My review was written in September 1982 after a New York Film Festival screening.
"City Lovers" is a dull, undramatic "message" picture about the official suppression of interracial sex in South Africa. Backed by various European tv webs, its use will probably be limited to broadcast exposure.
Joe Stewardson, a familiar face from action pictures, is topcast as Franz Von Leinsdorff, a cold duck of a geologist who very gradually becomes romantically involved with a mixed-marriage girl Yvonne (pretty screen newcomer Denise Newman). What begins as a casual encounter in a supermarket leads to her part-time job as his housekeeper and eventually to bed. Inevitably, the bigoted neighbors fink on them to the police, cuing a very tedious search and a scary wide angle shot finale of Yvonne subjected to a gynecological examination at police headquarters.
Director Barney Simon adapts Nadine Gordimer's story into a format familiar from British filmizations of H. E. Bates tales: two characters calmly interacting until a sudden, violent finale. With Stewardson glumly walking through the material and Newman bubbling over like a groupie with her favorite rock star, the soft focus romance is a bore. Nasty glances or verbal slurs by white neighbors ae injected at regular intervals.
There is little overt conflict, with urbanity and understatement stressed by Simon even after the police arrive. Regarding the interracial issue, the age difference between the leads (he's at least 30 years older than her_ is far more noticeable and distracting than any difference in skin color.
Simon's clearly on the side of the angels in his criticism of the country's social system, but his film is a failure. To paraphrase the familiar jazz artist expression, "it's not what you do, but how you do it".
