Wednesday, October 26, 2011
“I live in a perpetual state of optimism…”
By Ivan G. Shreve, Jr.
Artist and activist Harry Belafonte turned 84 in March of this year…and has lost none of his expertise for making headlines. On a recent edition of The Joy Behar Show, he was extremely critical of former Godfather’s Pizza CEO and now GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, labeling him “a bad apple” — and later remarked to Newsweek, “I’m pretty sure African Americans don’t take Cain seriously, but I’m not sure about white people. They believe this black man is the real deal. He isn’t. Anyone who says what he says isn’t.” Cain volleyed back, remarking “He’s been on that banana boat too long” — a reference to the actor-singer’s million-selling record in 1956, “The Banana Boat Song (Day-O).”
At the risk of getting into a political urination contest…Herman Cain can’t carry Harry Belafonte’s jockstrap. While Cain was content to shuck and jive in the back of the bus during the Civil Rights struggle, Belafonte was at the forefront of that movement…as a confidant to Martin Luther King, Jr., and an organizer/supporter of many of the landmark events during that era (the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, etc.). Long before celebrities such as Sean Penn and Angelina Jolie stretched beyond their chosen professions with defiant political stands and causes, Harry was one of the first to walk the walk and talk the talk…and as a new HBO documentary, Sing Your Song, demonstrates — he is “the real deal.”
The running time of Sing Your Song (1 hour and 45 minutes) can’t scratch the surface in documenting Belafonte’s remarkable career — in fact, the presentation is but one portion of a retrospective look at the actor-singer’s life; a memoir entitled My Song was published recently and allows Belafonte to take a more detailed and anecdotal look into his amazing past. Sing Your Song acts as a primer for those individuals whose only familiarity with the performer-activist boils down to asking the boss man to count his bananas. The documentary offers rich, rewarding archival footage of Harry’s TV appearances and clips from his movies, supplemented with Belafonte’s narration and on-camera interviews with the likes of Diahann Carroll, the late Coretta Scott King, Julian Bond, Rep. John Lewis and Sidney Poitier, to name just a few. Directed by Susanne Rostock and co-produced by his daughter Gina, Song tells the story of Belafonte’s triumph over a life of hardscrabble poverty to become a Emmy, Grammy and Tony Award-winning performer whose dedication to the cause of social justice was prompted by his mother once telling him “that I should never, ever awaken in a day where there wasn’t something in our agenda that would help set the course for the undermining of injustice.”
Harold George Belafonte, Jr. was born in Harlem in 1927 to immigrant parents — and when his father left his mother shortly after his birth, she was forced to compensate in a one-parent household by working as a domestic, sending Harry and his brother to live with their grandparents in Jamaica. His early life (1932-40) in that country would have a profound effect on his future profession. That career direction was decided one night back in New York when he attended a performance of Home is the Hunter at the American Negro Theatre in Harlem (he was working as a janitor’s assistant and received tickets to the play as a gratuity). He joined the theater company (his fellow students included Brock Peters and lifelong friend Poitier), and soon after became a pupil under the tutelage of German director Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic Workshop of the New School of Social Research. (Among Harry’s classmates: Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Walter Matthau, Bea Arthur and Rod Steiger.)
To pay for his acting classes, Belafonte worked as a nightclub singer in New York — his first gig found the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach and Miles Davis playing as his “back-up band.” Belafonte had started out singing pop tunes in 1949, but he became interested in folk music after seeing a performance by Huddie Ledbetter and studied the history of that music at the archives of the Library of Congress. He soon became a regular at New York’s Village Vanguard, and it was there that the legendary actor-singer-activist Paul Robeson made Harry’s acquaintance, advising him: “Get them to sing your song and they will want to know you are.” (Hence the title of the documentary.) Robeson would become one of the many mentoring influences in Belafonte’s meteoric rise to fame, which all began with a Tony Award for his participation in a Broadway production of John Murray Anderson’s Almanac. With his first single released in 1953 and first LP a year later (Mark Twain and Other Folk Favorites), Belafonte’s breakthrough album came in 1956, entitled Calypso — the first LP certified as a million seller. In clips from variety shows hosted by Ed Sullivan, Dinah Shore and Steve Allen, Sing Your Song features snippets of Harry’s popular hits such as “Jamaica Farewell,” “Mama Look at Bubu” and “Man Smart, Woman Smarter.”
Achieving success with a gold record album was not all peaches and cream for Belafonte, who was also carving out a niche in motion pictures beginning with his first film for MGM, Bright Road (1953), co-starring Dorothy Dandridge. During production on this film, Harry was staying with friends at a house in Beverly Hills when he decided to take a fresh air stroll one night and found himself stopped by the local constabulary, whose interest in him seemed to center around the fact that he was “walking around Beverly Hills while being black.” It wouldn’t be the first time the actor-singer would be on the receiving end of the cold water splash of prejudice; he details in Song how he wasn’t able to stay in the same hotels as co-stars Marge and Gower Champion when they toured with their revue 3 For Tonight (his encounter with a state trooper after attempting to relieve himself in a “whites only” restroom is particularly memorable) and how his protest over similar conditions at a Las Vegas hotel (he was the headliner but wasn't expected to use the main entrance or eat in the hotel’s main dining facilities) earned him a warning “that the only way I would leave Las Vegas if I didn’t fulfill that contract would be in a box.” (Harry gets the last laugh; Fran Scott Attaway, the wife of Belafonte’s bandleader, relates an incident in which Harry summons up the stones to take a dip in the hotel’s lily-white swimming pool.)
Despite motion picture success in films such as Carmen Jones (1954; which re-teamed him with Dandridge), Belafonte encountered similar hostile racial attitudes in the movie industry — controversy arose from his performance in the 1957 film Island in the Sun, which
intimated that there was a romance going on between his character and that of Joan Fontaine’s — something that was anathema to Southern audiences (his publicist, Mike Merrick, observes that the ticklish situation nevertheless made curious onlookers more determined to see the film). Belafonte’s struggle to find good roles free of negative black stereotypes led him to start his own production company in HarBel — which produced movies such as The World, The Flesh and the Devil (an “end of the world” film whose ending was tampered with by MGM when the touchy issue of a romance between Harry and white Inger Stevens once again caused Southern audiences to revolt) and Odds Against Tomorrow (both 1959). (In an interview with The Daily Beast, Belafonte cited the last movie — a noir that mixes a heist film with a searing examination of racial prejudice — as “the centerpiece of my work in cinema.”) Everywhere Harry seemed to turn he would confront the specter of intolerance; his television specials Tonight with Belafonte and Belafonte, New York 19, despite winning critical and ratings accolades (Tonight won Harry a Emmy for outstanding performance in a variety or musical program or series) earned him enmity from the sponsors for his insistence on using racially integrated casts.Belafonte recently related to an interviewer: “I was an activist before I was an actor. I was aware of all happening around me that was wrong in the midst of getting into this career. All of us did during those times, and we couldn’t sit back and worry about the consequences of doing something. We had to speak out about what was wrong in this country, and we did.” It is this portion of Harry’s
life that makes much of Sing Your Song fascinating viewing; the audience learns that his friendships with Robeson and later Martin Luther King, Jr. earned him the unwelcome intrusion of the FBI (who was convinced back then that anyone fighting for the cause of equal rights must be some sort of Commie) — Belafonte’s first marriage to wife Marguerite Byrd suffered the severe strain of J. Edgar’s interest in the activist; Byrd simply couldn’t reconcile that the stories being handed to her about Belafonte by the bureau were complete bullshit. His closeness with Dr. King is even more remarkable and is choc-a-bloc with anecdotes; it was Belafonte who lobbied presidential candidate John F. Kennedy (then a senator) to intervene on King’s behalf when King was sentenced to work on a Georgia chain gang for a minor traffic violation. Later, Harry was needed to put the Kennedy administration’s fears to rest about the unrest that they believed would result from the 1963 March on Washington. Belafonte proudly relates how he persuaded the Kennedy people to eventually side with those in the civil rights movement, and in particular the part he played in educating Robert Kennedy, who may have been his brother’s attorney general but was still quite conservative in his politics (he had worked for Sen. Joseph McCarthy early in his career). (King once said to Belafonte about Bobby Kennedy: “In that mind resides good; go out and find that man’s moral center and win him to our cause.”)Sing Your Song provides telling details about Belafonte’s humanitarian efforts on behalf of Haiti, South Africa and other nations, particularly as one of the organizers behind USA for Africa and as goodwill ambassador to UNICEF …and comes full circle to the actor-singer’s struggle to make individuals aware of the growing problem with at-risk and incarcerated black/Latino gang youth (his palpable rage at seeing television news footage of a 9-year-old girl being handcuffed because she was “unruly” is not something easily forgotten). If there are any weak areas in Song, it’s that Belafonte’s controversial stance on the Iraq War (with headline-grabbing remarks directed toward its architects U.S. Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, not to mention President George W. Bush) is sort of glossed over, but then much of the material from later in his life (including some of his film work from the '70s up to today) is telescoped to fit the demands of the documentary’s running time.
“How could it be that the world is in the chaos and disorder and the consuming violence that we are all experiencing after so many had invested so much to change that fact?” Harry Belafonte asks the interviewer’s camera close to the end of Sing Your Song. The struggle against injustice is a constant one, and while Harry Belafonte was able to temper the fight on occasion through his music and acting, he would pay a price for his activism; several of his children and second wife Julie Robinson (the two of them later divorced and Belafonte married his third wife, Pamela in April 2008) relate in Song that while Harry wasn’t a bad father it was often a trial serving two families (his own and his activism) making demands on his time. The release of this documentary and his memoir My Song comes at a most opportune time when the U.S. is in a current state of upheaval over the issues of unemployment, health care and poverty. It is one thing to allow individuals to do the heavy lifting addressing the ills of the system in order for you to reap financial benefits (and perhaps run for president), it is another to commit yourself to a mindset that “from the time I go to sleep till the time I get up, I seek out the injustices done to humankind.” Harry Belafonte continues to sing his song…and we are all richer for his having done so.
The original HBO documentary Sing Your Song has an encore performance today at 11:30 a.m. EDT (10:30 a.m. Central) and also can be viewed later at 2:30 p.m. on HBO West. It will continue to air at various time and dates on various HBO channels through Nov. 22. The documentary also is available on HBO On Demand (where applicable) until Nov. 13. It will be accessible to HBO subscribers on HBO GO until Dec. 31, 2012. For more details, check out its entry on HBO’s website here.
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Labels: 10s, Awards, Belafonte, Brando, Documentary, HBO, Jolie, Matthau, Music, Musicals, Nonfiction, Poitier, Sean Penn, Television, Theater, Tony Curtis, Twain
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Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Damn those TV ads again
By Edward Copeland
I resisted Changeling as long as I could, namely because of the pervasive TV ads when it opened that focused on Angelina Jolie wailing, "HE'S NOT MY SON!" After listening to her shrieking last year in A Mighty Heart, the thought of more screeching wasn't very palatable. So imagine my surprise when I sat down to the movie and found that both it and Jolie were good.
Changeling may be one of Clint Eastwood's best directing efforts except that it's a bit too long. It joins the growing list of period pieces, this time based on a true story, that makes the case that the Los Angeles Police Department always had corruption in its DNA.
Jolie stars as Christine Collins, a single mom whose 9-year-old son disappears. The police find an abandoned boy in Illinois and try to pass him off as Collins' son. When she immediately cries foul, instead of continuing to search and admit their error, the police begin a campaign to make it sound as if Christine is the crazy one.
Fortunately, a popular radio preacher (John Malkovich) is on her side, but not before the police have locked her away in a mental hospital, ready to give her shock treatments.
Jolie is surprisingly effective and this is certainly the best performance I've seen her give since way back in Girl, Interrupted. The Oscar nomination she received wasn't the outrage I thought it might be before I saw the film and the technical nominations it got (art direction, cinematography) were definitely earned and it was robbed of a nomination for Deborah Hopper's costumes and probably a win. (Come on, The Duchess was great, but enough with the corsets. When is the last time we saw great working class 1920s duds depicted this well?)
Except for being about 20 minutes too long, Changeling is a riveting, harrowing true story that yet again explains why I've always had the sense of palpable evil when I set foot in L.A.
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Labels: 00s, Eastwood, Jolie, Malkovich
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Sunday, February 22, 2009
What love looks like when it's triumphant
By Edward Copeland
One thing is certain when Hollywood gathers tonight to hand out the Academy Awards for the 81st time: No film has a chance of sweeping the top 5 categories of picture, director, actor, actress and writing. Seventy-five years ago today, a film was released that would be the first to achieve that feat and only two other films have equaled it since. Though It Happened One Night may be 75 years old, it may be the best of the three films that have pulled off the sweep.
Director Frank Capra won the first of his three Oscars for It Happened One Night. Capra, at least as far as I'm concerned, always has had an unfair reputation as a corny sentimentalist as a director and while that description could certainly apply to some of his movies, it by no means apply to them all and, in his best films, that sentimentality is usually earned. It Happened One Night certainly doesn't fit into that pigeonhole: It's just a solid romantic comedy — and the romance comes late, sentiment is in very small doses and there's nary a trace of corniness to be found.
What you do find though is the very essence of romantic chemistry between its Oscar-winning stars Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. As individual characters, the actors are just as winning. Colbert's portrayal of Ellie Andrews, the spoiled heiress determined to marry a man her father despises is great, even though she speaks the truth when she tells her dad (the great Walter Connolly) that they come from a long line of stubborn idiots. You can hardly blame her dad, since the man Ellie wants to run off and make her husband is King Westley (Jameson Thomas), a too-old dandy of a playboy.
Gable is a comic dynamo as Peter Warne, the reporter we first see stinking drunk in a phone booth telling off his editor in front of a crowd of spectators. Re-watching the movie, it occurred to me how, even when it was a negative portrayal of yellow journalism, old films seemed to have a better take on the newspaper journalist than any films made today. So few are even made today and when they are, they usually are laughably ridiculous. (I'll give only one example: Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed who is supposed to be a copy editor and has her own office. That's funny enough, even before she gets her undercover reporting assignment.) When fate gets in the way of the last seat of a bus bring Peter and Ellie together, so comes the road trip and the sparks. The memorable scenes pile up one after another. There's the encounter on the bus with the now-forgotten character actor Roscoe Karns as Shapeley. There's the hysterical hitchhiking scene (remember, the limb is mightier than the thumb). The car ride with Alan Hale Sr. The Walls of Jericho, built out of blankets. Perhaps the most magical scene is when Ellie asks Peter if he's ever been in love while they are on opposite sides of the blanket and the wiseacre gets serious for a moment, wistfully describing the kind of woman that could capture his heart while we see Ellie slowly melt on the other side of the blanket. Seventy-five years later, the performances are still great, the laughs are still solid and the romance is still earned. If there are Walls of Jericho that prevent modern moviegoers from letting themselves enjoy the charms of It Happened One Night today, I say, "Let them topple."
FUN NOTE: I finally saw Clint Eastwood's Changeling last night and Angelina Jolie's character puts two dollars on It Happened One Night to win best picture in an Oscar pool, which is the first time I can remember an Oscar pool ever being referred to in any film.
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Labels: 30s, Capra, Eastwood, Gable, Jolie, Movie Tributes
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Thursday, March 06, 2008
Where have you gone Winona Ryder?
By Edward Copeland
Winona Ryder will turn 37 in October. How is this possible? Of course, we all age, but when I stumble upon a classic Winona Ryder film, her youthful greatness makes it seem impossible that the actress I had a major crush on decades ago is now closing in on 40, something that isn't helped by her near disappearance from the cultural radar. What prompted this post was catching her in the mixed bag of a 2007 film called The Ten and happening upon the ending of Beetlejuice on cable and falling for the Goth goddess once again.
I first noticed Ryder as the shy, tomboyish friend of Corey Haim in Lucas, but it was her performance in Tim Burton's Beetlejuice that really injected her into my consciousness. When I happened upon the ending of that film on cable last week, with her floating in midair, lip-synching Harry Belafonte, all those old feelings came rushing back.
Of course, my passion for Winona also was very dependent on hair color. As a result, I've never watched Burton's Edward Scissorhands. My Winona should NOT be a blonde. As luck would have it, the film The Ten arrived the same day I caught a bit of Beetlejuice. Ryder is pretty great in the film as a woman who becomes obsessed with a ventriloquist's dummy, even if the film itself (made by some of the same people responsible for the underrated gem Wet Hot American Summer) doesn't quite hold together.
Still, it was good to see Ryder again, able to be both funny, charming and a little bent. I know her run-in with the law over shoplifting derailed her career a bit, but it still makes no sense to me why her career stalled the way it did. Ryder managed Oscar nominations in two consecutive years (1993 and 1994) for Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence and Little Women.
She starred in and produced Girl, Interrupted in 1999, which won Angelina Jolie an Oscar but did little for Ryder herself. Where did the talent who propelled the brilliant dark satire Heathers (released the same year she soared as Jerry Lee Lewis' teen cousin/bride in Great Balls of Fire) go?
Even in lesser films such as Mermaids and Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael, she was a pleasure to watch. The same year she scored an Oscar nomination for Little Women she also starred in the extremely underrated Reality Bites, which still stands as one of the best depictions of the post-baby boom generation ever put on screen. (I refuse to use the term Generation X, since the media tried to use a lousy novel by a Canadian to pigeonhole an American generational phenomenon.)
She made other films ranging from the so-so (How to Make an American Quilt) to the great (Looking for Richard and The Crucible), but somehow it seemed as if she were receding from view. By the time Girl, Interrupted came out, it was as if she were a star from days long past.
Ryder is an actress who was able to bridge the gap between modern tales to long-ago period pieces, something that not many of her peers can say. I have to wonder if the tale is true about her former friend Gwyneth Paltrow snatching the Shakespeare in Love screenplay from her coffee table and stealing the part as well. If she'd made Shakespeare, would things be different now instead of most of her work seeming to go straight to DVD?
Then there is the question asked by numerous film buffs: What if she didn't drop out of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather Part III and she had played the role Coppola unfortunately ended up using his daughter Sofia for. Who knows? I do know though that Winona still holds a special place in my heart and I hope she gets the comeback she deserves.
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Labels: Belafonte, Coppola, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jolie, Scorsese, Shakespeare, Tim Burton, Winona
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Thursday, February 14, 2008
Let the costume do the acting
By Edward Copeland
I liked Cate Blanchett's performance in Elizabeth better than I liked the movie itself. I was somewhat surprised that she managed to snag an Oscar nomination for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, given the tepid reviews and box office. Now that I've seen it, while I think it might be more fun than its predecessor and Blanchett is fine, it's still more a case of great costume design and art direction than it is great filmmaking.
One thing that I think hurts Shekhar Kapur's film is the bountiful number of projects about Elizabeth I over the past decade or so, especially the recent HBO miniseries Elizabeth I with the great Helen Mirren.
Kapur's film is campier than his first one, but there really isn't a lot in the way of characterization to offer his cast, be it Clive Owen as Walter Raleigh or Blanchett herself who, quite literally, often blends into the background. She pulls off seeming like an older version of the woman she played so well in 1998, but the entire film ends up being of limited effect.
Blanchett probably deserved the Oscar nomination more than Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, but I still think there were other, better choices out there.
As eye candy, Elizabeth: The Golden Age has its moments, but as a film, it's a nonentity.
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I liked Cate Blanchett's performance in Elizabeth better than I liked the movie itself. I was somewhat surprised that she managed to snag an Oscar nomination for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, given the tepid reviews and box office. Now that I've seen it, while I think it might be more fun than its predecessor and Blanchett is fine, it's still more a case of great costume design and art direction than it is great filmmaking.
One thing that I think hurts Shekhar Kapur's film is the bountiful number of projects about Elizabeth I over the past decade or so, especially the recent HBO miniseries Elizabeth I with the great Helen Mirren.
Kapur's film is campier than his first one, but there really isn't a lot in the way of characterization to offer his cast, be it Clive Owen as Walter Raleigh or Blanchett herself who, quite literally, often blends into the background. She pulls off seeming like an older version of the woman she played so well in 1998, but the entire film ends up being of limited effect.
Blanchett probably deserved the Oscar nomination more than Angelina Jolie in A Mighty Heart, but I still think there were other, better choices out there.
As eye candy, Elizabeth: The Golden Age has its moments, but as a film, it's a nonentity.
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Labels: 00s, Blanchett, Clive Owen, HBO, Jolie, Mirren, Sequels
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Tuesday, January 08, 2008
We know how this ends
By Edward Copeland
Telling the story of well-known events can be a tricky thing, especially in a story as well known as what happened to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl when he was abducted in Pakistan.
Angelina Jolie gives a solid performance as Pearl's wife Marianne, but A Mighty Heart seems stuck in neutral for its entire running time since we know where it's headed.
I was hoping that Michael Winterbottom's film of Marianne Pearl's book would teach me something new about the efforts to find Daniel Pearl, but it is presented in such a dry way, that it didn't do much for me.
Compare it to David Fincher's great Zodiac from last year, and as a procedural it just can't compete.
A Mighty Heart doesn't really add much on the emotional side either. Jolie's performance is mostly good (you forget that it's her for the most part), but once she gets the devastating news of Daniel's death, her shrieking scene reminded me of Grace Zabriskie's reaction to the news of Laura's death in the very first episode of Twin Peaks: It just goes on and on and you know A Mighty Heart didn't mean it to be funny on some level, but it's so over the top, you just can't help but react that way, despite the tragic truth of the story that lies beneath.
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Telling the story of well-known events can be a tricky thing, especially in a story as well known as what happened to Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl when he was abducted in Pakistan.
Angelina Jolie gives a solid performance as Pearl's wife Marianne, but A Mighty Heart seems stuck in neutral for its entire running time since we know where it's headed.
I was hoping that Michael Winterbottom's film of Marianne Pearl's book would teach me something new about the efforts to find Daniel Pearl, but it is presented in such a dry way, that it didn't do much for me.
Compare it to David Fincher's great Zodiac from last year, and as a procedural it just can't compete.
A Mighty Heart doesn't really add much on the emotional side either. Jolie's performance is mostly good (you forget that it's her for the most part), but once she gets the devastating news of Daniel's death, her shrieking scene reminded me of Grace Zabriskie's reaction to the news of Laura's death in the very first episode of Twin Peaks: It just goes on and on and you know A Mighty Heart didn't mean it to be funny on some level, but it's so over the top, you just can't help but react that way, despite the tragic truth of the story that lies beneath.
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Labels: 00s, Fincher, Jolie, Twin Peaks
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