Ay, Calypso

My father was not socially conscious.  He was a pretty straight guy.  He was hardly what anyone would call "cool," having grown up in the fifties virtually oblivious to rock and roll.  Having been strictly raised Catholic in the days before the Second Vatican Council, he must have found Chuck Berry completely alien.  But he was a huge fan of one performer who, while not a rock and roller, was, as the son of Caribbean immigrants who incorporated calypso and rhythm and blues into his music and whose acting ability and good looks made him one of the first major black stars in Hollywood, was hip by definition.  My father was a huge fan of Harry Belafonte.

My father had pretty much every album from Belafonte, who died this week at 96, made in the late fifties and early sixties and he incessantly played them well into the late seventies, the records still without a scratch in them.  Belafonte was a truly impressive and energetic singer, and he was a classy showman.  But for all the good taste in music my father developed when he went to St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, New Jersey, he only appreciated the musical aspects of Belafonte's career and not the social ones.  My father was mostly an Eisenhower Republican who couldn't make heads or tails out of the civil rights movement or the counterculture, and do he did not share Belafonte's politics or social activism.  Belafonte was always there like Tom Joad, marching for civil rights in Washington, speaking out against the Vietnam War, featuring Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy as a guest host for Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show" (mere months before their assassinations), and appearing on the Smothers Brothers' variety show to sing "Don't Stop the Carnival" ot images of the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago (the meaning of the juxtaposition of which was clear enough to get it cut from the broadcast, though it would be shown decades later).  Belafonte didn't just sing, like his contemporaries did.  Belafonte had something to say.

Belafonte would continue his activism well into the turn to the right in this country, supporting anti-apartheid measures against South Africa and spearheading famine relief for Ethiopia.  (Although Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson get the credit for USA For Africa by writing "We Are the World," they just wtoe the song; it was Belafonte who organized  that united support of artists.) And he was one of the first people to brand George Walker Bush a terrorist for starting a war in Iraq at a time when most people supported that military misadventure.  Even in his later years he was ahead of his time.  The same held true for popular culture; he co-produced the 1984 hip-hop movie Beat Street at a time when Culture Club and Duran Duran dominated the pop charts and the biggest movies of the year included Ghostbusters.  He never stopped speaking out for what was right and promoting what was important to him, and he carried that social and political conscience right up to the end of his life.

Harry Belafonte - singer, actor, humanitarian, political activist . . . 

. . . and also a cat lover.

RIP.

To Sir, With Love

Any actor would be proud to play a police detective, a fiancé, or a foreign-exchange teacher in movies that deal with race and racial tension.  Sidney Poitier played all three of those roles in three different films, all of which came out in the same year, 1967.  In that year, the year of Sgt. Pepper, only the Beatles as as much influence on popular culture, but then there were four of them, while there was only one Poitier.   In In the Heat of the Night, his character Virgil Tibbs found himself down in Mississippi handling a murder case in a racially charged atmosphere.  Guess Who's Coming To Dinner featured him as Dr. John Prentice, a black man engaged to a white woman fourteen years his junior who meets and surprises her parents (played by Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in their last collaboration), while, in To Sir, With Love, his character Mark Thackeray was a Guyanese immigrant in London trying to handle disruptive white working-class East End students not unlike the very sort of character he'd played in The Blackboard Jungle.  All three roles showed Poitier's characters handing racial and social tensions that could overwhelm anyone in such a situation with toughness and dignity, making Poitier one of the most respected actors of his time, and the most respected black actor of his time.

Poitier, who died this past Thursday, had already broken ground with his emotionally charged performances in movies like The Defiant Ones, in which he played an escaped black convict handcuffed to a white convict (played by Tony Curtis), A Raisin In the Sun, about a black family trying to buy a house in a white neighborhood, and Lilies of The Field, in which he played a handyman helping German nuns build a chapel in Arizona, the latter earning him an Oscar and making him the first black man to receive such an honor.  His movies of the late sixties and early seventies would go on to make black movie stars mainstream, and Poitier would play every role from the serious to the less-than serious, from an enigmatic man whose returns in his hometown precede deaths in his family in Brother John to the trio of comedies he directed and starred in with Bill Cosby.  Some of his best work was as a director, such as Stir Crazy, the second movie to star both Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.

Even in today's times, where racial tension seems worse than ever, you only need to look at how more black actors and filmmakers prosper and how none of this would have been likely, or maybe even possible, without Poitier blazing the trail.  Some of the social situations in Poitier's early movies that seemed so unrealistic back in the day are commonplace now; there are so many interracial couples in America that you could theoretically make a movie with an interracial couple and not even focus on that as an angle.  This country and the world at large are all the better because of what Sidney Poitier accomplished as an actor.  RIP. 😢  

Tony Curtis: 1925-2010

Tony Curtis, who died last night at the age of 85, started out as a heartthrob, but he was very much an actor's actor, throwing himself wholeheartedly into whatever role he played. Growing up as Bernie Schwartz in the Bronx, he had thrown himself just as wholeheartedly into the movies he watched in the neighborhood theater - sometimes for ten hours at a time - and in the plays he performed in at a local settlement house. It proved to be training as valuable as that from a conservatory. He retained the common touch when he became famous, and he was known to be a genial, warm man.

Most obituaries will cite Curtis's role in 1959's Some Like It Hot, and others might even remember him for the 1960 comedy The Great Impostor, but I will always remember his role as a bigoted white escaped convict chained to a black inmate - played by Sidney Poitier - in The Defiant Ones, a story of how two opposites overcome prejudice and animosity on the run from the law. It was a groundbreaking movie, and one Curtis was happy to be a part of. In both his acting and in his painting, which he took up later in life, he proved himself to be a man of integrity. They don't make 'em like that anymore. R.I.P.