s. In this one, Belafonte plays real life gambling promoter/gangster Ivory “Seldom Seen” Johnson. In 2006 he appeared as part of an ensemble cast of players in Bobby (2006), director Emilio Estevez’s drama which depicts the events leading up to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Belafonte has a small role in Spike Lee’s 1970s historical crime drama BlacKkKlansman (2018) in which he plays Jerome Turner, an elderly Civil Rights leader who is highly regarded by the African American community of activists. In the film he recounts the story of teenager Jesse Washington’s lynching in 1916.
Harry Belafonte has always been outspoken about his strong political beliefs and has never shied away from controversy. He was a Civil Rights activist throughout the 1950s and beyond and was friends with Martin Luther King. Jr. He became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and helped organize the all-star recording of We Are the World by USA for Africa. He didn’t have the same film career as his counterpart Sidney Poitier because he wasn’t willing to play Hollywood’s game and stayed true to his beliefs. Even though he hasn’t won a competitive Academy Award, he still technically fits the category of an EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) winner. He won three Grammys, an Emmy, a Tony Award and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Academy Award. His best friend Sidney Poitier joined him on stage when Belafonte received his honorary Oscar in 2015.
Let’s celebrate Harry Belafonte’s birthday with these films available to rent on DVD Netflix.
Raquel Stecher has been writing about classic films for the past decade on her blog Out of the Past. She attends the TCM Classic Film Festival as well as other events where old movie fanatics get together to geek out. Raquel has been a devoted DVD Netflix member since 2002! Follow her on her blog Out of the Past or find her on Twitter @RaquelStecher and @ClassicFilmRead, Facebook, and Instagram.