Bidding a fond farewell to HARRY BELAFONTE
Globe film critic Odie Henderson pays tribute to the actor, singer, and activist, who died Tuesday at 96
When I heard Harry Belafonte had died, my brain didn’t conjure up his most famous calypso hit, “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O).” Instead, I thought of his appearance at Jim Henson’s 1990 memorial service. Like many others who worked with, and loved, the creator of the Muppets, he was there to pay tribute through story and song.
Belafonte spoke of how Henson’s artistry touched the lives of the oppressed and the downtrodden, bringing hope across the world. “I say this because I have moved among these people,” he told the audience. “When I first came to Jim with a song that had been created from one of those wretched places, that spoke to the hopes and the thoughts and the feelings of a mythology, that I didn’t know that most people would want to hear about, it was Jim who said, ‘Let’s do it.’”
Then, Belafonte sang one of his greatest songs, “Turn the World Around,” which I first saw him perform on “The Muppet Show” when I was 9 or 10. On that episode, surrounded by Muppets made to resemble African masks, he explained that he’d been inspired by a storyteller he met in Guinea. “All of us are here for a very, very short time,” that storyteller told Belafonte.
Belafonte tallied 96 years of life and will be remembered for numerous achievements. For me, the appearance he made at Henson’s funeral encapsulated everything he was. In those nine minutes, he was the activist who cared about, and still fought for, the impoverished; the storyteller whose raspy voice still inspired and moved the listener; the actor whose devastatingly beautiful looks still smoldered; the elder statesman who still imparted lessons; and, of course, the singer whose unique voice still stirred the soul.
He deserves a homegoing service as joyous, celebratory, and heartbreaking as Jim Henson’s, which is my go-to whenever I need a good cry.
Harry Belafonte was figuratively in my orbit at the recent TCM Film Festival: His daughter Shari Belafonte spoke about him at her introduction for “The African Queen,” and he was steaming up the screen with Dorothy Dandridge in 1954’s “Carmen Jones,” which was showing at the Hollywood Legion.
In that film, he appears shirtless and slathered in oil. His character, Joe, was sent into a frenzy of lust by Dandridge’s fiery Carmen (an Oscar-nominated performance, the first for a Black leading actress). That spell was broken by the fact that his singing voice, like almost everyone else’s in the picture, was dubbed. How could they replace one of the most recognizable voices in all of music? It created an uncanny valley situation that always ruined the movie for me.
The same year Belafonte made “Carmen Jones,” that unmistakable voice of his won him the Tony Award for the Broadway revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.” He’d later win three Grammys, the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and become the first Black person to win an Emmy. Yes, he was an EGOT.
Regarding that Emmy: About a month ago, I stumbled upon a black-andwhite clip of Belafonte doing a comic musical number with the singer and civil rights activist Odetta. I later learned it was from the show he hosted, 1959’s “Tonight with Belafonte,” which won him the Emmy. It was a radical idea to have a show filled with Black performers on television at the time, but Belafonte got it done.
Coincidentally, the song I saw him perform with Odetta, “A Hole in the Bucket,” was first introduced to me decades before by the Muppets on “Sesame Street.” Jim Henson sang Belafonte’s part.
Lest I forget, Belafonte won the New York Film Critics Circle supporting actor award for what some consider his greatest onscreen role, the terrifying gangster Seldom Seen in Robert Altman’s 1996 film “Kansas City.” Personally, I think that movie is a misfire, but Belafonte is so good in it, you wish the entire film had been about him. He was equally good as singer/thief Ingram in Robert Wise’s bleak 1959 noir, “Odds Against Tomorrow,” a film Belafonte produced.
More recently, Belafonte made two powerful and memorable cameos in movies. In Spike Lee’s 2018 film “BlacKkKlansman” he gave an amazing speech about D.W. Griffith’s racist 1915 film, “The Birth of a Nation,” and in Elvis Mitchell’s 2022 documentary, “Is That Black Enough For You?!?,” he explained how his singing career saved him from having to take demeaning roles in studio system-era movies. His explanation for turning down Sidney Poitier’s Oscar-winning role in “Lilies of the Field” is worth the price of a rental.
When Poitier died on Jan. 6, 2022, I wondered how much longer we’d have his lifelong friend and occasional acting partner. Poitier’s relationship with Belafonte went way back to the beginnings of both of their careers. They were prominently featured in each other’s memoirs. The duo marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., were once nearly killed for their civil rights activism, and raised money for numerous Black causes.
And when Poitier accepted his AFI Lifetime Achievement award, he thanked “that old, decrepit folk singer, what’s-hisname Belafonte.”
Poitier starred with and directed Belafonte twice, in 1972’s “Buck and the Preacher” and 1974’s “Uptown Saturday Night.” Both times, he let his pal run off with the movie. In “Buck,” Belafonte played a rascally devil of a con man (who gets a nude scene!) and, as criminal Geechie Dan in “Uptown,” he paid hilarious homage to Brando’s Vito Corleone.
Poitier and Belafonte were so inextricably linked it’s hard to imagine one going on without the other. Sixteen months separate their deaths; each one has hit me hard. I never knew life without either of them.
I must mention the movie that prominently featured a greatest-hits soundtrack of Belafonte’s calypso songs, Tim Burton’s “Beetlejuice.” Back in 1988, I sat through that movie twice at Jersey City’s State
Theater just so I could see Catherine O’Hara’s dinner party rudely disrupted by an impromptu sing-along of “The Banana Boat Song” and Winona Ryder’s elevated dance to “Jump in the Line.”
“Beetlejuice” got on my last damn nerve, so sitting through it again just for those scenes was an exercise in masochism. But the notion of Belafonte’s music providing the score for the afterlife intrigued me. Wouldn’t it be great if it could?