Harry Belafonte makes first screen appearance in 20 years in 'Burden'.(Originated from The Virginian-Pilot)

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. _ Harry Belafonte is back.

In ``White Man's Burden,'' contrived to be the most controversial movie of the year, he makes his first screen appearance in 20 years. It's a major comeback in a film that depicts an America enmeshed in reverse racial bias _ blacks are in the majority and whites live in impoverished ghettos. The ``what if?'' theory is designed to make audiences squirm.

It's a compelling vehicle to re-enter the movie world after a two-decade absence.

``A lot of people think I'm dead,'' the trim Belafonte, now 68, said with a laugh as he sat in the garden of the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. Asked to explain his long absence from film, he said: ``I don't play the Hollywood game. I enjoy my life fully in a way that doesn't require that I be making movies. Let's just say I'm least expected to be where the rituals of society deify themselves.''

To millions, Belafonte is still the honey-voiced young man with the open-to-the-waist shirt who sang ``Matilda'' and ``The Banana Boat Song.'' His album ``Harry Belafonte _ Calypso'' was the first ever to sell more than 1 million copies. His Carnegie Hall album held the record as the longest-running disc on the Top 10 music charts for almost four decades, until Michael Jackson's ``Thriller'' edged it out.

He won an Emmy for the TV special ``Tonight With Belafonte'' and a Tony for his Broadway appearance in the musical ``John Murray Anderson's Almanac.'' In Hollywood, he became a black screen idol, co-starring with Dorothy Dandridge in the hot ``Carmen Jones.'' To top it off, he received the coveted Kennedy Center Honor.

In ``White Man's Burden,''…