Word: johannesburger
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...weighty story of the racial injustice of South Africa. An excellent story, I hasten to add, but one so poignant that it needs relief of some sort. From the very beginning when the old native pastor sets off to seek his lost sister and son in the hellhole of Johannesburg, and through the whole story of his agonies on learning that his sister is a prostitute and his son a murderer, and also in the collateral story of the sufferings of the English landowner whose son is killed, there is little relief to be found in the plot...
Intellectually, then, it is important that all the major opinion be brought out and scrutinized. But the movie version inexplicably omits one whole school of thought, that of the semi-revolutionary natives, embodied in the colored pastor's brother, a great agitator in Johannesburg. This severely damages the intellectual balance of the Christian solution have only to defeat the relatively poor arguments of the white supremacists...
Unhappily, the film betrays its literary origin by stressing emotion rather than motion. It is the tale of the Rev. Stephen Kumalo (Canada Lee), a simple Zulu minister who journeys from Ndotsheni, Natal to the great, bewildering city of Johannesburg to find his lost sister. There he discovers that she has become a prostitute in the squalid; segregated shantytown where the plight of black-skinned people in a white man's world is shockingly evident. The black voyager also finds that his only child, Absalom, has murdered a young white champion of the oppressed Negroes. The victim...
Zoltan Korda affectionately filmed the picture almost entirely in the real locales: Ixopo, Carisbrooke and Johannesburg. There are expansive shots of rolling green hills, played-out mining areas and savage slums. But the camera, with its realistic eye, can also confine and shackle. Though Cry, the Beloved, Country has much of the novel's passion, it has lost some of the poetry. The lens brings into harsh focus the artifices which trick out the theme yet cast little light on the problems of the dark continent...
...Johannesburg last week Paton announced that current world conditions had left him feeling so "uncertain and politically frustrated" that he and his wife were going into seclusion for a year or more. His asylum: a Negro tuberculosis settlement some 25 miles from Durban where he will help with the manual labor.* A switch on the real-life story of Commander Howard W. Gilmore. Mortally wounded by Jap gunfire on the bridge of his submarine, Gilmore ordered his men to "Take her down!", rode to a hero's grave to save his craft...