A bygone era: The golden age of photo comics and bioscope

Teenagers and adults, black and white, ordinary folk, not often the upper crust, read them voraciously and they were everywhere to be found. It was a folksy — at times titillating and bizarre — heritage ranging from sentimental doctor-nurse love stories, to crude heroes and heroines having the most ridiculous adventures imaginable. At its height the Durban-based Republican Press alone was printing 20 different photo comic issues a month, averaging about 30 000 unit sales per issue. That’s 600 000 unit sales every month.

The photo comics characters

Shot on various locations in Durban, some of the actors then were locals sourced in Durban’s white working-class neighbourhoods. Appearance fees for them were negligible. The male actors were generally eccentric, hard-living womanisers, according to Ron Roderik, a retired executive from the now defunct Republican Press, quoted in the book The evolution of African pulp fiction, by Sean O’Toole.

Not all the photo comics were, for want of expression, “low-grade” or “common”. Some had a certain middle-class dignity, expressing aspirational socio-economic impulse and conservative morality.

Foremost among the dashing heroes of those fotoverhale was a young, shy English-speaking Vereeniging electrician, one Leon le Roux. He could barely speak Afrikaans, and his handsome profile and manly physique catapulted him to fame and feature film stardom, particularly among Afrikaners.

A forgotten photo comics icon

A somewhat forgotten icon, Leon le Roux in 2011, was aged 76 when I interviewed him. He was living out his retirement, alone, in a modest semi-detached cottage in Silverglades, Fish Hoek, and retained a large archive of his glory years.

Those years included starring roles in the enormously successful local films: Debbie, Die Kavaliers, Kruger Miljoene, Saboteurs, Ruiter in the Nag, Diamonds are Dangerous and others. Part of a golden age of indigenous cinema? I suspect so.

These wonderful old bioscope movies played in cinemas across the country. Then, bioscope halls all seemed cloned – all of them played the same music – often Cliff Richard and the Shadows, or the theme tune for the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and had red velvet curtains on the stage.

Leon worked with a host of South African theatre greats: people like Siegfried Mynhardt, Karel Trichardt, Louis van Niekerk, Brian O’Shaugnessy, Kobus Roussouw, Derek de Villiers, Hans Strijdom, Bill Brewer and Brenda Bell, to name a few.

Elvis, Sinatra and Juliet Prowse

Born in Vereeniging, he attended the same school as the legendary Juliet Prowse, who later dated Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley, and in the mid-1950s Leon landed a job as a model for a Lifebuoy soap ad. A succession of modelling contracts developed and in the late 1970s, Juliet Prowse introduced Leon to one Stanley Baker, who had a leading role in The Guns of Navarrone. One thing led to another involving the then Northcliff Film Studio in Johannesburg, where he was given a screen test for the Debbie role, which he won.

“I was very shy, I sweated a bit trying to sound like an Afrikaner,” said Leon.

“I could barely speak the language and eventually they decided to dub in another voice, because my accent was all wrong. I think that many of the professional actors saw me as this ‘shy unprofessional English electrician who got lucky’. Well, I suppose that was not far off the mark.”

Debbie was a hit and he was offered more leading film roles in quick succession with his flexing of Afrikaans diction and accent improving until it was spot on – and his fellows began to warm to him, and he to them. He remembered many of them, some whom had died, with affection.

His income in the 1960s from his picture book modelling alone resulted in long stretches of R1,800 a week, a considerable sum then. He appeared regularly in photo comic series, including Sister Theresa, Dr Marius Hugo, The Flying Doctor. In his prime Leon received about 500 fan letters a week.

I watched Debbie and Die Kavaliers with Leon at his home and marveled, particularly at the Debbie movie. The cinematography was clear and bright and well framed, beautifully highlighting the lost world of upper-class Afrikaner society in Hillbrow and Pretoria in the 1960s.

The beautiful sets showing off, for example, exquisite examples of 1960s top drawer interior design, the beehive hairstyles, the fantastic frocks, the cars, the solidly hoisted and well-covered bosoms, the genteel manners. Its endearingly naïve plot was based on the novel Groenkoring by Trana du Toit.

As expected, not one black person was visible in any of crowd scenes, which included a stadium full of people — a sign of the times.

The movie caused a stir. There is a premarital affair between two Tukkies (University of Pretoria) students which results in pregnancy, abortion is considered –- and rejected -– and the baby is eventually given up for adoption.

The only risqué scene in the movie is two young people French-kissing in a car in a hailstorm.

The fact that premarital relations and abortion was dealt with was bad enough, but what got some people going was that the lead actor, Leon, was 29 and his co-star, Susan van Oudtshoorn, was 17. All this was enough to prompt the censors to initially give the film a 4-18 age restriction.

Leon’s personal life

The untimely death of Leon’s first wife Colleen, then 39, when Leon was 40, was a major setback.

“I began losing my ability to remember my lines. My heart wasn’t in it and I took a long break.”

It was a break which turned out to be permanent, as Leon went into real estate business in Johannesburg. He did some electrical work and moved to Durban, where he met his second wife Carol, a businesswoman who tragically also did not outlive Leon.

Eventually after a long loop of time which saw several sojourns in Vancouver, Canada, where he revelled in salmon fishing, he came back to South Africa.

“I moved to Fish Hoek in 2007 for family connections — my sons live nearby with their families and Fish Hoek reminds me so much of Vancouver.”

It was a privilege to sit with an icon of a now vanished time and watch the movies. In the mad gabble of today and the politically correct “issues” hysteria, the ultra naiveté of that era, the richly homespun photo comic and bioscopic antics were curiously refreshing, and deserve recognition and flexing in the annals of South African social history.

Leon died in 2014.

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