CRY FREEDOM: Blu-ray (Universal, 1987) Kino Lorber

In the 33-years since its theatrical release, Richard Attenborough’s Cry Freedom (1987) has lost none of its intensity as a scathing indictment of South African Apartheid. Important to note, that dystopian regimes of mass oppression like Apartheid, as well as the extreme brutality and poverty they breed, have not been rid from the earth since the picture’s debut. They have merely gone underground in other parts of the world. And Attenborough, embarking on this opus magnum at age 64, is approaching his subject matter from the perspective of a privileged white liberal - precisely the sort of smug superiority he seeks to expose. In its time, Cry Freedom was Attenborough’s altruistic stab to sober the minds of the American public on a plight to which many remained either modestly naïve or wholeheartedly unaware. And, in retrospect, the picture falls perfectly in line with Hollywood’s ‘then’ affinity for movies extolling the sins of man’s cruel inhumanity to his fellow man, to elevate its virtuous martyrs who have tried, mostly in vain, to change the system; pictures like The Dogs of War (1980), Silkwood (1983), The Killing Fields (1984) The Mission, and, Salvador (both in 1986). For a time, it was fashionable to ‘have a cause’ – and Hollywood, since the mid-1980’s has had as many as a dog does flees.  Indeed, Attenborough had experienced both the impact and prosperity to be reaped from pictorializing social injustice; his Gandhi (1982) not only sweeping the Oscars with a record 11 nominations and 8 wins (including Best Picture), but also ringing registers around the globe; enough for Columbia’s marketing to declare its release ‘a world event’.

The difficulty in Cry Freedom, and likely the reason it absolutely failed to catch the tail fires of this zeitgeist in polarizing picture-making, lay chiefly in the dour affliction of John Briley’s screenplay – based on two autobiographical books by liberal South African newspaper editor, Donald Woods (played in the movie by Kevin Kline). Not for a moment, are we allowed to simply settle into our theater seats and embrace the spectacle; its set pieces, shot in Zimbabwe, a sea of nondescript black faces, chanting peaceably – if passionately – only to be ruthlessly crushed by their oppressors. Attenborough’s movie is book-ended by two unequivocally demoralizing examples of the totalitarian brutalization of its people; the decimation of a displaced populace’s makeshift camp outside the established city walls of Soweto, and, the utterly appalling human waste resulting from a student protest in which more than 700 children and women were mowed down by the heavily militarized South African police.  Between these handsomely mounted, expertly edited sequences, we get the unlikely bromantic chemistry brewing between the aforementioned Wood, and, political activist, Steven Biko (memorably evolved from martyr into man by Denzel Washington), and despite Attenborough’s endeavors to have Biko remain a remote and Christ-like figure, backlit by a blinding reflection of the sun and photographed through dense, languid foliage to obfuscate his full figure – infinitely less impressive than the mirage Attenborough’s camera first presents to us. Washington, fourth billed in the credits, and, denied us the first 20-minutes or so, only to be prematurely expunged by the reality of Biko’s murder, is far more charismatic than any of his counterparts in this movie, save, perhaps, the sadly underrated Josette Simon as Dr. Ramphele – the catalyst to bring Woods and Biko together for their briefly engaged détente.

Yet, for all Attenborough’s prophetization of Biko, Cry Freedom remains a movie rather heavily invested in the re-education of his white, socially-affluent cohort. Thus far, having professed his newspaper’s plight to social justice, Donald Woods is, as yet, embarrassingly naïve and incapable to fully grasp the enormity of atrocities being committed by the iron-fisted regime, only a stone’s throw away from his own idyllic existence. Within the boundaries of this same social structure, Woods and his family have enjoyed the fruits of other’s labors, thus far to have kept the masses in bondage, servitude and poverty, subservient to their status quo. The awakening of Woods’ moral conscience, in spite of his skin color, eventually to defy the only real world of opportunity he has ever known, resulting in his daring exile from South Africa, is at the crux of this picture, and, the real aegis for Attenborough’s inspiration to re-tell the story, presumably dedicated to the liberation of black society, yet through the rubric of white privilege slowly eroded, then stirred to embrace the anthem of the oppressed. The unlikely bond of friendship established between Woods and Biko, seemingly ‘master’ and ‘mate’, steadily evolves into a singular mindset; Woods, the voice of Biko, after his has been silenced.

Though cynically judged at the time of its release as Attenborough’s heavy-handed effort to rekindle the Oscar-worthy buzz and magic of Gandhi, Cry Freedom remains its own monument to a sort of film-maker’s creed, lost to us in the intervening decades. Too many movies since, endeavoring to stand up to racial intolerance have devolved into mere ‘angry’ pictures, arguably, made by ‘even angrier picture-makers’ whose contempt has conquered their artistry as well as their better judgment. Cry Freedom never teeters on this precipice. Its speeches, particularly those espoused by Washington’s Biko, are magnetic and eloquent declarations to liberation, diplomatically achieved, while the lengthy exchanges between Biko and Woods are investigative and educational tomes that never impair the ear, heart or mind. Here, the credit must squarely rest with Washington and Kline who, given exposition to stifle the best of their ilk, instead manage to transform dialogue into edifying debates that stir and propel the plot forward, despite their essential stalemate quality. Movies ensconced in such ‘teachable moments’ since have become far too preachy and thus, far more ‘indoctrinating’ than ‘entertaining’. The contemporary slant is also, likewise, hampered by an inexplicable loss of objectivity, merely to tell a good story pictorially and let the chips fall where they may, allowing the audience to have its own opinion. 

Cry Freedom is the exception to this aforementioned rule - one of many made throughout the 1980’s, a decade that, having lived through it, and, readily to have derived great pleasures – and lessons from it, I now increasingly lean on and regress to on rainy/snowy afternoons or, for a good ‘pick me up’. Yet, Cry Freedom denies me such elevation of the human soul. Its finale is overwhelmingly heart-rending – the repercussions from the secret plan to get Woods and his family out of South Africa so he may live and fight ‘the good fight’ another day, the penultimate pastoral view of those furtive plains from the air as their plane flies off into the clouds, is met with a shocking epitaph set to George Fenton/Jonas Gwangwa’s underscore, capped off by Nkosi Sikelel'iAfrika – the South African national anthem, accompanied by Attenborough’s list of the dead, a document of the ‘mysterious’ tragedies to befall those dedicated to freedom.  While the message of unwarlike reform in Gandhi was telescopically concentrated in the embodiment of Ben Kingsley’s towering central performance, albeit, book-ended by his character’s thought-numbing assassination of the ‘little brown man in sack clothes’, the reformation in South Africa had yet to be achieved at the time Cry Freedom hit theaters. Thus, Attenborough’s defiance of the regime, by augmenting Woods’ crusade, stings of gutsy (dare we even suggest, ‘imperial’) doggedness. However, dividing the cause between Biko and Woods, seen primarily through finally ‘opened’ white eyes, diffuses the point, and, is not, perhaps, the message anyone outside South Africa was, as yet, willing to embrace. As a result, Cry Freedom opened without fanfare or prestige; Attenborough’s David Lean-esque desire to will another epic from the ashes, somehow mislaid on the deaf ears of the public, since to have moved on – or rather, away – from the early decade’s more socially conscious picture-making into pure pop-u-tainments.    

Our story begins with type-set credits and the hellish demolition of a slum in the south-east of the Cape Province. Journalist/editor, Donald Woods seeks more information about the incident and, via his contact with the forthright, Dr. Ramphele, is made an introduction to Steve Biko – a Robin Hood-esque figure, reviled by the authorities as a daring proponent of the Black Consciousness Movement. Banned by the government from leaving King William's Town, Biko nevertheless moves freely about the landscape, protected by his loyalists. While opposed to Biko’s political views, Woods cannot help but believe Biko’s banning is wrong. Biko encourages Woods to spend a night inside the black township, its impoverished hovels in stark contrast to the suburban middle-class affluence enjoyed by Woods, his wife, Wendy (Penelope Wilton), and their children; Jane (Kate Hardie), Dillon (Graeme Taylor), Duncan (Adam Stuart Walker), Gavin (Hamish Stuart Walker), and, Mary (Spring Stuart Walker). Aside: in life, Mrs. Woods was far more politically involved in the cause than Wilton’s placid counterpart in this movie.  After bearing witness to the government’s tyrannical restrictions, constituting the system of apartheid, Woods becomes a strong proponent of Biko’s ambition to declare South Africa free for the native South Africans, pledged with the same opportunities and influences as its white counterpart. As Woods comes to embrace Biko's stance, their friendship blossoms.

After speaking to a cohort of South Africans outside his banishment zone, the rally disguised as a ‘soccer game’, Biko is arrested and interrogated by security forces on the tip-off of an informer. Brought to court to defend himself against the charges, Biko’s address to the white-minority judiciary captivates with his advocacy for non-violent reform.  In retaliation, the police descend upon and destroy the church used by Biko as his base of operation. Woods assures Biko he will appeal the matter, and, true to his word, attends Jimmy Kruger (John Thaw), the South African Minister of Justice, on his estate in Pretoria. Kruger feigns his support, but later, Woods is harassed at his home by security forces, who insinuate their orders come directly from the Minister. Meanwhile, in traveling to Cape Town to speak at a student-run rally, Biko is identified by security forces, arrested and taken to prison where he is severely beaten, resulting in a fatal brain hemorrhage. Shell-shocked by the news of his friend’s death, Woods now endeavors to expose the police brutality, gaining access to photos of Biko’s body that bely the official cause of death as a ‘hunger strike’. Woods, who has been surveyed in his investigation, is now banned from leaving the country. Soon, the entire family is targeted in a campaign of harassment by the security police. Seeking asylum in Great Britain, Woods, disguised as a priest, escapes to the Kingdom of Lesotho, promising Wendy, she and their family will rejoin him later. Aided by Australian journalist, Bruce Haigh (John Hargreaves), the British High Commission in Maseru, and the Government of Lesotho, the family is smuggled out of South Africa and flown to safety under United Nations’ passports – first, to Botswana, then London, where they are granted political asylum.

Cry Freedom is potent picture-making. If it occasionally falters or rests on Attenborough’s laurels for a well-seasoned pictorial drama – wordy, though nevertheless, engrossing – the net result is a movie that continues, chiefly, to stir and inform as few movies about racial intolerance have since. By 1987, Richard Attenborough was an éminence grise on both sides of the Atlantic. As an actor, he had been around since the mid-1950’s. As a director, he would have something more of an uphill climb to maintain this respectability. Indeed, taken in their totality, the movies he directed are a curious lot, beginning with the cynical, Oh, What a Lovely War (1969) and topped off by the introspective WWII melodrama, Closing the Ring (2007). In between, Attenborough achieved great success with Gandhi, but endured the cataclysmic failure of reincarnating Broadway’s legendary show of shows, A Chorus Line with a disastrously leaden 1985 movie adaptation. He also made the poignant mid-life reaffirming romantic/tragedy, Shadowlands (1993), and continued to occasionally crop up in popular fare as diverse as Jurassic Park (1993) and Kenneth Branagh’s all-star adaptation of Hamlet (1996).  Of all these, in tone and artistic temperament, Cry Freedom bears its most striking resemblance to Gandhi. In part, perhaps, this was good enough reason for its’ tepid box office and negative critical response, comparatively misjudged as inferior, pontificating tripe. Yet, Cry Freedom goes well beyond the obvious parallels of socio-political upheaval already addressed by Attenborough’s clear eye in Gandhi. More astutely, both movies are aligned to Attenborough’s then prevailing conviction against colonization. Cribbing from Donald Wood’s novel, John Briley’s screenplay is supremely respectful of the powder keg it is about to detonate, treading lightly – but steadily – and with unflinching resolve that, again, never oversteps its boundaries as an ‘entertainment’. The lesson is therefore presented to anyone with eyes enough to plainly acknowledge. But the journey toward ‘truth’ is peppered in expertly crafted dramatics, even more satisfyingly realized by its two stars, and, buttressed by a level of edifying craftsmanship behind the camera. Ronnie Taylor’s cinematography extols the stark contrast between the lushly tropical white-bred enclaves and the unspeakably grim and unsanitary hovels that surround them.

Cry Freedom’s premise is loosely structured on the true story of Steve Biko. Yet, its core is ethnocentrically focused on Donald Woods’ eventual comprehension of Biko’s humanitarian plight towards all. “When I was a student, trying to qualify for the jobs you people will let us have,” Biko explains to Woods, “I suddenly realized that it wasn't just good jobs that were white. The only history we read is made by the white man, written by the white man; television, cars, medicines - all invented by the white man, even football. It's not hard to believe there's something inferior about being born black.” The most common critical accusation levied against Cry Freedom in 1987 was that it leaned to far, and yet, somehow, not far enough – a pontificating trifle. Yet, it is saying much of Denzel Washington’s performance that, given Biko’s lengthy speeches, Washington never degenerates into angry diatribes. His orations are almost lyrical in tone – Shakespearean even, and capable of riveting the audience to their seats, solely on the strength and spirit of a real freedom fighter’s overriding charisma.  When Washington as Biko addresses the court with “My lord, blacks are not unaware of the hardships they endure or what the government is doing to them. We want them to stop accepting these hardships - to confront them. People must not just give in to the hardship of life. They must find a way, even in these environments to develop hope - hope for themselves, hope for this country. Now, I think that is what black consciousness is all about. Not without any reference to the white man. To try to build up a sense of our own humanity - our legitimate place in the world,” the scene, as well as the courtroom, crackles with a spark of social awareness that is wholly – or rather, seemingly – unrehearsed; the actor’s inner passion counterbalanced by an outward and calming rectitude, not altogether strangely upsetting to the status quo. Biko’s aspirations are so genuine, so undiluted and so fraught with the prospect of achieving social change via compliance, they unsettle the white power structure, seemingly without trying.

Brought before a magistrate on yet another trumped up charge, the judge’s condescending inquiry “Why do you people call yourselves black? You look more brown than black,” is met with poetic disdain as Biko astutely pointed out, “Why do you call yourselves white? You look more pink than white.” The last act of Cry Freedom is a steadily mounted indictment of South Africa’s complicit parliament, of the hypocrisies of institutionalized racism blindly upheld despite its even more transparent injustices as the very benchmark of maintaining ‘law and order’.  Biko’s murder, while propelling the narrative, also leaves the last act of the picture modestly unbalanced. We lose Denzel Washington’s enigmatic screen presence, not altogether compensated for by Kevin Kline’s introspective and understated Donald Woods, a man whose own moral compass has begun to point in the same direction as his deceased friend.  It is perhaps interesting to note, at the time Cry Freedom went before the cameras, neither Washington nor Kline were, as yet, considered stars. Washington had been a regular of TV’s popular ensemble hospital drama, St. Elsewhere (1982-88) while Kline sporadically appeared in such high-profile movies as The Pirates of Penzance and, more notably, The Big Chill (both in 1983). It would take the featherweight English farce, A Fish Called Wanda (1988) to transform Kline’s reputation into that of an easily marketable commodity on both sides of the Atlantic. In retrospect, Cry Freedom launches both actors into their respective stardom.  And yet, Cry Freedom remains an almost forgotten work in both stars’ repertoire – still regarded as a footnote, rather than the movie that brought their talents fully-formed to the attention of the ticket-paying public.

As for the real Donald Woods, after the South African government banned him from publishing articles and made not so subtle threats against him and his family, forcing Woods into exile, Woods picked up Biko’s cause, shining an unflattering spotlight on South Africa’s shadowy autocracy from abroad. In 1978, Woods pressured the world to take notice with his powerful biography: Biko, an exposé that blew the lid off state-sanctioned corruption and the complicity of the police in the activist’s premeditated murder. The book’s publication in Britain, as well as Woods’ autobiography, Asking for Trouble, published that same year, caused an uproar in the United Nations’ Security Council, responding swiftly with an arms embargo against South Africa. The stirring of this pot into a popular zeitgeist also captivated Attenborough and ultimately became the basis for Cry Freedom. Owing to the political volatility in South Africa, principal photography on Cry Freedom commenced in Zimbabwe and Kenya instead, with interiors shot at Shepperton Studios back in England.

In hindsight it remains a genuine pity Cry Freedom was not a commercial success; its $29 million budget dwarfed by its relatively anemic $5,899,797 gross. Apart from the aforementioned performances by Washington and Kline, Cry Freedom is visually arresting. Ronnie Taylor’s cinematography does a very fine job of contrasting the stark poverty of the Soweto ghettos with the plushness of the white neighborhoods, filling the screen with some truly breathtaking natural scenery as Woods and his family make their harrowing sojourn with destiny via a twin-engine plane. George Fenton and Jonas Gwangwa’s organic score is an intoxicating blend of traditional chants and understated film composition, seamlessly blended to achieve an aural verisimilitude that remains the perfect complement. Within a year of Cry Freedom's theatrical release, the scandal that was Apartheid had degenerated into a global embarrassment for its government, altering South Africa’s political landscape and serving as a precursor for the release of imprisoned patriot, Nelson Mandela. Viewed today, Cry Freedom serves as a memorable time capsule of a very unflattering moment in history, one – alas, that has not abated in other parts of the world. And while the critics were quick to point out that the story being told is very much more about Woods than Biko, Attenborough’s verve for telling a tale, essentially a cause celebre for the free peoples of the world to stand tall/stand together, is an enduring message of solidarity among the masses we can all continue to embrace, regardless of color, creed or sexual orientation.

Cry Freedom has finally arrived on Blu-ray via Kino Lorber’s alliance with Universal Home Video and, for the most part, the results here are immensely satisfying. For decades the movie has existed on only VHS and DVD in horrendously awful letter-boxed editions, with so much video distortion, DNR and lack of preservation applied, the movie remained virtually ‘unwatchable’ in either of those formats – perhaps, part of the reason it has also remained unseen by the public in the 30-plus years since its theatrical debut. Well, it is time to set aside those years, as Kino’s new to Blu looks very impressive indeed. Colors are rich and enveloping. A few shots still appear soft or fuzzy, with a modicum of film grain that looks artificially amplified to my eyes. But this represents a handful of anomalies in an otherwise flawless presentation of an almost 3-hr. epic and accurately reproduces the visual splendor in Ronnie Taylor’s cinematography Color reproduction is excellent. Ditto for contrast. Age-related artifacts are non-existent. The opening credits suffer from some minor edge effects. There are other edge effects that crop up sporadically throughout this presentation, though never to distracting levels. The 5.1 DTS audio sounds excellent, if dated by 1980’s recording techniques. Kino has shelled out for a comprehensive audio commentary by historian, Eddy Von Mueller, who speaks eloquently and at length about virtually every aspect of the movie and the civil/political unrest on which it is based: an exceptionally fine addendum to the movie. There are also trailers for this and other Kino product starring Kevin Kline. Bottom line: Cry Freedom is a powerful, affecting and socially aware picture deserving of our renewed respect. The Blu-ray, if not perfect, is not all that far off the mark. Very highly recommended.

FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)

4

VIDEO/AUDIO

4

EXTRAS

1