Thursday, March 29, 2012

My Song by Harry Belafonte


MY SONG
by Harry Belafonte

No autobiography is worth its salt unless it contains as much baring of soul as it does factual accuracy and thorough, painstaking recounting of the subject’s history.  Harry Belafonte’s, a quite recent publication, passes all these three tests magnificently as far as I am concerned.  In addition it turns out to be quite event-filled.  Without reading it all the way through you could turn to almost any of the 443 pages at random and land squarely in the middle of something either highly dramatic or historically amazing and engrossing.  Inch by inch, mile by mile he covers his incredible life story without dry rhetorical digressions or dandyish swagger.  He is ruthlessly honest about himself, painting a childhood picture that is shocking, heartbreaking and full of unspeakable abuse, not to mention rank poverty, as those formative years alternated between residences in both Jamaica and Harlem.  The book may be quite long and thickly detailed, but it never drags and never ceases to grip hard.  


He takes us along the circuitous path of his musical career, which started without any support whatsoever from his difficult-to-please mother or his monstrous father.  He emerged as a truly self-made man professionally.  That career seems to have evolved in tandem with his activism.  It is difficult to notice where the career leaves off and the activism begins.  

Some may be drawn to it simply for what it has to say about how his style of music was conceived.  He is more than a calypso singer.  He drew on many elements to establish himself as a leading pop vocalist.  He tells us how he launched his career without any formal voice training or study and about the troubles he had keeping his throat healthy by way of a few touch-and-go surgeries.  He has performed in the vast majority of countries in the western world and some in other parts of the globe.  Along the way he made friends with countless individuals in government, in politics, in the motion picture industry, in education, in religion, as well as in show business.  And he has won prestigious awards – a Tony, an Emmy, the National Medal of Arts, and is a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.  His work as a UNICEF ambassador is one he holds quite high and proudly in his personal esteem.
 
Late in the narrative Belafonte discloses something that just about knocked me out.  He says that he is not nor has ever been a millionaire.  Get that!  What makes this so believable is his recounting of the vast sums he has given away in support of the many causes and social initiatives in which he has become involved, most especially the civil rights movement.  I was profoundly touched by his depiction of how he and Martin Luther King became co-revolutionaries.  It was King who in 1956 initiated their first encounter by a long distance phone call, inviting Belafonte to meet with him in Birmingham, Alabama in a church basement.  There in one three hour meeting, just the two of them, they forged a bond that held together for the remaining twelve years of King’s life.  Belafonte also poured much of his financial support into the drive to free Nelson Mandela and to end apartheid in South Africa.  He even reached into his pocket to promote the careers of other musical talents.  These are but a few of his munificent donations to enterprises about which he was passionate, not to mention his hands-on participation in so many struggles for equality and justice.

And passionate is a word that does not begin to describe his personality.  He could be a real fire brand, at times burning a little too hot for the good of what he was aiming to accomplish, though he was never a Black Power extremist.  He is very candid in recounting some of his run-ins with fellow activists who differed with him on methodology.  There is sadness, disappointment and tragedy in his life, but his triumphs greatly exceed them.  He admits that his many travels away from home alienated him from his first two wives and interfered with his relationships with his children.  He was a reconciler for many and a controversial figure for others.  But I believe the book’s flyleaf is accurate in saying that “he has led one of the great American lives of the last century” and that the memoir “turns both a loving and critical eye on our country’s cultural past.”

I would like to make one final observation about this man.  He has not only played a major role in knocking down racial barriers; he has also transcended race in the appeal he has had as a concert entertainer.  Several years ago, my wife Ruby and I attended a concert of his in Baltimore, expecting to be one of the white minority members of the audience.  But when we arrived, all we could see were well dressed Caucasians in evening clothes and behaving as if they were attending a symphony orchestra affair.  For a moment we wondered if we had come to the wrong theater or if perhaps we were at the right theater on the wrong night.  We checked our tickets just to be sure.  They seemed to be in order.  And once we stepped into the lobby, sure enough there was the larger than life poster display of him towering over us.  That was his audience, his night, and before the evening was over, I had looked around and spotted no more than roughly one black person for every ten white people in that hall.  We all adored his performance, and he related warmly and excitedly and with shrewd humor to everyone present. 

I cannot recommend “My Song” too highly for every free-thinking, culture savvy, open-minded and open-hearted citizen of this or any other nation.  I have read scores of biographies and autobiographies in my lifetime and for the first time – yes, for the first time – I have come across one that I would like to give a second reading.  For me it is that rewarding.  I hope it will be for many of you.       


Saturday, March 24, 2012

Reviews of Friendly Persuasion & Shenandoah

In this blog I will be talking about not only current cinema but classics as well, and we all know that time can create barriers between a contemporary audience and the worthy labors of producers, directors and screen writers long departed from the land of the living.  I wish to keep as many of these old flames alive and burning as time and space will permit.  Many of you reading had not been born when the two following gems were released.  I would be most pleased if you discovered them.

FRIENDLY PERSUASION
(2 hrs & 18 min, color, 1956)

SHENANDOAH
(1 hr & 46 min, color, 1965)

Neutrality in a war zone becomes a serious moral and ethical issue for a peace-loving family in each of these gems.  Though made a decade apart and by different people and released by different distributors, both of them face into the subject with unabashed confidence, honesty and pluck.  Both become something other than preachy parables.  Each one places us inside the comfort zone of a farming family during the American Civil War, people who live off the fat of the land and do not consider the armed conflict going on around them to be of any direct concern to them.  Theirs is not the white flag of surrender, rather the plain mantle of preferred non-participation, though for different reasons.

“Friendly Persuasion” is based upon a novel by Jessamyn West.  It tells a good-humored, amiable story of a Quaker family residing in Indiana in the early days of that War.  Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire are the parents of three children, one of whom is a teenage boy (Anthony Perkins in his screen debut) who must choose either to adhere to his elders’ teaching about non-violence or lend his manhood to the defense of his community against the encroaching Rebs.  There is much more to the picture, however, than his struggle of conscience.  Most of it captures the rhythm of the family’s daily lives and their incessant struggle to match their idealistic faith practice with their erratic natures and quirks of character.  That struggle engenders some heartwarming and thoroughly entertaining moments of comedy, though in a couple of places it lapses a mite too far into cartoon farce.  But we have the brilliant Director William Wyler to keep things on a steady course despite the digressions.

Cooper plays against type as a man of peace, and McGuire is choice casting for a matriarch who must officiate over the souls as well as the bodily care of her offspring and spouse.  Not the least of the film’s charms are the thee’s and thou’s and thy’s that are a staple of these beautiful peoples’ conversation.  By the time the War reaches their front yard in the film’s third act, you come to care exceedingly about their welfare and survival.  Through it all we are urged to think about the gap between the perfection God allegedly expects of us and that which we expect of ourselves.    


“Shenandoah” is an original screenplay by James Lee Barrett, the film directed with driving energy and sensitivity by Andrew V. McGlaglen.  James Stewart is a patriarch, whose northern Virginia farm sits astride the North and the South, but his refusal to get involved in the combat is based upon apolitical principle and rugged individualism, not any religious fervor.  He is, in fact, almost an agnostic but sticks to the religious education of his six sons and one daughter out of his promise to his deceased wife to do so.  Against overweening pressure from his neighbors, the Confederacy, his oldest boys and his pastor, he stands his ground as a non-combatant, reasoning that since he owns no slaves the War does not involve him or his.  He is content to sit it out and go on about his business, until the inevitable  circumstances you just know are going to occur jerk him out of his malaise.

Quite a moving tale emerges from his predicament.  And you can count on Stewart to wrap himself around your heart.  This is one of his most distinguished pieces of work, and he dominates just about every scene, even if his character is somewhat snobbish and snappish and not the most likeable individual.  There are several other notable players in the drama, but he is so strong a figure that he overshadows them all.  The movie is a mixture of tender mercy, heartbreak and the joys of reconciliation.

Neither film attempts in any fashion to provide a pat answer or resolution to the argument posed.  We simply watch, as well crafted characters come to life, take on authentic flesh and blood and become slowly entangled in the consequences of the choices they make.  Both films celebrate family values without being patronizing but with unsparing affection and intelligence.  And either or both would open up rich discussion about when to take up arms and when to seek other solutions – no measly question for the early days of the 21st century.   My advice: Do not choose between the two.  See them both.

Friday, March 23, 2012

Lauching the Ship

Welcome, all of you now reading, to my new blog, which I do not expect to stay new for very long.  For some time I have been building up to this move, yearning as any writer usually does, for a bigger audience than local media of communication make possible.  My background is largely in movie criticism and in commentary about classical music and drama as well as poetry.  Several individuals who have been recipients of my words when beamed over my local church’s e-mail network have indicated that they value what I say and anticipate my latest review or appraisal.  It is my hope that I can widen that readership and by so doing spur on my creative juices that might otherwise tend to grow fallow.  Certainly I am hoping for greater feedback, which can incite me to writings that I might only dream of creating.  The bigger the audience the greater the challenge!

One thing that will not appear on this blog is political commentary.  I will not be expressing views on Presidential candidates or making predictions about the outcome of elections or discussing trends among the voting public.  I will not hesitate to come to terms with a controversial movie or topics explored and depicted on the screen.  But do not count on me to make pronouncements about the world scene as such.

My writings will be conditioned by my Christian faith and my intense devotion to the search for truth.  As a sampler of the kind of substance I intend to share, I offer the following poem, one of my most recent works.

Infinity Beyond the Blink of an Eye


“How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!  How vast is the sum of them!  Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand.”
                                      Psalm 139: 17-18a

Only at great peril do we attempt to enter the mind of God. 
There in that hinterland we are soon lost. 
The road signs are not readable, not even for an intrepid mystic. 
Let it please the devout heart that this is so!  Surely the Psalmist, disinclined to watch from within the Creator’s mind, if only
he could, deems everything visible to the naked human eye
a divine thought in painterly language. 

Every tree, rock, drop of water, chunk of earth, every mountain peak or cavern, each declivity, the very sun that warms our earth,
each blade of grass, every gust of wind in the willows,
the aromatic vapor of the morning, each and every species of creature! 
What we see of them standing on our tiptoes is enough, is it not!

But if the divine mind is anything akin to the human,
we must suppose that God’s is also cudgeled by secret fears –
hidden of necessity from us mortals supremely inflicted with
lesser ones of our own. 
The lacerating edge of many a deadly nightfall, of many
a war or devastation.

Entering this formidable domain we would shoulder the universe itself, caught in fierce meteor showers, seething asteroids and
black holes, as well as all the pains and sufferings of
the multitudes beyond our ken, all the human wreckage,
refuse and irreversible transgression.

And even if we could, for as much as a fleeting moment, glimpse
the unspeakable orbit of infinite love that overreaches all that,
how would we hold onto it?  It might even be blinding to our eyes.
Let us rather with thankful hearts and minds cling
to the passion of the Psalmist, who saw the divine wonders
but only through the eyes of the flesh.
It is after all a heart of flesh this God has given us so lovingly.