Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in a publicity still from Carmen Jones
The death has been announced of singer and sometimes actor Harry Belafonte. Belafonte, who was in many ways responsible for the calypso craze of the late 1950s, was 96. That latter was also recorded on film, with such hilariously awful movies (that Belafonte had nothing to do with, it should be pointed out) as Bop Girl Goes Calypso.
Belafonte only made a handful of dramatic (ie. non-documentary movies), and all of the ones I've seen are interesting, although I have to say that they're generally interesting for reasons other than Belafonte's presence in the cast. It's Dorothy Dandrige and Pearl Bailey, for example, that give Carmen Jones its irrepressible energy, and child star Philip Hepburn in Bright Road. Belafonte was pleasant enough on screen, but everybody around him seemed to have more heft.
I think it's in part because of that that certainly Belafonte's singing career is going to be more mentioned in the obituaries, as well as his social activism. I haven't looked it up to see whether TCM is going to have a tribute to him in May or June, but he made a small enough number of movies that it would probably have to be limited to a Sunday night before Silent Sunday Nights double feature of probably two out of Bright Road, The World, The Flesh, and the Devil, and Odds Against Tomorrow.
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