Odd for a cinema industry emerging from the birth of apartheid in 1948, several films were produced from 1949 - 1951 in which the focus was on Black South Africans, rather than their oppressive rulers. The films were Donald Swanson's African Jim aka Jim Comes To Jo'burg (1949), Hyman Kirstein's Zonk (1950), Emil Nofal's Song of Africa (1951) and this gloriously funny musical comedy, filmed in the Johannesburg suburb of Alexandra and featuring almost all of its' residents in a madcap chase in pursuit of a thief who stole money from a church whose oldest parishioner had just donated his life savings to that church. Among the hugely funny moments is a scene set in a dustbin of all places: the thief is hiding in one and when the police confront him, he claims the bin as his home, leading one police officer to say "This housing problem is getting serious."
There is only one dark spot in this film's legacy and that is the fact that the film's screenwriter, James Ambrose Brown attempted to track the film down in 1988 and found it at the National Film, Video and Sound Archives in Pretoria. Once there, he was made aware of the fact that not only was the film there in 16mm print format but its' negative masters as well: all well preserved for many years.
All well and good, until Brown demanded that the negatives be released to him as he claimed copyright on it, despite only being the screenwriter and the fact that producer and director Donald Swanson had passed away in 1977. This demand was entertained by the archivists on the condition that Brown could produce proof that he was the actual rights holder: this he could not do and thus went away in a huff, later writing an article in the The Star newspaper in which he alleged that "the film is available in Europe but in Pretoria, the film moulders in a vault".
In light of the positivity of this long unseen film, it is troubling that the next three features made by foreign filmmakers with Black South Africans as the focal point - Zoltan Korda's bleak, depressing Cry The Beloved Country (1952), Lionel Rogosin's covertly filmed awful disaster Come Back Africa and Henning Carlsen's dire Dilemma aka A World Of Strangers - chose the negative view typical of anti-South African foreign filmmakers of this country instead and chose to portray South Africa as a ghastly hell hole with no chance of redemption nor rescue from the pit of despair that apartheid had spawned.
Simply put: South Africans should tell their own stories, nobody else has the right or should be allowed to. With Dolly Rathebe, Tommy Machaka and Willard Cele.
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