As a working person with an unruly schedule, I felt fortunate to attend any panels at all, especially a discussion between Belafonte and Sidney Poitier on their careers, followed by questions from the audience. In my head I composed what I thought was a clever question regarding the social dynamics of a film set: was there any difference in the power relations of a set when working with Hollywood veterans e.
I wondered later if this was typical of both their friendship as well as their public appearances together, with the quick-to-anger Belafonte upstaging the laid-back Poitier. However, it is his second Hollywood film, Carmen Jones Otto Preminger, , that signals the direction his film career would subsequently take. It is not simply that Joe eventually murders Carmen an inevitability considering the source material , he betrays the mythos of heroic masculinity: not only does he pull a knife on an unarmed rival, but he is also defeated by him.
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It would be difficult to imagine a Poitier character demonstrating such a decline in ethics or humiliated so. Belafonte was unconcerned with projecting an image of Poiteresque moral or ethical superiority to whites on screen as he was unafraid to provide evidence of Black frailty and impotence in his characterizations. This hints at the difference between the Belafonte and Poitier star personas.
This tendency is again evident in his next film, Island in the Sun Robert Rossen, ; see top image , where he portrays David Boyeur, the de facto leader of the Black populace of a fictional Carribean island transitioning from British colonial rule.
He is also engaged in a tentative romance with a member of that decaying ruling class, Mavis Norman played by Joan Fontaine. Ostensibly a noble representative of Black liberation in the film, Boyeur is also a cunning political strategist: interrupting a scheduled political event, he engages in an impromptu debate with the scheduled speaker a white man who masquerades as a friend of the Black islanders to gain political power to satisfy his own neurotic needs and publicly exposes him as the racist he actually is.
