THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, November 30, 1995 TAG: 9511300046
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Interview
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, ENTERTAINMENT WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 194 lines
HARRY BELAFONTE is back.
In ``White Man's Burden,'' one of the most controversial movies of the year, he makes his first screen appearance in 20 years. It's a major comeback in a film that depicts an America enmeshed in reverse racial bias - blacks are in the majority and whites live in impoverished ghettos. The ``what if?'' theory is designed to make audiences squirm.
It's an interesting vehicle to re-enter the movie world after a two decade absence.
``A lot of people think I'm dead,'' the trim Belafonte, now 68, said with a laugh as he sat in the garden of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. Asked to explain his long absence from film, he said: ``I don't play the Hollywood game. I enjoy my life fully in a way that doesn't require that I be making movies. Let's just say I'm least expected to be where the rituals of society deify themselves.''
To millions, Belafonte is still the honey-voiced young man with the open-to-the-waist shirt who sang ``Matilda'' and ``The Banana Boat Song.'' His album ``Harry Belafonte - Calypso'' was the first ever to sell over 1 million copies. His Carnegie Hall album held the record as the longest-running disc on the Top 10 music charts for almost four decades, until Michael Jackson's ``Thriller'' edged it out.
He won an Emmy for the TV special ``Tonight With Belafonte'' and a Tony for his Broadway appearance in the musical ``John Murray Anderson's Almanac.'' In Hollywood, he became a black screen idol, co-starring with Dorothy Dandridge in the hot ``Carmen Jones.'' To top it off, he received the coveted Kennedy Center Honor.
In ``White Man's Burden,'' he plays a wealthy black business executive opposite John Travolta as a poor white factory worker living from paycheck to paycheck.
The movie already is causing audiences to take sides. Among the many charges that have been leveled against it is the one you'd think might most disturb Belafonte - that African-Americans are pictured as being just as biased and prejudiced if they were in the majority in America as modern Caucasians.
``Certainly some black people are going to hate this film,'' he said. ``Mostly, blacks have been pictured in movies only as downtrodden residents of the ghettos. We need to get beyond that. When Spike Lee and the other new wave of young black movie makers came along, I didn't really agree with what they were doing. They made only ghetto films. But I didn't want to argue with them. That would be like turning against your young. I thought, `Let them have their day.' But at the same time, I'm not interested in romanticizing our villains - the pimps and dope peddlers. Now, audiences have to be given something beyond the ghetto experiences if you expect them to buy tickets.''
``There are some black people,'' he added, ``who believe white people are the most violent force in the world because of their genes. That is not acceptable to me. There are a lot of white people who feel black people are genetically flawed. This is not acceptable to me. I've lived with racial bias from the time I was a small child on into my 68th year. It doesn't make sense for any of us, but I'm aware that a little white boy could be changed for life because his father, reading the paper about all the murders in the ghettos, comments that `that's just the way those people are.' This movie reverses the setting, if not the feeling.''
The script was first offered to Travolta, who chose it as his surprise follow-up to his big comeback in ``Pulp Fiction'' although it was a low-budget, independent film with a first-time director. (``White Man's Burden'' was filmed before Travolta's current hit, ``Get Shorty.'') Travolta passed it on to Belafonte.
``I'd always liked John,'' Belafonte said. ``I first saw him in `Saturday Night Fever,' and I recognized that Italian-American kid in the script - the kids in my neighborhood. I never met John, though, until now. I found that he knew how to roll up his sleeves and just get to work on the characters. There was a lot of work to do.''
At first, Belafonte turned it down. ``I felt it wasn't complete enough,'' he said. ``We had an America which was supposed to be influenced by African heritage rather than European. This should mean that the clothes, the architecture, everything would be different. What do we do with Mozart and Shakespeare in this society? They wouldn't have been heard of - or at least not predominate.''
In the film, patterned prints are worn by women. Formal wear, for men, does not include coats and ties, reflecting warm-weather African influences rather than European ones.
Travolta said that he would not have been in the movie if Belafonte had turned it down. ``It needed his persona and elegance,'' Travolta said. ``And who wouldn't want to work with a legend?''
In the film, blacks beat a white person. In a school pageant, Belafonte's wife speaks in derogatory terms of ``the darling little white children,'' adding that her favorite charities would help them.
Kelly Lynch, who plays Travolta's wife in the film, feels that ``black audiences will think it's a comedy. White audiences will find it very intense.''
Belafonte is more vague, saying: ``Audiences are going to see this film from different viewpoints, but the overall feeling should be that we all are racially biased, maybe in little ways we didn't even realize.''
The biggest stretch for Belafonte was to play a racially biased executive. ``I'm asking people to believe me as this character for two hours, when my entire life has been spent working against racial prejudice,'' he said. ``The man I play feels, with some sympathy, that all white people are genetically inferior. In order to play him, I have to be seduced by the character. I have to accept the flaws in the character. I thought of Marlon Brando's role in `The Young Lions.' He played a man who loved van Gogh, Monet and fine wine - an educated man. But it also happened that he was a Nazi - a man who followed Hitler. Marlon had to play the character sympathetically.
``Actually, in playing this part, I thought often of Jesse Helms. I would always think of Jesse Helms if I was playing a degenerate.
``I feel, in a way, that the film represents the fact that we are at a major turning point in this country. The very soul of America is at stake. We seem to be choosing up sides, and the next century is going to be the one in which great racial tragedy may occur. I mean, who would have thought that the civil rights movement could, or would, be reversed? People like Clarence Thomas say they don't believe in aspects of affirmative action - yet he has benefited from it.''
Fired up now, Belafonte made it clear that he doesn't excuse people of his own race for stalling on racial questions. ``We now have 8,000 elected black people in office in the United States,'' he said, ``but are we more enlightened because of it? It hasn't made much of a change. Most of the blacks who get in the game play the game.''
``That goes for Hollywood too,'' he added. ``Denzel (Washington) gets to play nonracial roles now, but for the most part, Hollywood has not been known for any courage when it comes to dealing with these issues. There are changes, though. Movies were once known only for fantasy. There never was a real place quite like `Casablanca.'
``It was very hard raising the money for a movie like `White Man's Burden.' If you can imagine that even Steven Spielberg had a great deal of trouble getting `Schindler's List' made, you'd know that there was trouble with `White Man's Burden.' ''
Harold George Belafonte Jr. was born in Harlem. His mother was Jamaican and his father was from Martinique. He lived in Jamaica from ages 3 to 5 and again from 10 to 14. He left high school to join the Navy. After serving his tour, he got jobs as an assistant to a janitor and pushing a cart in the garment district of New York. His ambition changed when someone gave him a ticket to see the Negro Ensemble Company. Immediately, he decided he wanted to become an actor.
``To this day,'' he said, ``I'd rather be an actor than be the greatest singer in the world.'' In the lean days, he and his boyhood friend Sidney Poitier opened a hamburger-hash joint called Sage in Greenwich Village. There were 2 a.m. jam sessions there.
Belafonte's calypso fame - led by his exuberant calling of ``Day-O'' - lured both intellectuals and swooning teenagers.
``Carmen Jones'' in 1954 was a Hollywood hit. It adapted Bizet's ``Carmen'' opera to fit Pearl Bailey and an all-black cast. For her work in the title role, Dorothy Dandridge became the first black actress to be nominated in Oscar's best actress race. Belafonte said the smoldering love scenes were only on camera. ``We were too tired otherwise,'' he said.
``Island in the Sun,'' a melodrama about Caribbean politics (1957), is largely reputed to contain the movies' first interracial kiss - between Belafonte and Joan Fontaine. The Ku Klux Klan threatened to burn down any theater that showed it. Belafonte points out, though, that if you look at the film, ``Joan and I never actually kissed. It was all implied.''
He was the first black performer to produce his own movies, including starring vehicles ``Odds Against Tomorrow'' and ``The World, the Flesh and the Devil'' (both in 1959).
Just after his Navy duty, he married Frances Marguerite Byrd. They had two daughters, including the television actress Shari Belafonte.
After a 1957 divorce, he married Julie Robinson, a former dancer with the Katherine Dunham Company. They have a son and a daughter.
He was the host for Nelson Mandela's first visit to the United States and was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to be a special adviser to the Peace Corps. ``My work for racial freedom internationally is more important than any of the movie work I might do,'' he said. ``Because of it, I got to work with, and be friends of, people like Eleanor Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Today, our biggest mistake is that we are putting too much trust in our leaders and not working ourselves.''
Belafonte's acting comeback will be reinforced by a role as a homophobic killer in Robert Altman's new film ``Kansas City.'' There is already buzz about that role netting an Oscar nomination next year. Meanwhile, he will produce ``The Port Chicago Mutiny'' for TNT and is developing ``Parting the Waters'' as a feature film. It's based on Taylor Branch's book about the civil rights movement.
On ``White Man's Burden,'' he adds, emphatically, ``I won't debate the audience.'' After a pause, he adds, ``But I do hope the audience will debate among itself.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photos]
RYSHER ENTERTAINMENT
Harry Belafonte, 68, makes his first movie appearance in 20 years in
"White Man's Burden," in which blacks are the majority and in
power.
Co-starring with Belafonte are John Travolta as a poor white factory
worker and KellyLynch as his wife.
CBS
Belafonte in a 1960 television special.
FILE PHOTO
Harry Belafonte set records with his best-selling albums in the
1950s and '60s.
by CNB