In the middle of the 20th century, Harry Belafonte was at the dizzying high point of his stunning multi-hyphenate celebrity: this handsome, athletic, Caribbean-American star with a gorgeous calypso singing voice was at the top of his game in music, movies and politics. He was the million-selling artist whose easy and sensuous musical stylings and lighter-skinned image made him acceptable to white audiences. But this didn’t stop him having a fierce screen presence and an even fiercer commitment to civil rights. He was the friend and comrade of Paul Robeson and Martin Luther King Jr – and his crossover success, incidentally, never stopped him being subject to the ugliest kind of bigotry from racists who saw his fame as a kind of infiltration. His legendary Banana Boat Song with its keening and much-spoofed call-and-response chorus “Day – O!” is actually about the brutal night shift loading bananas on to ships, part of an exploitative trade with its roots in empire.
His friend and rival Sidney Poitier (there is room for debate in exactly how friendly their rivalry really was) may have outpaced him in the contest to become Hollywood’s first black American star, being perhaps able to project gravitas more naturally and reassuringly. But Belafonte, for all his emollient proto-pop performances on vinyl, was arguably more naturally passionate. Crucially, his great movie breakthrough was with an all-black cast (though with the white director Otto Preminger) in Carmen Jones. In this 1954 film, Belafonte built on the screen chemistry he had had with the sensational star Dorothy Dandridge in their previous film together, Bright Road (a high school movie with Belafonte as the school’s headteacher, anticipating Poitier’s Blackboard Jungle and To Sir, With Love).
Three years later, in Robert Rossen’s Island in the Sun – adapted from the novel by Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn – Belafonte sang the catchy, dreamy title song but had a spikier dramatic role as the up-and-coming trade unionist in the fictional West Indian island, confronting the white colonial ruling class. Again, Belafonte was cast with the much-loved Dandridge but his implied dangerous liaison is with a white woman, played by Joan Fontaine, connected with the family that runs the plantation. This was the sexual suggestion that had the film pulled from most movie theatres in the US south.
