Belafonte Returns It’s Been 20 Years Since His Last Film But He’s Back In The Movie Game Now In A Big Way

Even Harry Belafonte admits that his return to the big screen after a two-decade absence is, well, kind of odd.

In “White Man’s Burden” he plays Thaddeus Thomas, a wealthy, highly cultured industrialist in a “Twilight Zone” America where blacks are the dominant race. And Thaddeus is a complacent racist.

“When I first read the script, I found it titillating, I found it extremely naive and I thought that it was fraught with great danger,” Belafonte says in his trademark mellow rasp, which the actor makes as mesmerizing as ever at age 68.

“When a person as all-omnipotent as Steven Spielberg has as much difficulty as he did trying to get ‘Schindler’s List’ made, how do mere mortals try to approach seriously the subject of race in an America that is so racist, so driven by racial definitions and perceptions? Hollywood has had no great record of any courage in dealing with this subject matter - one or two exceptions, maybe, but certainly not anything you’d call commanding.”

As is typical of Belafonte, though, the very difficulty of the task attracted him to it. This, after all, is a man who has built a rich, ground-breaking body of work out of career choices that seemed, at the time, improbable at best.

Who suspected that at the height of Cold War xenophobia, in the mid-1950s, the Harlem-born, Jamaica-bred Belafonte would make a record album called “Calypso” that would become the first ever to sell more than a million copies? Or that he’d be starring in some of Hollywood’s earliest realistic African-American dramas (“Bright Road,” “Carmen Jones”), while his friend and future collaborator Sidney Poitier was still a supporting actor? Or that, by 1959, he’d be producing his own movie, the taut crime caper “Odds Against Tomorrow,” and would soon become the first black producer in television?

Inevitably, given his achievements and his inclinations alike, Belafonte also became a major figure in the modern civil rights movement. His working friendships ranged from Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt to Nelson Mandela, and he’s been instrumental in projects as different as the early days of the Peace Corps and the “We Are the World” effort.

Belafonte’s lifelong commitment to the struggle for racial equality, obviously, finds expression in “White Man’s Burden,” which marks his first major feature appearance since the 1974 “Uptown Saturday Night” (directed by Poitier). He says preparation for the role of an intelligent man with unexamined prejudices was easy.

“Life in America,” he says, summing up the background. “All of it, from my childhood to my 68th year. It’s there every day of my life, one form or another. Some of it is severely oppressive - it used to be more than now. But now it’s in the most dangerous place it’s ever been, with the attacks on affirmative action and the Newt contract and white Christian America on its evangelical campaign.

“A movie like this would have been important at any time, because racism has always been there. But it happens to coincidentally come at a time when no one had envisioned the kind of reversal that’s taken place now. Everybody thought America would move ahead to its next truth, on a higher level. Nobody expected that civil rights and human rights would be reversed. It’s a weird moment. I hope this film, coming at this time, will in some way provoke expression.”

That said, Belafonte admits he had many initial reservations about “White Man’s Burden,” which was conceived and directed by Japanese-American Desmond Nakano, whose screenwriting credits include “Last Exit to Brooklyn” and “American Me.” While Belafonte liked the plot, in which dismissed bakery worker Louis Pinnock (John Travolta) kidnaps his oblivious boss Thomas and the two unexpectedly bond, the actor found Nakano’s conception of the rich bigot a little, well, obvious.

“This thing had to be character-driven, and what the characters do had to be made really seductive to the audience,” Belafonte pointed out. “In the beginning, Thaddeus Thomas was debased. He was a womanizer, he just hated. That, to me, was rather shallow. It’s easy to play Hitler if you’re going to play him as a psychotic. It’s easy to play Jesse Helms as a degenerate - just be flawed, just be that.

“But I think that most of us play out the racial theme with aspects of charm and cultivation and intelligence. I played Thaddeus as monogamous. He loves his wife, he loves his children, he’s considered a pillar of strength in his society, he’s fulfilled the American dream. And incidentally he thinks, with some benevolence, that all white people are genetically flawed and inferior.”

Whether you agree or not that Belafonte’s changes made Thomas a better man, it seems certain that a number of viewers, for as many different reasons as there are perspectives, will find “White Man’s Burden” insulting, patronizing, trivializing or otherwise controversial.

Belafonte is all for that, too.

“People are going to come to the theater with all these varying degrees of prejudices,” he predicts. “Some blacks are going to hate it. Others won’t see anything in it and would rather be looking at ‘Boyz N the Hood’ or ‘Terminator 6.’

“But I don’t get caught up in the Hollywood view of all that. I don’t try to debate the audience in that sense. You know, trying to make a movie acceptable to all tastes is a flawed pursuit.”

Indeed, Belafonte is back in the movie game in a big way. He just finished work co-starring in “Kansas City,” Robert Altman’s period crime drama. He’s working with director Jonathan Demme on adapting Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the civil rights movement, “Parting the Waters.” He has just executive-produced an HBO movie, “The Affair,” and plans to make his directing debut with the Turner Network Television movie “Port Chicago Mutiny.”

“It’s my time again; it’s cyclical,” he shrugs when asked about his re-emergence. “I’m getting more offers because diversity is being re-introduced into the marketplace. All the pictures aren’t about black people in the ghetto anymore. It’s expanding once again.”