A look inside Hollywood and the movies. : TOWNSHIP TALK : The Big Question in South Africa: How Did ‘Sarafina!’ Play in Pretoria?

Any fears of white backlash were erased when “Sarafina!,” a hard-hitting musical targeting South Africa’s apartheid policy, opened in that country earlier this month.

The reviews were excellent (one critic called the film “an achievement that should, at last, put South African cinema on the international map”). The film, which stars Leleti Khumalo and Whoopi Goldberg, did business even in relatively right-wing white areas such as Pretoria and Bloemfontein. And, for the first time, the release of a South African movie--one of the few to present the situation from a black point of view--was a truly “national” one: Theaters in the black township of Soweto were showing the movie at the same time as those in Durban or Johannesburg.

Spirits were further buoyed by the fact that the movie had the highest opening weekend per-screen average of any South African film ever, and 2 1/2 times that of Richard Attenborough’s 1987 “Cry Freedom,” which tackled the country’s political powder keg from the vantage point of a white journalist. Word of mouth must have been strong because, instead of the usual box-office drop, attendance actually increased during weekend No. 2.

A few weeks before, however, “Sarafina!” producer Anant Singh received a phone call from a police higher-up--a grim reminder that, legal reforms notwithstanding, freedom will be slow in coming. Based on the trailer, he was informed, the movie may have violated a prohibition against replicating the uniforms or depicting officers in an uncomplimentary way. Singh turned down his request for a special screening, advising him to shell out his money like everyone else. But after talking to his lawyer who feared the film would be banned, Singh ultimately reneged.

“I stayed away because I thought maybe they’d take me, then and there,” recalls Singh, a third-generation Indian who had been arrested several times before for his film involvement. “To my surprise, they said the police had been accurately depicted . . . maybe because they were shown as menacing instead of as fools. I guess the film brought back nostalgic memories. Those, after all, were their good old days.”

The Sept. 22 premiere that followed, Singh recalls, was a definite “up” as a racially mixed crowd of 1,500 packed Johannesburg’s Kine Center.

“(African National Congress leader Nelson) Mandela stood on the stage with Leleti, who was dressed in the Mandela suit she wore in the ‘Freedom Is Coming Tomorrow’ dance sequence on screen,” Singh says. “In the film, Sarafina had fantasized about Mandela’s release and for that moment, at least, her dream . . . and reality . . . had come together.”

The creators of “Sarafina!” felt vindicated when the movie snagged the prize for best picture, director (for Darrell James Roodt), sound, screenplay and a special prize for music at the annual film awards given out by M-NET--the South African pay-TV network, which had turned down Singh’s request to finance the film. But producer Danny Schechter, who attended the premiere, says the audience reaction was qualified.

“Some people found the film a bit simplistic and outdated,” said Schechter, vice president of Globalvision and creator of the former PBS series “South Africa Now.” “With all the violence and despair (in South Africa) these days, people feel distanced from those hopeful demonstrations it portrays. As one high-level member of the ANC commented to me, Sarafina should not have thrown away the AK-47 at the end. Getting rid of that symbol of resistance suggests that the struggle is over.”

Singh takes on the critics. “Certain people do find the movie simplistic, but we’ve always believed the film can stand on its own, irrespective of what happened politically,” he says. “People encouraged us to contemporize ‘Sarafina!’ when Mandela was released, but we felt it was wrong to play with it. Throwing away the gun was a way of showing that violence isn’t the answer and was a dramatic turning point in Sarafina’s development.”

No stranger to conflict, Singh found himself face to face with the U.S. Establishment as well. A week before the release date, the ratings board of the Motion Picture Assn. of America suggested that because of certain graphic sequences, the film might receive a restrictive R designation. A PG-13 classification was ultimately awarded after a negotiated settlement.

In early October, the city of Dallas called the film “too violent for children under 16” and labeled a scene in which a constable kicks a black youth as “sadistic” and “perverted.” That rating, too, was ultimately reversed.

“It was very ironic,” the producer notes. “I’ve been fighting censorship in South Africa for years only to come up against it in (the United States).”