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The Man Who Drove With Mandela
UK/USA/South Africa 1998
Reviewed by Kieron Corless
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, the present. President Mandela revisits the spot where he and Cecil Williams, a white homosexual freedom fighter, were arrested in 1962. Williams grew up in Cornwall, UK, but moved to Johannesburg in 1928. He became a Communist and a schoolteacher, switching to journalism during World War Two. After the war, he entered the theatre and joined the Springbok Legion, an anti-fascist organisation with no colour bar. Williams deployed his considerable public speaking and street-fighting skills during elections but the Nationalists took power, passing the notorious pass laws. The Springbok Legion was forced underground. Although Williams experienced a severe gay-bashing, his political colleagues generally turned a blind eye to his homosexuality.
Apartheid was vigorously implemented during the 50s but Williams found ways to work regularly with black actors. Resistance to the pass laws gradually gained momentum, culminating in the Sharpeville massacre in March 1960. Numerous activists were jailed and Mandela left the country to raise international support for the liberation struggle. Williams was selected to pick Mandela up at the border to smuggle him back into the country, disguised as Williams' chauffeur. Williams' decision to share the driving raised suspicions and they were arrested. Williams was released the next day but, facing prolonged house arrest, decided to leave the country. He settled in London where he died in 1979.
Review
"What kind of a white guy is this?" wonders actor Corney Mabaso at one point, referring with bemused affection to Cecil Williams, the man in the car with Mandela the day he was arrested. Twenty years after his death, director Greta Schiller and writer Mark Gevisser set out to answer this question and recover Williams from the margins of South African history. They achieve this through an intricate mapping of the political and sexual landscape of cosmopolitan 50s Johannesburg. Flamboyant homosexual, ANC activist, prominent theatre director and dandified bon viveur - the morally courageous, chameleon Englishman Williams lived right at the seething hub of his era, never far from danger, intrigue and the next cocktail party. The film deftly knits together Williams' compartmentalised lives, negotiating these distinct social worlds with the same surefooted verve as its louche protagonist.
Paris Was a Woman, Schiller's previous film, was a similarly multi-textured collage of period footage and interviews. Here, the interspersal of dramatic monologues, drawing on Williams' own writings, provides the principal development and is reminiscent of Mark Rappaport's moving film From the Journals of Jean Seberg. It was a brave decision to use this device, but it's not entirely successful here. Shot on a stylised, theatrically lit set, these fragments permit insights into this complex man's emotional conflicts and contradictions. But in view of recurrent testimony to Williams' charm, wit and forcefulness ("He was teaching us to be assertive," recalls one black performer), we rarely see those qualities in Corin Redgrave's stagy, often wistful soliloquising.
The film's real strength lies in its unfailingly precise selection of vivid anecdotes and archive material, interwoven to evoke the man and the times with illuminating immediacy. One ravishingly colourful home movie depicts frolicking white theatre types camping it up on the beach. Black men conscripted into the Army, meanwhile, were learning drill with spears rather than guns which they weren't allowed even in battle. An ex-pupil at one of South Africa's exclusive government schools where Williams taught recounts his sublime response to the boys' standing to attention as he entered the classroom - "Sit down you fucking little fascists." Time and again, interviewees illustrate with humour and a real sense of kinship the invisible threads of influence connecting Williams to those whose lives he touched. Issues such as interracial gay sex and freedom fighters' often antediluvian views on homosexuality are not glossed over but treated with glancingly penetrating insight. It's a meticulously researched, quietly powerful piece of historical excavation, finally according an unsung hero his rightful place in the South African pantheon.
Credits
- Producers
- Greta Schiller
- Mark Gevisser
- One Man Show sequence:
- Simon Allen
- Screenplay
- Mark Gevisser
- Directors of Photography
- Michelle J. Crenshaw
- One Man Show sequence:
- Tania Hoser
- Editor
- Prisca Swan
- Production Designer
- One Man Show sequence:
- Sheba Phombeah
- Music
- Philip Miller
- ©Jezebel Productions and Beulah Films
- Production Companies
- Produced by Jezebel Productions in association with Beulah Films for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (USA)/Channel 4 (UK), in association with The London Production Fund/The British Film Institute/SABC 3 (South
- Africa)/AVRO (Netherlands)/VRT-Canvas (Belgium)
- This film was made possible in part by a grant from the South African Department of Arts, Culture, Science and Technology
- Executive Producer
- Indra de Lanerolle
- Line Producers
- Andrea Weiss
- Meryl Schutte
- Production Co-ordinator
- One Man Show sequence:
- Stéphane Jaggers
- Project Co-ordinator
- Gay Oral History:
- Graeme Reid
- Researchers
- Mark Gevisser
- Additional:
- Sharon Cort
- David Marinus
- Karen Martin
- Ruth Morgan
- Tom Swart
- Assistant Directors
- One Man Show sequence:
- Simon Allen
- Eyal Shaphyr
- Script Supervisor
- One Man Show sequence:
- Gabriella Romano
- Archive Photographers
- Henner Frankenfeld
- Naashon Zalk
- Rostrum
- King Camera
- Art Director
- One Man Show sequence:
- Anna-Maria James
- Costume Designer
- One Man Show sequence:
- Jason Gill
- Wardrobe
- Documentary sequence:
- Enrique Swart
- Hair/Make-up
- One Man Show sequence:
- Dawn Miller
- Titles
- Litza Jansz
- Opticals
- Screen Opticals
- Musicians
- Cello:
- Daniel Neal
- Double Bass:
- Zoltan Kovats
- Piano:
- Philip Miller
- Vocals:
- Vulimsi Mdluli
- Soundtrack
- "Life Could Not Better Be" by Sammy Cahn, Sylvia Fine, performed by Danny Kaye; "Civilization (Bongo Bongo Bongo)" by Bob Hilliard, Carl Sigman, performed by Danny Kaye and the Andrews Sisters; "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)" by Jay Livingston, Ray Evans, performed by Doris Day; "Mayibuye" by/performed by Vusi Mahlasela
- Sound
- Documentary sequence:
- Gita Cerveira
- Maggie Ellis
- One Man Show sequence:
- Maggie Ellis
- Dubbing Editor
- Richard Dunford
- Dubbing Mixer
- Steve Haynes
- Historical Consultant
- Rica Hodgson
- Cast
- One Man Show sequence
- Corin Redgrave
- Cecil Williams
- documentary sequence
- Joseph Bale
- Nelson Mandela
- Gavin Hayward
- man entering flat
- Robert Tsiesi
- basket carrier
- Ashley Brownlee
- white man on beach Adnaan Bassier
- black man on beach Clinton Smith
- Riaan Velloen
- thugs
- Robert Whitehead
- man in lobby
- Certificate
- tbc
- Distributor
- Jane Balfour Films Limited
- tbc feet
- tbc minutes
- Dolby
- In Colour