Cry, the Beloved Country

A sincere courageous film which depicted the apartheid society in South Africa ( instituted in 1948,abolished in 1991)at the beginning of the fifties.

It depicts the different paths of two men :a black minister , Stephen Kumalo ,and a wealthy landlord, James Jarvis ;two paths which will cross each other in tragic circumstances.

Kumalo is a country priest,Johannesburg town is a world he does not know at all ;his arrival ,when he's fooled by the young man, is revealing ; his faith will be put to the test during the ordeals and trials he will have to cope with....many exploited black men do not think that pie in the sky is enough now...

Jarvis is a good husband and a proud father ,but he's also a ruthless rich ,who has no pity on the tenant farmer who cannot pay anymore; he too,will experiment tragedy but his son's progressist ideas (the reading of his manifesto is one of the great moments of the film,summing up the plight of black people in admirably succint style) will make him a brand new man.

Sidney Poitier ,who paved a reliable way for today's black stars , makes all his scenes count ,though he does not play the lead.

A powerful, deep, and complex story of an interracial crime in 1940s Johannesburg. As in The Grapes Of Wrath, the spotlight is on the human struggle and heartbreak of a racially divided society instead of the inevitable political and moral overtones, and the result is the story of a generation.

A really good film could be made about the making of Cry, the Beloved Country which in itself is a landmark film about the early stages of the formal apartheid society in the Union of South Africa.

There's a famous story of Alfred Hitchcock shooting the scene with Cary Grant fleeing the United Nations on the sly with a hidden camera because the UN would not grant him permission to film. That's nothing to what Zoltan Korda had to just even getting Canada Lee and young Sidney Poitier into South Africa in the guise of houseboys. He filmed all the outdoor stuff on location there and the government never caught on. Had they caught on it might have meant prison, it certainly at a minimum would have resulted in deportation.,

Canada Lee plays Reverend Stephen Kumalo who comes to Johannesburg in search of his missing son Absalom. Another man of the cloth, Sidney Poitier helps him search for his son who among other things has gotten a woman pregnant and has committed murder during a robbery attempt in a fit of panic.

The rest of the story is not a pleasant one, but strangely uplifting as Lee, father of the murderer and the father of the victim who was a liberal South African fighting the apartheid regime pledge mutually out of their grief to work for a just society. It took a long time and it's not all together there yet, but South Africa is one of the great success stories of the past century about people of good will righting terrible wrongs.

Alan Paton the author was a prophet with no honor in his own country. His book, a world best seller, was banned in the Union of South Africa and Paton himself ostracized. Paton was a committed Christian who really did believe that all people were indeed equal and fought for that ideal all his life. He died in the mid eighties and sadly did not live to see the fall of apartheid.

Though a big budget film of Cry, the Beloved Country came out in the nineties, this time with the cooperation of the Mandela government, this film still sets a high standard just for courage in the making.

In South Africa, some young black township boys burgle a white owned farmer's house and accidentally kill a white man. The father (Canada Lee) of one of the boy's has recently arrived back in Johannesberg and is shocked how the township has changed. The tragedy surprisingly has the effect of bringing both sides together.

An early and rare example of a film that highlighted South African apartheid in this strong racial drama. Even more surprising is that the authorities allowed the film to be shot in South Africa, but was directed by Zoltan Korda, a director that liked authenticity in his films. It is something of an earnest drama, but is nevertheless worthy without being preachy. A strong early performance for Sidney Poitier and a final film for Canada Lee in a particularly powerful performance.

There seems little point in remaking proved masterpieces of cinema. Generally they are given short shrift by critics and moviegoers with examples such as a new "Stagecoach" and "Psycho" quickly assigned to oblivion while their originals continue to give endless pleasure either as DVDs or TV reshowings. The 1995 version of "Cry, the Beloved Country" deserved a similar fate and was only saved I would imagine because the original version of Alan Paton's South African novel directed by Vincent Korda in 1951 is so little known today. I regard this neglect and the fact that it was felt that a "new" version was needed as one of cinema's greatest tragedies, for the original was beyond doubt, in my opinion, one of the half dozen greatest films ever to have emerged from a British studio. I ran the two versions again recently. By the end of the exercise I vowed never again to see the "new" version as in every sense it is the inferior of the two. I would cite the treatments of one small scene to make the point, the incredibly moving moment in the novel when the news is broken to the white landowner on his farm of the murder of his only son by a group of black youth during the course of a burglary of his home in Johannesburg. Korda's treatment of the scene takes approximately a third of the time of the equivalent in the new Darrell Roodt version. It is impressively understated with the father quietly having to sit down to take in the dreadful news he has been brought. Richard Harris in the same part cannot match Charles Carson's tremendous dignity, exteriorising his grief in a far more theatrical way. It is the difference between tragedy and melodrama. Korda's monochrome "Cry, the Beloved Country" is almost documentary in style. The voice-over reading of Paton's opening paragraph is set against shots of the landscape it describes. The black Minister's train journey to the big city to find his fallen sister is punctuated by landscapes becoming more and more blighted by the rape of industry. Once there he embarks on a sad pilgrimage of shantytowns photographed with all the mastery of the postwar Italian neo-realists. That Korda's version of Paton's bleak tale is on the same level of artistic integrity and achievement as works such as "Bicycle Thieves" and "Germany Year Zero" is a measure of how highly I rate it. The use of music is masterly: indigenous a cappella choruses for the credits then nothing for the first third of the film. Then almost imperceptibly Raymond Gallois-Montbrun's orchestral score creeps in to meditate on some of the quieter scenes reaching a sort of apotheosis reminiscent of the conclusion of Berg's Violin Concerto by adopting the form of a chorale prelude for the final scene where the Minister climbs a hilltop to witness the dawn of a new day at the time his son is being executed. Shortly before he has passed the doubly bereaved white farmer to whom he has sent flowers on learning of his wife's death. The moment of reconcilliation between the two men is marked by the farmer's simple acknowledgement "Your flowers were of great beauty". There are few moments in cinema as moving as this.