Recognizing Belafonte

By Robert K. Lightning.

If Poitier’s films frequently situate him as an integrationist hero, successfully negotiating the rocky path to white acceptance, Belafonte’s films typically chart a very different path where acceptance is not always the goal, making him often Poitier’s cinematic antithesis.”

With the announcement of Harry Belafonte’s death on April 25^th, I was reminded of a personal encounter (at a public event) I had once had with the star. The event was a conference celebrating Pan African cinema sponsored by New York University in (as I recall) 1994. It really was a stellar gathering, with (again, as I recall) such luminaries of Black-cinema culture as Charles Burnett, Spike Lee, Julie Dash and Manthia Diawara participating. As a working person with an unruly schedule, I felt fortunate to attend any panels at all, especially a discussion between Belafonte and Sidney Poitier on their careers, followed by questions from the audience. In my head I composed what I thought was a clever question regarding the social dynamics of a film set: was there any difference in the power relations of a set when working with Hollywood veterans (e.g., Katharine Hepburn) as opposed to contemporaries (e.g., Tony Curtis). I framed my question in terms of “on-set politics”, a big mistake. Upon hearing the word “politics”, Belafonte leapt to Poitier’s defense, misinterpreting my question as an attack on the political content of Poitier’s films and blasting me for the offense. (I don’t recall being too put out: I was used to such question-and-answer sessions erupting into similar displays of emotion, though usually emanating from the audience.) And that’s how I remember this encounter now, not as my audience with two entertainment legends but as my very own personal experience of that firebrand, Harry Belafonte.

I wondered later if this was typical of both their friendship as well as their public appearances together, with the quick-to-anger Belafonte upstaging the laid-back Poitier. (I can’t recall a word Poitier said or, in fact, if he even spoke.) If it was indeed the case that there was a competitive edge to their friendship, Belafonte need not have been overly sensitive about Poitier’s screen image (which requires no defense) nor self-conscious about his own achievements in the cinema which, if not as monumental as Poitier’s, are significant and worth examining. If Poitier’s films frequently situate him as an integrationist hero, successfully negotiating the rocky path to white acceptance, Belafonte’s films typically chart a very different path where acceptance is not always the goal, making him often Poitier’s cinematic antithesis.

That Belafonte’s goals in Hollywood were somewhat radical is indicated in his earliest films, although (Hollywood doubtless taking into consideration his extraordinary good looks) he starts off as a conventional leading man in the touching social-problem film Bright Road (Gerald Mayer, 1953). However, it is his second Hollywood film, Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954), that signals the direction his film career would subsequently take. Again, he is cast as the film’s good-looking and upstanding hero, Joe, and Belafonte performs his duties rather straightforwardly, almost entirely overshadowed by Dorothy Dandridge’s vivacious Carmen. It is, however, his transformation from “erased phallus” (Andrew Britton’s metaphor for the conventional lover in the women’s film) to oppressive and jealous lover that forecasts the direction his screen image would take in subsequent films. It is not simply that Joe eventually murders Carmen (an inevitability considering the source material), he betrays the mythos of heroic masculinity: not only does he pull a knife on an unarmed rival, but he is also defeated by him. It would be difficult to imagine a Poitier character demonstrating such a decline in ethics or humiliated so.

Belafonte was unconcerned with projecting an image of Poiteresque moral or ethical superiority to whites on screen as he was unafraid to provide evidence of Black frailty and impotence in his characterizations.”

This hints at the difference between the Belafonte and Poitier star personas. Whereas Poitier maintains the codes of chivalric masculine behavior to an extreme degree (he was nicknamed “the ebony saint” by one critic), Belafonte is willing (even eager, to judge from the films he himself produced) to portray flawed Black protagonists. This tendency is again evident in his next film, Island in the Sun (Robert Rossen, 1957; see top image), where he portrays David Boyeur, the de facto leader of the Black populace of a fictional Carribean island transitioning from British colonial rule. He is also engaged in a tentative romance with a member of that decaying ruling class, Mavis Norman (played by Joan Fontaine.) Ostensibly a noble representative of Black liberation in the film, Boyeur is also a cunning political strategist: interrupting a scheduled political event, he engages in an impromptu debate with the scheduled speaker (a white man who masquerades as a friend of the Black islanders to gain political power to satisfy his own neurotic needs) and publicly exposes him as the racist he actually is. However, the film hints that David too may be driven by a neurotic desire for power fueled by an understandable hypersensitivity to racial difference. In one revealing scene set during preparations for carnival, Mavis (with seemingly innocent intent) dons a mask representing a dark-skinned Black woman and David snatches it away violently, as if afraid he is being mocked. Or does the mask suddenly remind him that his own political ambitions depend on his maintaining the appearance of Black solidarity through racial separatism? Whatever demons drive him (the scene’s power derives from its non-specificity) a degree of personal instability is implied. Certainly, when Mavis accuses him (during their breakup) of being obsessed with power, the accusation cannot be definitively refuted.

The Belafonte characters Joe and David have in common a fear of losing control (of Carmen and the Black body politic respectively) and one finds that a dialectic of power and impotence connects them with other Belafonte performances. This is again in contrast to the typical Poitier film where this dialectic is recast in terms of questions of personal honor, ethics, and self-respect. This dialectic again informs Belafonte’s next film character, Ralph Burton in The World, the Flesh and the Devil (TWTFATD) (Ranald MacDougall, 1959), a post-apocalyptic film co-produced by Belafonte’s own Harbel Productions. Belafonte’s Ralph is the apparent sole survivor of a deadly release of radioactive material across the globe. He, however, eventually discovers an additional survivor, a white woman named Sarah (Inger Stevens in a moving performance.) With her appearance, Belafonte again engages with the theme of his preceding film, Black-white sexual relations. (It is worth noting that this theme is not introduced into the Poitier universe until 1965’s A Patch of Blue). For Sarah (like Joan Fontaine’s Mavis before her) is more than willing to ignore prior social restrictions and become Ralph’s lover. Ralph, however, cannot. Unlike Belafonte’s David Boyeur (who relinquishes love for political power), Ralph (having internalized the taboo on interracial sex) performs an act of psychic self-castration, repressing desire (while rationalizing his veto on sex as a matter of pride) by refusing to respond to the white woman’s radical overtures.

For Poitier, onscreen sexual abstinence is a component of the missionary zeal of the integrationists he so often portrayed and, inevitably, of his revolutionary role as a rising Black star in Hollywood. (1) Seemingly unconcerned with the restrictions entailed by such an agenda, Belafonte dives right into the taboo subject of interracial sex (no matter how unsatisfactorily resolved in TWTFATD), risking alienating his audience and, thus, his future as a Hollywood star. (2) In the same vein, equally is Belafonte unconcerned with projecting an image of Poiteresque moral or ethical superiority to whites on screen as he is unafraid to provide evidence of Black frailty and impotence in his characterizations. This is evident from the heist film Odds Against Tomorrow (Robert Wise, 1959), Belafonte’s next Hollywood film (and last for eleven years). Here Belafonte plays a compulsive gambler who (to pay off gambling debts) becomes involved in a bank heist alongside a white racist (Robert Ryan). This premise recalls the plot of The Defiant Ones (Stanley Kramer, 1958) where Poitier (in the role that made him a star) played a prison escapee chained to another who is a white racist. (As The Defiant Ones was filmed exactly one year prior to Odds Against Tomorrow, the Belafonte production may have been conceived as a response to the earlier film.)

While both films come to the same conclusion (racial intolerance is bad), you could hardly find two films that better illustrate the stars’ divergent personas, beginning with their respective characters’ relationship to criminality: while Belafonte (as a bank robber) is largely intentional in his lawbreaking, Poitier’s criminality (he responded with violence when a man pulled a gun on him) largely is not. Although both the Poitier and Belafonte characters react vehemently and defiantly to their white companions’ racism, Poitier is comparatively reasonable in his exchanges with his companion, reacting only to overt displays of racism and even offering aid when his companion injures his wrist. By contrast, Belafonte reacts to racism with an equivalent racism, one which precedes his involvement with his bigoted partner. In fact, in one scene Belafonte’s deep-seated, racist anger bursts to the surface when he discovers his ex-wife’s active role in an integrated teachers association. Poitier’s tolerance pays off when his companion eventually abandons his racist attitude, the film concluding with the two making mutual sacrifices that, while ensuring their recapture, solidify their emotional bond. Hotheaded Belafonte ends by exchanging gunfire with his white opponent atop a fuel tank, eventually igniting an apocalyptic explosion that unites them in death. (This replicates the climax of TWTFATD, where Belafonte also exchanges gunfire with a white male antagonist.)

The coupling of the two stars (in Buck and the Preacher serves to foreground the dialectical implications of their prior films, the mythologized space of the American frontier arguably serving to mythologize the dialectic.”

Here, Belafonte seems determined to demonstrate an equal-and-opposite negative Black agency in response to white racism. This aligns with his foregoing initiatives in creating less-than-heroic protagonists. As I have argued elsewhere, the integrationist project of Poitier’s most characteristic films places the burden of “responsible social behavior” (3) not on whites but on the Poitier protagonist himself. In the face of white racism, the Poitier hero’s acceptance of this burden is a heroic gesture indeed, one whose radicalism aligns with that of the politics of nonviolence in the concurrent Civil Rights Movement. But in his characteristic demonstrations of Black fallibility, volatility and even miscreancy, Belafonte implicitly refuses this burden (or demonstrates its intolerability, as in TWTFATD), a decision of equal radicalism given the emerging phenomena of the Poitier film and the Civil Rights Movement on the cultural and political landscapes. If Poitier’s films had a more immediate impact culturally, Belafonte’s films deserve greater recognition for not only reflecting contemporary politics but for anticipating later trends. David Boyeur’s declaration (at the end of Island) that his political duties are not limited to his own island (“My skin is my country”) implies the internationalism of such postwar thinkers as Frantz Fanon and Che Guevera, of such movements as postwar Pan-Africanism and of the formation of the short-lived Federation of the West Indies in 1958 (less than a year following Island’s release). Boyeur’s prioritizing of racial solidarity over his commitment to his white lover anticipates an attitude expressed prevalently in films of the blaxploitation era (sometimes through the unfortunate sexual exploitation or disregard of white women). The anti-white militantism of Belafonte’s Johnny Ingram (in Odds) also anticipates an attitude prevalent during that era. And the interracial sexual tensions explored in TWTFATD anticipate those implied in George Romero’s 1968 masterpiece, Night of the Living Dead. (4)

When Belafonte returns to the screen in 1970, it is often in character roles (where his beauty is sometimes distorted by makeup and characterization) or cameo roles. But this tendency is continuous with his prior reluctance to trade in on his good looks by playing traditionally heroic leading men. His prior tendency to play flawed, even criminal protagonists thus continues with his return: a former thief turned repentant angel in the fantasy The Angel Levine (Ján Kadár, 1970); a comic gangster in Uptown Saturday Night (Sidney Poitier, 1974); and a vicious gangster in Kansas City (Robert Altman, 1996). Given the focus of this article, of particular note is the 1972 film Buck and the Preacher, a revisionist western directed by Sidney Poitier, produced by Belafonte and pairing the two stars in the title roles. The coupling of the two stars serves to foreground the dialectical implications of their prior films, the mythologized space of the American frontier arguably serving to mythologize the dialectic. The film takes their star personas to their logical conclusions in the western, casting Poitier as the stolidly heroic Buck, a wagon master aiding ex-slaves as they settle in the West, and Belafonte as a charlatan preacher (guilty of the type’s usual sins, lust and avarice). Appropriately for an era that saw the decline of civil rights efforts and the rise of Black Power initiatives, the film finds a median between Poitier’s onscreen civility and nobility and Belafonte’s onscreen militantism. Thus, the Belafonte character successfully reforms by committing to Poitier’s noble cause, while Poitier’s Buck engages in horse stealing, bank robbery and killing to achieve his aims. This synthesis of star personas is epitomized at the film’s climax, which recalls that of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969): in a final shootout with their enemies, the two are (almost) joined in death.

But I think that Belafonte’s film legacy is best represented by White Man’s Burden (Desmond Nakano, 1995), an admirable and compelling cinematic parable in which America’s historical race relations are reversed, with Blacks representing the capitalist class and whites a permanent underclass. One can see why the role of racist CEO Thaddeus Thomas would appeal to the star, epitomizing as it does his radical rendering of racial equality onscreen, with his protagonists often capable of a ruthless destructiveness equal to white racists. (In Kansas City, his character actually has a young white upstart disemboweled.) Belafonte’s willingness to position himself as an equal-and-opposite negative force in relation to whites reaches its logical conclusion with his role as a Black capitalist oppressing a white worker (played by John Travolta) who suffers the indignities historically borne by Black Americans, both macro (recalling the assault on Rodney King only four years prior, Travolta is beaten viciously by black cops) and micro (he is erroneously suspected of sneaking peeks at Belafonte’s half-dressed wife). That such an exercise in didacticism might alienate (if not offend) as many viewers as it might engage was perhaps predictable: White Man’s Burden is uniformly denounced by the journalist-critics quoted on its Rotten Tomatoes page. (5) But it even shows signs of being considered too controversial for viewing today: currently it is unavailable on any of the major streaming sites. But this response to the film seems fitting for a star who had always been unafraid to alienate viewers: it pays appropriate tribute to Belafonte’s confrontational personality, both onscreen and off.

Endnotes

1. Supplementing my analysis of Night of the Living Dead (1968), I address the complexities of Poitier’s onscreen sexuality (as well as other aspects of his star persona) in “Interracial Tensions in Night of the Living Dead” (CineACTION, #52, 2000, p. 25) which should be considered a companion piece to the current article.
2. For an account of the potential harm posed to even a veteran star’s career after engaging in an onscreen interracial romance, see Joan Fontaine’s autobiography No Bed of Roses (William Morrow & Co., Inc., New York, 1978, p. 425) where she tells of the hundreds of hateful letters she received after completing her role in Island in the Sun. Ironically, the film was a major success at the box office.
3. Lightning, p. 23.
4. Lightning, pp. 22-29.
5. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1067214-white_mans_burden. Accessed 7/25/2023

Robert K. Lightning is a contributing editor for Film International.