saying goodbye to poor sabu
by
Douglas Messerli
Ian Iqbal Rashid (writer and director) Surviving Sabu / 1997
The Mysore Indian-born actor Sabu (born Selar Sabu in 1924, also known as Sabu Dastagir) was a beautiful child star whose career began at the age of 13 when he was discovered by director Robert Flaherty and cast as Rudyard Kipling’s Toomai in Elephant Boy. directed by Flaherty and Alexander Korda, the latter of whom would also direct Sabu in The Drum (1938) and the hit movie The Thief of Bagdad (1940) when the boy was 16 years of age. Roles in Korda’s Jungle Boy, another Kipling-inspired film, and John Rawlins’ Arabian Nights, both from 1942 followed, locking him into career as a figure in works of high exoticism, which, after World War II would result in his performance mostly in grade B movies, both British and American, for the rest of his life.
At the age of 20 Sabu became a United
States citizen and served in the Army Air Force as a tail gunner and ball
turret gunner on B-24 Liberators.
In 1947 he performed, at age 23, in what
his last and greatest high-quality film as the Young General Dilip Rai in what
was perhaps the most exotic and erotic film of them all, The Black
Narcissus,
directed by Korda’s own “discovery,” British filmmaker Michael Powell, who described
Sabu as having a “wonderful grace” about him.
A year later Sabu married Marilyn Cooper
whom he met on the set of Song of India. They had a son, Paul, who later
established the band Only Child which created big hits for David Bowie, Alice
Cooper, Madonna, Prince, and many others (“Cassie’s Song,” “Just for the
Moment,” “New Girl in Town,” etc.)
Sabu’s career opportunities, once the
beautiful boy had came of age, mostly evaporated. In 1950 a fire to the
second story of his family home in Hollywood was tried as a case of arson, but
may have actually been arranged by Sabu himself in order to receive insurance
money which he needed to help his family financially survive. He died, at age
39, of a heart attack, only two days after a checkup with a doctor who
reportedly had told him: "If all my patients were as healthy as you, I
would be out of a job.”
Ian Iqbal Rashid’s remarkable short
fictional documentary of 1997 begins with an Indian man relating the early
cinema days of the legendary child actor Sabu in what his son will soon
describe, interrupting the narration, as a “Prince of Wales” voice. We catch
quick glimpses of Sabu performing in Elephant Boy and The Thief of
Bagdad.
Suddenly the film shifts to black-and-white, where we see the British-sounding man’s son smoking a cigarette on the street and, seeing his father (Suresh Oberoi) walking toward their house, calls out to him, the father refusing to respond. Inside the walls and shelves are lined with photographs of the young Sabu, a copy of Life perhaps of the time of Sabu’s marriage, etc. The color “documentary” continues, while we witness more clips from Sabu’s films:
Sabu found fame and
fortune in Hollywood. Still only as a
teenager, Sabu was
living the life that most immigrants to
the West could only
dream of. When my son was a boy I’d
make him watch Sabu’s
films on television. I’d allow him to
stay up late. It was important he
should know we can succeed
in the countries. That
it’s possible.
In the kitchen, soon after or at another
time (again filmed in black-and-white) we see the father preparing a full
Indian dinner, the son, having brought him a tape of Indian music with jazz
infusions, the father responding, “Fusion or confusion.” Asked if he is staying
for dinner, Amin responds he’s got an appointment with his psychiatrist. He’s
stressed. Besides, the son soon reminds his elder that he doesn’t eat wheat,
dairy, meat. “All the things you said were for us when I was a kid, they’re
not.” We notice he’s wearing a T-shirt which sports the words “Gay and Lesbian
Center,” something which obviously has stressed his Muslim father as well.
Again through a color-film sequence, we
see the son recounting his father’s experiences of having come to England to be
a policeman, but after being refused year after year worked as a security
guard, proud of what he does, proud of being loyal.
At another meeting in the kitchen, where
the father is fixing dinner, Amin announces that he needs to talk to his father
about something, the elder responding, “You’ve decided to meet a nice Muslim
girl and give us all a reason to live?” The son has shown the movie to some
“important people” who are interested if only they can finish it. Yet his
father finally responds that he doesn’t think he should be making a film about
Sabu. “You are not worthy. ...You’re making fun of a great Hollywood star.”
The son’s response says nearly everything
that represents their vastly different conceptions of the world which they
cohabit: “Hollywood star! He was a colonialist fantasy. Those films dad, they
look at Sabu with a colonizers gaze.”
“Why make a film” his father protests, “about
someone you despise?”
When we return to the description of Sabu, his golden almost nude body spread out in the sand we might almost imagine that the narrator was speaking to us from the pages of a gay physique magazine rather than the father’s front room:
Sabu had an unnatural
natural beauty. Such a beautiful body.
A muscular athletic
physique. [In the clip, Subu turns over
to reveal the front of his
body] I told my son, look at Sabu’s
body, that he should
exercise and himself look like Sabu. But
he was always reading his
books and playing with his dolls
and singing songs. Never interested in exercise.
Clearly
if, as the son argues, Sabu was seen through the colonizer’s gaze, so also has
his father and others seen him through a queer gaze.
Again back in the kitchen (in black and
white) the son continues: “You know the way you talk about him...it’s almost
like.... Those movies filmed him like he was a woman. And you bought into it!”
The resultant anger ends in the father
hurling back his own insults at his son’s admiration of white boys.
At another moment during the filming, in
which the father has momentarily escaped to the backyard, they talk about
Sabu’s death. “Poor Sabu. Died so young,” the father looking over at his son
smoking a cigarette, “probably smoked. Anyway he wasn’t a Muslim.”
Amin responds: “I don’t think it was
smoking. I think he was probably crushed by a film industry that rejected him
when he became an adult. He couldn’t get any decent work. Gave up hope. ....It was about racism dad, a Paki leading
man kissing a white woman on the screen. It was never going to happen.”
The father finally at his wit’s end,
storms out. “When I get back I want all of you out of my house.”
In Rashid’s film, we have come to
perceive, Sabu is but a symbol of all that one generation perceives as a
continuation of the racism and denigration of outsiders about a culture that
the previous generation could not admit if they were to survive and succeed to
the best of their abilities. In this short film we see not just the generations
clashing against their different perceptions about moral values, work ethics,
and sexuality, but facing off in a directional shift in the entire course of
history: for Amin’s father every patient step on his part was a movement
forward, a small act of progress that could lead ultimately to assimilation,
while for Amin everything is turned around, having never resulted in
significant change the hope to which his parents’ generation had been committed
has shifted into a despair for what Amin and his friends see as movements into
the past of discrimination and outright hate for anything that stands outside
of ruling society’s normative cultural patterns. The two of them view the world
from entirely different perspectives.
Yet, in this director’s amazing short
work, father and son each are able to turn around and see one another from the
other’s viewpoint, which brings them back to life, away from their frozen
stares into the future and past, into the present:
Amin’s father speaks: “When he was
growing up, I tried not to talk to him much about the past, about back home. I
thought I should focus on the future, tell him what he didn’t know about this
place. Instead he told me.”
In antiphon Amin speaks: “He left
Uganda* with no money. He started from scratch. He rebuilt his life. He had
courage. How did he do it? It couldn’t just have been so his son might have a
better life. It just couldn’t.”
The father realizes now that when
Peter Sellars and other actors rubbed a chocolate-covered makeup across their
face, everyone laughed. “They were laughing at me.”
Amin speaks of the time when he first told his
father that he was gay, recalling the look upon his face, realizing, “He’d have
swapped me for anyone. Anyone else’s son.”
And the night he told us he was gay,
his father recalls, he stayed over that night, wanting everything to be all
right: “That took courage.”
Returning to the house, Amin finds
his father watching a Sabu film and joins him on the couch, the two quoting in
unison a line about Mogli from Sabu’s Jungle Boy. The elder agrees to
finish the last few frames of his son’s film with him, remarking that he will
be all right with whatever his director son presents in this movie. His
philosophy he says is “Relax, it’s only a film. What harm can a film do?” If
his question appears to offer a true reconciliation, it also belies the truth
that language, story, and image are the most terrifyingly powerful things in
life.
*Director Ian Iqbal Rashid was born in Tazania, from where his family, after being refused asylum in the United Kingdom and the US, settled in Canada, Rashid finally moving to London as an adult. Rashid has made other films, including the gay comedy Touch of Pink, but is best known in England for his poetry.
Los Angeles, January 2, 2021
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema and World Cinema Review (January 2021).
No comments:
Post a Comment