CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY (1951)

Cry, the Beloved Country (1951) deals head-on with the evils
of South Africa's apartheid system, which gave the full force of
law to white supremacy and ruthless subordination of the
country's black majority until it was finally dismantled in the
1990s. The screenplay is by Alan Paton, based on the eponymous
novel he wrote in 1946, the year of a strike for higher wages that
caused the death or injury of more than 1,000 black workers.
Paton's book was published two years later, just as apartheid was
being officially imposed; not surprisingly, South Africa's
government banned it. The film adaptation debuted early in 1952,
the year when new "pass laws" were instituted crippling black
people's freedom of movement more severely than ever and
when the anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela and a partner
opened the country's first black legal firm, an early occurrence in
the long struggle that finally ended apartheid some four decades
later.
The movie's main characters are Stephen Kumalo, a black
clergyman in rural South Africa, and James Jarvis, a white farmer
whose land is in the same part of the country, although the two
men have never met. The story begins when Stephen visits
Johannesburg for the first time, hoping to find out what's become
of Gertrude, his sister, and Absalom, his biblically named son.
Arriving in the big city and learning from a young priest named
Msimangu that Gertrude has become a prostitute, Stephen sets
off to rescue her from the miserable slum where she leads her
unhappy life. In the meanwhile, we see that Absalom's situation
is even worse he's become a criminal, and during a burglary he
shoots and kills Arthur Jarvis, a white liberal who has worked to
establish better housing for the country's poor black laborers.
Arthur is the idealistic son of James Jarvis, and in one of the
film's grim ironies, we've seen the racially unenlightened James
grumbling about a newspaper photo of Arthur shaking hands with
a black man to celebrate advances in his housing program. Now
another black man has ended Arthur's life.
This tragic event has at least one positive consequence. Traveling

to the city as soon as he receives the awful news, James spends a

great deal of time reading through his son's papers, coming to
understand and sympathize with his compassion for the country's
black population; later, at Arthur's funeral, he shakes hands with
many black people, the very thing he complained about Arthur
doing before Arthur's papers helped him see the light. The story
ends on the evening before Absalom's execution for the murder,
when Stephen and James have a conversation that holds out
promise for future progress in South African racial understanding.
Other characters include Stephen's brother John, a black militant,
and his nephew Matthew, who was Absalom's accomplice in the
crime; James's wife, Margaret, whose ill health is further shaken
by the trauma of Arthur's death; Martens, a probation officer
who's strongly interested in the murder case; and Father Vincent,
a priest who runs a mission in Johannesburg.
The picture was directed by Zoltan Korda, who belonged to a very
cinematic family his brothers were Vincent Korda, the
prominent art director and production designer, and Alexander
Korda, a prolific producer-director and founder of London Films,
the English studio where Cry, the Beloved Country was
produced. According to a memoir by Michael Korda, his nephew,
Zoltan's health was weakening in the early 1950s but he was
determined to make this film, which might possibly be his last, as
honest and uncompromising as possible, no matter how much its
anti-establishment message might offend the British Empire and
its South African avatars. Much of it was filmed in South Africa in
the thick of the apartheid era; costar Sidney Poitier, who plays
Msimangu, says in his autobiographyThis Life that he and Canada
Lee, who plays Stephen Kumalo, entered the country claiming to
be "indentured laborers," not actors which would have aroused
suspicion. Once they were there, they had to cope with official
racism so severe that as black people they'd be breaking the law
if they so much as drank a drop of alcohol.
Before going to South Africa for Cry, the Beloved Country,
Poitier hadn't dreamed that dignified Great Britain could harbor
the kind of lethal bigotry he encountered. Hearing about it in

depth from contacts he made there on the sly, "in a real cloakand-dagger manner," was quite a political and cultural eye-opener
for him. Yet he found great fulfillment in the role of Msimangu,
who had a "compassion and fighting spirit" that made him the
most "artistically exciting" character he'd played so far in his
career. He also appreciated the insights regarding "social
characteristics and other subtleties of character" provided to him
by Paton, who was present during much of the filming. And he
was very pleased to act alongside Lee, a former prizefighter who
acted in a handful of films he's best remembered
for Lifeboat in 1944 and Body and Soul in 1947 before his civilrights work of the 1930s and 1940s earned him a place on
Hollywood's blacklist during the infamous red-scare period. He
died of blood poisoning a few months after Cry, the Beloved
Country had its American premiere. Actor and activist Ossie
Davis later hailed him as "a new kind of black man, aggressive,
proud and dangerous."
Alexander Korda had been a left-wing activist in his native
Hungary, but he became a conservative fan of the British Empire
after moving to England in the 1930s. Between 1935 and 1939 he
and his brothers worked together on the Empire quartet, four
novel-based movies that celebrated the so-called white man's
burden in various British colonies. By contrast, Zoltan Korda was
a committed liberal who developed a keen respect for Africa when
he traveled there to do research for Sanders of the River (1935),
the first of those films. He saw Cry, the Beloved Country as a
chance to express his admiration for African culture in undiluted
form. Although he was gratified when it won the Bronze Bear at
the Berlin film festival and played at Cannes as an official
selection, he was bitterly let down when its American distributor
(Lopert Pictures) reedited it to tone down its message and
changed its title to the sensationalistic African Fury. This was a
disappointing fate for what Michael Korda describes as "certainly
his finest film, and the one he most cared about."
Paton's novel has also been the basis for other works,
including Lost in the Stars, a 1949 stage musical by playwright

Maxwell Anderson and composer Kurt Weill; a 1974 film version

of Lost in the Stars directed by Daniel Mann; and a 1995 remake
of Cry, the Beloved Country directed by South African
filmmaker Darrell Roodt and featuring James Earl Jones and
Richard Harris as the black and white protagonists. I was at the
New York premiere of the 1995 picture, which was introduced by
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who praised its commitment to
human rights, and South African President Mandela, who called it
a "monument to the future," stressing its value not so much as a
record of the past than as a guide to continued progress in time
to come. The same can be said of Korda's film today.
Director: Zoltan Korda
Producer: Zoltan Korda, Alan Paton
Screenplay: Alan Paton, adapted from his novel
Cinematographer: Robert Krasker
Film Editing: David Eady
Art Direction: Wilfred Shingleton
With: Canada Lee (Stephen Kumalo), Charles Carson (James
Jarvis), Sidney Poitier (Reverend Msimangu), Joyce Carey
(Margaret Jarvis), Geoffrey Keen (Father Vincent), Vivien Clinton
(Mary), Michael Goodliffe (Martens), Albertina Temba (Mrs.
Kumalo), Edric Connor (John Kumalo), Lionel Ngakane (Absalom
Kumalo), Charles McRae (Stephen's friend), Bruce Meredith Smith
(Captain Jaarsveldt), Bruce Anderson (Frank Smith), Ribbon
Dhlamini (Gertrude)
BW-103m.
by David Sterritt