The 1950s has become a genre all of its own. Hollywood obliged us to pay attention to the period, not only with Doris Day, Richard Widmark and other bland representations of the time. It also turned out some classics, such as the movie versions of West Side Story and Guys and Dolls, and gritty, witty evergreens like Some Like it Hot, the movie which proved that Marylin Monroe was not just a piece of dyed blonde fluff, but could actually act as well. There was also Cabin in the Sky with Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway, and general, self-deprecating Negro buffoonery such as all the ”Stepin’ Fetchit” films.
The point is that movies made in that period gave you the feel of the times, and continue to be your benchmark for what the era was like.
South Africa hopped on the bandwagon of the period too, with movies like Come Back Africa, Jim comes to Joburg, the Magic Garden and so on. And then there was the music, the style of dress, the mile-long gangster Cadillacs with their tsotsi fins, the Florsheim shoes, the ”live-fast-die-young” braggadocio, all intertwined with the desperate struggle to survive. There were also the politicians, the white cops in their Chevrolets, the municipal policemen known as ”Black Jacks”, the duck tails, the inappropriate bouffant hair dos, and Jewish girls swooning in the front row when Sonny Pillay, a skinny Indian fellow up from Durban, sang My Yiddishe Mama live at the Avalon Cinema.
Then there was Drum magazine. Drum became a legend in its own lifetime because, tumbling out of the mouths of its black writers and elegantly shaped by their clattering typewriters into columns of news-print and black-and-white photographs, it articulated an exciting and turbulent period — history unfolding in real time, and the arrogant confidence of a sidelined urban Africa that kept on making the point that it could not be suppressed. Sounds like a great theme for a movie.
Zola Maseko’s Drum, finally being shown in South Africa at last, after strutting its stuff in Toronto and London (a whiff of trepidation about bringing the new girlfriend home to meet the parents, perhaps?) presumably sets out to capture all of this.
Does it work? I have to register an interest here. The times and the characters portrayed all seem very intimate to me, so I’m going to be a hard audience to please in any case. (Okay, I’ll say it: making Todd Matshikiza look like nothing more than a startled rabbit without an intelligent word to say for himself is a pretty poor start. But let’s not get stuck there.)
Maseko’s argument has always been that this is his interpretation of the times — telling it the way he understands it.
But something has gone desperately awry here. Of course, we all interpret experiences outside of ourselves the way we understand them. But that, for me, is the problem with Drum: How deep is the author’s understanding?
(There is another problem here — what you see on the screen is not even Maseko’s own handiwork, but a screenplay that has done all the rounds a screenplay does for the movie to get on to the screen so that it finally ends up, in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase, as ”Hollywood’s peculiar ability to milk the cow and the goat at the same time and then to peddle the results as ginger ale”.)
Maseko privately agrees that, to get the movie made at all, he was finally obliged to sup with the Hollywood devil. The inevitable result of this choice, as Dr Faustus could have told him if he’d bothered to give him a call, is that you end up seeing everything from the devil’s point of view. No one can tell where your own soul is at anymore.
The film credits close with the disclaimer that all the characters portrayed are fictional and bear no resemblance to persons living, dead, the standard Hollywood legal get out clause when you know that you have gone too far. Why, then, are real characters and real, documented situations used to tell the story? If Maseko had used a rough outline of the times to truly fictionalise an extraordinary period (in the way it was done with Some Like it Hot, for example) we might have been able to sit back dispassionately and judge his film strictly from the point of view of art. But it ain’t like that.
Which leaves you cheated of having any frame of reference. Is it art, is it a history lesson, or is it politics masquerading as light entertainment? Well, ja, nee. All of the above. I could be wrong, but it seems to me to fall into Baldwin’s category of ginger ale. But, as I say, I could be wrong.
Hollywood actor Taye Diggs (the devil’s choice) fails to get anywhere near the profound spirit of Henry Nxumalo. Jason Fleming, in the rolled-up, portmanteau role of Anthony Sampson/Jim Bailey, doesn’t begin to get close to the eccentric genius of these people, but rather plays him as a middle of the road barking bulldog from Balham. And so on and so forth.
If there is anything to be said in the film’s favour, it must be about the sensitive portrayal of Moshidi Motshegwa as Nxumalo’s long-suffering wife Florence, and especially Bonginkosi Dlamini’s tough, in-your-face, uncompromising gangster Alpheus. (This blazing performance should get an Oscar all of its own.)
The rest is as far from the truth as you can get without actually getting into a space rocket.
Drum is opening the Cape Town World Cinema Festival on November 12 at 7pm at the Opera House, Artscape. Tickets cost R60