A Dry White Season
Euzhan Palcy (1989)
Throughout the opening titles, two adolescent boys play ball or good-naturedly wrestle on the lush lawns of a large suburban house. One boy is white, the other Black, the sun is shining, the boys are happy. We can guess their smiles will soon disappear – especially if we know that A Dry White Season is set in South Africa during the apartheid era. The Black boy is Jonathan Ngubene (Bekhithemba Mpofu); his white playmate is Johan du Toit (Rowen Elmes). The well-kept lawns of this Johannesburg home are the work of Jonathan’s father Gordon (Winston Ntshona), the gardener employed by Johan’s parents, Ben (Donald Sutherland) and Susan (Janet Suzman). When they’re not together, the two boys play different ball games. Johan’s parents are on the touchline, cheering on their son in his (all-white, of course) school rugby team. Jonathan and his Black mates kick a soccer ball round the dusty streets of the Soweto township.
Plenty happens within the first half hour or so of Euzhan Palcy’s drama, based on André Brink’s novel of the same name. South African police open fire on the Black schoolchildren protesting in Soweto at being forced to learn in Afrikaans. (Approaching 200 children are thought to have died in the massacre of 16 June 1976.) Jonathan is arrested and vanishes without trace. Gordon, desperate to find his son, is also arrested, tortured and murdered by a police team led by Captain Stolz (Jürgen Prochnow). Ben du Toit, who teaches history in the same school where his son’s a pupil, trusts the police implicitly and so declines to help Gordon in his search for Jonathan. When Gordon disappears, Ben starts to think again and to see the light of what’s going on in his country – a process of enlightenment that occupies the remainder of the film. His efforts to secure justice for Gordon cost Ben du Toit his job, his marriage and eventually his life.
The subject of the film, when it was made and by whom, combine to guarantee A Dry White Season a great deal of audience goodwill. It was released in autumn 1989, a few weeks after F W de Klerk became South African president, a few months before Nelson Mandela was released from prison on Robben Island. In making this film, Euzhan Palcy, a thirty-year-old Martinican, became the first Black woman to direct a feature produced by a major Hollywood studio (MGM). You also admire Afrikaner André Brink’s courage in writing the source material when he did: Brink’s novel was first published (though initially banned in South Africa) only three years after Soweto[1]. Yet this isn’t enough to blind you – at least at this distance in time – to the film’s huge dramatic defects, its clumsy plotting and moralising.
This was the sophomore feature from Euzhan Palcy, who made her debut with Sugar Cane Alley in 1983 (and has made only one subsequent feature, a 1992 musical called Siméon). Palcy also shares the screenplay credit for A Dry White Season, with Colin Welland. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether script or direction is the bigger problem; in either case, things go from bad to worse. The du Toits’ family celebrations round the Christmas tree are interrupted by the unexpected arrival of taxi driver Stanley Mokhaya (Zakes Mokae), a Black activist with whom Ben has been working closely. Stanley’s a bit drunk; insults are exchanged between him and Susan’s father (David de Keyser). Stanley has come to the house to break the news to Ben that Emily (Thoko Ntshinga), the broken-hearted widow of Gordon and mother of Jonathan, is now dead, too. The ruckus is enough not only for Ben’s scandalised in-laws to leave but also for Susan du Toit to pack a suitcase and walk out on her husband, there and then. She takes their virulently racist daughter Suzette (Susannah Harker) with her although loyal Johan insists on staying with his father. At this point in the narrative, the abominable scene seems an aberration. By the end of the story, a succession of melodramatic sequences – Johan delivers his father’s secret documents to crusading journalist Melanie Bruwer (Susan Sarandon) to publish, Stolz’s car runs Ben over, Stanley shoots Stolz dead in revenge – means the Christmas episode no longer stands out as badly conceived and staged.
The characters are mostly so thinly written that there’s not much the actors can do. In the case of Janet Suzman’s Susan, this is frustrating. In the case of, for example, Richard Wilson, who plays the headmaster at the school where Ben teaches, it’s a relief he’s not on screen more: in his first scene, Wilson doesn’t even try to cloak his Victor Meldrew voice in a South African accent; in his next scene, he does. It wouldn’t be fair to say that Jürgen Prochnow gives a bad performance, yet slack editing makes it look as though he does: Stolz’s gimlet-eyed glares always go on a beat too long. The main problem, though, is Donald Sutherland. In Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), Sutherland was cast against physical and temperamental type as a brutal Blackshirt. His portrait, such as it was, amounted to crude censure of the character’s politics. In the lead in A Dry White Season, Sutherland is worse. If Ben were bluff and hearty at the start his radicalisation might have impact. Donald Sutherland exudes liberal conscience – so much so that you never believe Ben du Toit would have lived comfortably with apartheid until its atrocities struck close to home.
Despite all this, A Dry White Season is worth seeing (I’d always meant to see it but never had until now) – and for what the film is best remembered for. It features what by general consent is Marlon Brando’s last great performance (though he appeared in several more films before his death in 2004). As Ian McKenzie, a high-profile progressive lawyer whom Ben persuades to represent the Ngubene family at the inquest into Gordon’s death, Brando has only two scenes and can’t be on screen for more than ten minutes all told. The first scene is a private meeting between Ben and McKenzie; the second is the court inquest. It’s true that, thanks to André Brink or the screenwriters or both, Brando has the script’s juiciest lines but to say he makes the most of them is an understatement. In both scenes, he does a brilliant job of grounding McKenzie’s witty sarcasm in deeply bitter yet controlled hatred of the legal system of which he’s part. When Ben naively says he wants justice for Gordon, McKenzie replies that the ‘distant cousins’ justice and law are, in South Africa, ‘not on speaking terms at all’. When Ben mentions the ‘many cases in support of human rights’ that McKenzie has won, the latter regretfully disagrees because ‘Every time I win a case, they simply change the law’. At the inquest the presiding magistrate (Michael Gambon) is as blatantly parti pris as McKenzie’s legal opponent (Ronald Pickup) and lying-through-his-teeth Captain Stolz in the witness box. As a result, it’s not easy to believe Ian McKenzie managed to win cases even before the law was changed to ensure no repeat. But for every moment he’s in the film, Marlon Brando doesn’t just transcend A Dry White Season. He transforms it.
22 June 2026
[1] The book takes its title from a ‘struggle poem’ by Mongane Wally Serote, lines from which Brink uses as an epigraph: ‘it is a dry white season/dark leaves don’t last, their brief lives dry out/and with a broken heart they dive down gently to the earth/not even bleeding …’