I fondly remember those Christmases past when my nan would say to me “Oo, I hate comedy, it’s not funny”. I’d look perplexed and say, ‘so what DO you like nan?’. She’d say, “I like Zulu”. Admittedly not a funny film, even when Michael Caine says, ‘we must have got 60 of them!’ and Ardendorf replies ‘Well, that leaves only 3,940 then!’. But I do miss my old nan, Cetshwayo Mbeki Walter Sisulu u Suthu Smedley. Sadly, she’s not with us anymore. And the key tip there is putting a sign in the door saying, ‘Gone to Skegness’. That keeps them away.
But Christmas with or without family we often turn to the TV. If you don’t have family and friends, you can watch old familiar films and be reassured that life goes on. Never mind little town of Bethlehem and While Shepherds Watched, we remember ‘I was playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order’ and ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ and our childhoods are still with us.
Happy
One of my favourite film scenes, and it was on again this Christmas, is the dance-off in West Side Story where the Puerto Rican gang does Latin samba, and the American gang does rock and jive. You’re meant to think ‘gosh these will NEVER get on with each other’ but I just think ‘Brilliant what a fine example of intercultural diversity’. That said the opening scenes where the Sharks and the Jets are provoking each other with racist taunts, violent attacks and intolerant abuse…expressed through the medium of contemporary dance and ballet..is something we should maybe try out on our modern street gangs. Never mind more Police, what we want is choreographers and balletic flashmobs on our streets.
New
The Magnificent Seven, another great film challenging racial intolerance as Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen drive the hearse of a native American up Boot Hill against the grunts of disapproval from the town racists. Great solidarity from the boys there. Only, in real life Brynner and McQueen hated each other and throughout the film constantly tried to upstage each other. Have a look every time the camera has a close up on Yul, Steve will be tilting his hat jauntily in the same shot. And Yul, somewhat shorter than Steve, often resorted to making mounds of earth to stand on to gain those extra inches, which Steve would then kick away when he wasn’t looking. At least they all united in the end. And shot up the Mexicans.
Year
I was interviewed once for the radio and asked what my favourite film of all time was. Trying hard not to say ‘Zulu’ I said ‘Casablanca’. Which is the classic film for solving moral dilemmas, choosing good over evil and concluding maybe fascism wasn’t such a good idea. The scene where Czech resistance fighter Victor Lazlo gets the band to play ‘La Marseillaise’ to drown out the Nazis singing ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ is made even more poignant when you learn the actors playing the French in the 1942 film were refugees who had been forced out of France by the Nazis. Humphrey Bogart finally makes the right choice (the Nazis are….’the baddies’) and as he helps the woman he loves escape with Lazlo to continue la resistance and looks at her and says, ‘We’ll always have Highbridge’. Or something similar,
So, these are just a few moral choices we all have to make. And Christmas always brings this into focus as we take stock of the year gone by, what we did, didn’t do and maybe should have done. Then think about the year ahead. And 2025 looks like throwing up a few more choices for us all.
Jabulela Unyaka Omusha!