And Tonight's Special Guest - Jamie Garwood!
This week's guest contributor talks up a new 4K restoration of the little-seen anti-apartheid film Cry, The Beloved Country
By Jamie Garwood
This 1951 release was directed by Zoltan Korda (The Four Feathers), based upon the novel by Alan Paton, and stars Sidney Poitier and Canada Lee, in his last film role while being photographed by Robert Krasker, who shot The Third Man. All in all, it’s a very welcome addition to the StudioCanal library.
The film follows the story of a black priest Kumalo. portrayed by Lee, who leaves the township he resides in to go to the big city, in this case Johannesburg, to search for his estranged son. Poitier plays a fellow benevolent priest in the city.
Each step on his journey, Kumalo is blindsided by revelations that leave him utterly shattered, from the discovery that his sister is a prostitute to finding out his son has been sentenced to death for the murder of a prominent white figure in the community.
Meanwhile back in the village, white farmer Jarvis (Charles Carson) - who is indifferent to the injustices of apartheid - learns of the murder of his own son, an activist keen to curb the oppression of Black South Africans. In discovering more about his son’s passing, Jarvis begins to understand the struggles of the people his boy was so determined to help.
Shot on location in South Africa, Cry, The Beloved County is a deeply poignant political drama, that transitions between two distinct styles of filmmaking. For while the scenes involving the white farmer are shot like an Ealing drawing room drama, the location work in Johannesburg shows a new brevity and bravery in direction; shooting on location turning the city itself into character. Furthermore, since Lee and Poitier are so prominent, this is a production unafraid to comment on racial injustices. There’s no white saviour narrative of the kind that’d become the norm in Hollywood (see Mississippi Burning or A Time To Kill). British cinema, however, has never been afraid to voice the stories of black figures such as Horace Ove.
Extras on the Blu-Ray and DVD include an interview with Canada Lee biographer Mona Z Smith, archive footage of the production, a documentary on cinema under apartheid and interviews with African filmmaker Lionel Ngakane and writer Alan Paton, as well as a fascinating 16 page booklet.
CRY, THE BELOVED COUNTRY is out 9th October on Blu-Ray/DVD from Studiocanal UK.