Every classic film fan has her or his go-to stars, just as film fans did back when the movies were young, or stepping into middle age. I’ll watch most anything with Bogart and/or Bacall, William Powell, Gary Cooper, Joel McRea, Dick Powell, Stanwyck, Fonda, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart or Gregory Peck in it.
Any film John Wayne did with Howard Hawks or John Ford is worth watching and re-watching. Glenn Ford? Alan Ladd? Take’em or leave’em, depending on the subject, the setting, the director and the studio the movie was made under.
But to my tastes, life is too short to waste on movies starring Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Randolph Scott or Van Johnson.
And I never warmed to “The King,” either. Clark Gable, who made most of his pictures for big-budget, high-gloss MGM, had his moments — “It Happened One Night” and “Red Dust” stand out. But maybe it was the gloss MGM packaged him in, his acting style, which isn’t aging as well as more “natural” performances by many of his peers (Peck, Stewart, Fonda and Ford especially). But something always feels “off” in his Hemingwayesque posing and posturing, the starchy machismo he clung to as if he had no greater fear than being perceived as “soft.”
“Mogambo” (1953) gave the ageing star in one of his last macho hits, an on-location-in-Africa spectacle that paired The King of MGM with one of the greatest American directors for a romantic thriller of “The Great White Hunter” school.
It’s old fashioned, as more evolved generations see Big Game hunting — even just to capture animals for zoos and circuses — as barbaric and destructive. The greying, 50something Gable doesn’t just “get the girl,” he all but has his choice of two leading ladies in this love triangle story set on a safari.
Grace Kelly was less than half his age. Ava Gardner was 20 years his junior and too much woman for him, or almost anybody any studio paired her up with.
But off we, he and legendary Western filmmaker John Ford go into the wilds of British colonies that became Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya for the story of a bachelor safari leader tempted by two women who fall under his gaze.
Vic Marswell (Gable) runs a business where he has to maintain good relations with the natives as he leads well-heeled customers on hunts or expeditions, often capturing wild animals with one competent subordinate (Philip Stainton) and one malevolently incompetent one (Eric Pohlmann).
Then this blast of blowsy, showgirl sex appeal shows up. Gardner plays Eloise “Honey Bear” Kelly, a brassy broad summoned by her “old pal,” a maharaja, only to discover the rich twit left days before.
Vic doesn’t like having women around, but he’s knocked-down and kept on his heels by this dame.
She calls him “Mister whoever-you-are” and “my little white hunter,” and when she sees him in safari shorts, gives him a “Bless your big bony knees.”
Her “Look, Buster, don’t you get overstimulated with me!” warns him off.
As she cuddles with the caged critters — some of them not that cuddly — he sizes her up. He knows her “type,” he says — “not an honest feeling from her kneecap to her neck.”
It must be love. Or would be, if she wasn’t anxious to catch the first boat back out of the middle-of-nowhere. And when Vic’s scientist-client (Donald Sinden) and his very young wife (Grace Kelly) arrive as Vic’s next clients, only an Act of God, or engine trouble on the boat, could trap Honey Bear here with Vic’s next woman of interest, the beautiful Brit blonde married to a sickly anthropologist.
That manly Gable always needed an Ashley Wilkes he could show up in movies like this. But worldwise Honey Bear sees Vic as he really is.
“This is no Sir Galahad who loves from afar. This is a two-legged boa constrictor.”
Unspoiled African scenery (mixed with a lot of soundstage shots), wild animals in cagees, or in second unit nature footage inserts aside, this is Gardner’s picture. It’s not quite lifeless when she’s not on camera, but Gable’s posturing and posing — the fodder of generations of comic impersonators — gets old after a bit.
Kelly’s winsome protests meant to hide animal lust because “Women always fall for ‘The Great White Hunter'” are little more than a plot device. But our leading man was still picking his leading ladies up — literally — when the need arose.
Movies in this setting during that era make one all but expect racism, but despite filming in the middle of the Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya, or perhaps because of it (Gable had bodyguards, Ford had to change locations due to threats) there’s little of that nature here — just a generally patronizing American and European attitude towards the sometimes servile natives, some of it conveyed by the mere presence of a Catholic missionary-priest (Denis O’Dea).
It’s the animal stuff that’s more likely to carry a cringe these days.
There’s very little action, but it’s ably conveyed by Gable’s glowering take on his character’s shoot-from-the-hip experience with this world.
This was Gable and MGM’s second take on this story, as 1932’s “Red Dust” was the picture that made his name with the studio, with the same screenwriter (John Lee Mahin) adapting the play it’s based on anew, transplanting it from pre-WWII Vietnam to post-war Africa.
That film, a “pre-code” drama co-starring Jean Harlow, was lusty and virile and transgressive, with Gable’s adulterous rogue walking a finer line between likable and loathsome. Ford’s take on this tale is more scenic, but the adultery is tame and aside from Gardner, the whole enterprise is humorless.
Howard Hawks took John Wayne to Africa for the more rambunctious men-among-men Big Game (trapping) safari comedy “Hatari” a decade later, and got a better picture out of it, even if the attitudes in it are little more enlightened.
“Mogambo” isn’t all that, but it isn’t bad. And it says something for audience’s long-standing love for Gable that it became a good-sized hit, despite coming out less than a year after the similar and edgier Peck/Gardner and Susan Hayward Hemingway adaptation “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”
Today it’s most interesting as a lesser picture in the Ford canon, and a movie that prolonged Gable’s leading man career long enough for him to joke around in Doris Day’s limelight in “Teacher’s Pet,” get upstaged by the scenery-chewing Burt Lancaster in the sub thriller “Run Silent, Run Deep” and earn a nice grace note for his long career by sacrificing what was left of his health enduring Marilyn Monroe and John Huston in the desert of “The Misfits.”
It was always good to be “The King of Hollywood,” even if too much of the time, you watched Gable and wondered who else could have done that part, and maybe given it another dimension or two.
Rating: PG, violence, adultery, smoking
Cast: Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden, Philip Stainton, Eric Pohlmann and Denis O’Dea.
Credits: Directed by John Ford, scripted by John Lee Mahin, based on the play “Red Dust” by Wilson Collison. An MGM release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:53
Movie Nation 