The Gods Must Be Crazy

There are surprise box-office hits and there is this family movie (and its sequel) which can be described as what might have emerged had Benny Hill decided to make a movie with the Leyland Brothers – a light slapstick documentary-cum-narrative fiction without cleavage but a couple of upskirts gags.

Whilst the story, generally speaking involving a contrast between primitive African society and civilized Western society, is, depending on your viewpoint, either charmingly or ingenuously naive, it goes on too long, the low production values and lack of visual style offers little by way of compensation and the English dialogue is dubbed, giving the film an even more expedient quality than it already has.The film didn’t receive international release until 1985 but then it was an enormous world-wide hit.

For all its limitations its heart is in the right place so all power to Jamie Uys who also wrote and produced it and appears as the missionary. In typical fashion its sequel, The Gods Must Be Crazy II (1989) which had a similar production history, re-works the original premise with, if you really haven’t had enough with the original, comparable rewards.

DVD Extras: There’s an interesting short documentary which visits the home of the film’s main character, the Kalahari bushman, N!xou in 1990 and again in 2003, shortly before his death from tuberculosis. Sadly the 1990 visit shows just how far the reality of the Bushmen’s lives is from the Roussean idyll portrayed by Uys (glowing recalled by his cinematographer Buster Reynolds on the sequel’s DVD edition). Thankfully by 2003 things have improved although, ironically, Coca Cola is well established.

 

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