Released in South Africa on 15 November 1951, Cry, the Beloved Country was among the
very first feature films of Sidney Poitier‘s long career. The then 24-year-old plays Theophilus Msimangu, a reverend who assists fellow minister Stephen Kumalo (Canada Lee) in nurturing his ill sister and locating his son Absalom (Lionel Ngakane), who has left without contact. Their cause takes them through Johannesburg and the newly imposed apartheid system, exposing its layers of injustice and dysfunction.
Cry, the Beloved Country is novel in its presentation of black African perspectives some 15 years before the civil rights pictures of the 1960s, such as Poitier’s own Look Who’s Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night. Those two films are likely to feature in any retrospective of cinema and race, but not Cry, the Beloved Country.
Why is that? Well, the pacing is deliberate; characters speak at length and often about banal details. You feel its 72 years, too – PG fare of the 1950s struggles to show racial urban decay like Tsotsi, City of God and half a hundred other examples. But while Cry may lack modern potency, it has not lost its timeless sense of contemplation and morality, which is built by the performances as much as Alan Paton’s script.
Lee plays Kumalo as a tormented stoic, while Poitier strides as a pillar of the new generation. Together, their perspectives embody the pain of South Africa’s past and the hopeful progress that, Paton suggests, is not beyond possibility. Alas, apartheid would endure for another four decades.
Cry, the Beloved Country is available now on Blu-ray, DVD and digital platforms.
