Zoltan Korda’s thrilling movie version of Alan Paton’s novel was first released in 1951, when South Africa’s racist apartheid policy was only three years of age and maybe enough of a novelty to be thought of as something amenable to second thoughts, capable of being reformed or even abolished. Paton’s novel itself was published in 1948, the same year as apartheid appeared. Now this film is rereleased, revealing again that it has a crusading preacher’s urgency and moral seriousness, appropriate for a story of priests.
After a slow start, the movie hits a muscular, compelling stride; it is a drama with an obvious biblical parallel, but also a quite genuine Shakespearean resonance in the tragic dimension of its final act and the Montague/Capulet reconciliation it envisions for black and white, bought with the self-sacrificial forgiveness for a capital crime. Perhaps modern audiences would be restive at a story about apartheid South Africa that appears to centre its eventual moral judgment amid the white community and white victimhood, but its passion and idealism blaze out.
