Clark Gable takes his rugged (and ageing) good looks to the rugged outdoors in this African adventure film directed by John Ford. Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly fill in the other points of a Gable-centric love triangle in this morally complicated battle of the sexes on safari. John Ford, the manliest director who ever lived, isn't neccessarily the first person you would go to for a film about the finer points of male-female relationships, but he does a fairly balanced job of it (all things considered) and shoots more for adventure and comedy than high melodrama.
Ava Gardner is Elouise Kelly, a socialite who comes to east Africa to visit a safari-ing maharajah and gets stranded with Victor Marswell (Gable) instead. The two have a bit a tryst but when it becomes clear that Elouise is going to be hanging around for quite a while longer the relationship becomes strained and rather sour. To make things worse, Victor is expecting a documentarian who hopes to film some gorillas in the wild. The filmmaker's wife, Linda (Grace Kelly), welcomes Victor's inappropriate advances and they begin to have an affair... leaving Elouise smouldering on the sidelines. Will Victor take what he wants? Or will he remember his humanity?
The African backdrop of wild animals and jungle highs is more than apt for a film about alpha males and sexual competition. Being a '50s film made by one of the establishment's more masculine filmmakers, Mogambo uses a paradigm that equates men with nature/the outdoors and women with society/socialness, but despite this rather backward approach to gender politics it also attempts to tackle a few concepts that are nearly impossible to look at under the auspices of the Hays Code. Things like female circumcision, pre-marital sex and adultery. The scene where Gable tries to explain female circumcision is so awkward and shrouded that it baffles me why they tried to even put it in the script.
Ava Gardner is Elouise Kelly, a socialite who comes to east Africa to visit a safari-ing maharajah and gets stranded with Victor Marswell (Gable) instead. The two have a bit a tryst but when it becomes clear that Elouise is going to be hanging around for quite a while longer the relationship becomes strained and rather sour. To make things worse, Victor is expecting a documentarian who hopes to film some gorillas in the wild. The filmmaker's wife, Linda (Grace Kelly), welcomes Victor's inappropriate advances and they begin to have an affair... leaving Elouise smouldering on the sidelines. Will Victor take what he wants? Or will he remember his humanity?
The African backdrop of wild animals and jungle highs is more than apt for a film about alpha males and sexual competition. Being a '50s film made by one of the establishment's more masculine filmmakers, Mogambo uses a paradigm that equates men with nature/the outdoors and women with society/socialness, but despite this rather backward approach to gender politics it also attempts to tackle a few concepts that are nearly impossible to look at under the auspices of the Hays Code. Things like female circumcision, pre-marital sex and adultery. The scene where Gable tries to explain female circumcision is so awkward and shrouded that it baffles me why they tried to even put it in the script.
So the plot and scripting isn't the best, but it's really about this A-grade cast having high adventure in the African wilderness. Gable's Victor is a lonely and cynical man, curmudgeonly and confident. It could just as easily be John Wayne or Henry Fonda, though Gable's presence allows the more romantic elements to flourish more than they would under those other actors. He's flanked throughout the film by Boltchek (Eric Pohlmann), a dodgy Russian drunk whose only function in the film is to act as a deus ex machina for the end sequence, and Brownie (Philip Stainton), the intellectual British right hand man (I guess Peter Ustinov was unavailable). The real standout of the film though is quite easily Ava Gardner as Elouise... she's playful, adventurous, capable, not at all the stereotypical out-of-her-depth princess-type you might expect the character to be. Gardner is great, she's such a good sport in the role - funny and wry, throwing herself around like a party girl in the wilderness and acting as a fine contrast to Grace Kelly's refined and snobbish depiction of repressed naivete.
Anyway, this isn't quite the 'classic' you might expect it to be, but any such film under the direction of John Ford is going to be more than worth your time. The imperialist in me loves these Old Hollywood tales of colonials in Africa or India, I just get swept up in that adventuring spirit, and the cast makes it a fun ride.
LOWPOINT: The splicing of film footage with documentary footage of animals (especially the gorillas) isn't very well done. Some of it is all too clearly shot on different film stock. There's actually only one shot in the whole film where gorillas and actors actually appear together!
DIRECTOR: John Ford
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by John Lee Mahin, based on the play by Wilson Collinson.
KEY ACTORS: Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Eric Pohlmann, Donald Sinden, Philip Stainton
RELATED TEXTS:
- Red Dust, a play by Wilson Collinson.
- Mogambo is actually a loose remake of the 1932 film Red Dust, both of which featured Clark Gable in the lead role.
- Safaris, animal-catching, a woman out of her depth in the African wilderness, a bristly (and ageing) man's man, a baby elephant, one of America's most well-known directors... I could be describing either Mogambo or Hatari! They're practically the same film.
- Other Hollywood-Goes-to-Africa films: The African Queen, The Ghost in the Darkness, Out of Africa, King Solomon's Mines (three separate versions) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro.
AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Actress (Ava Gardner) and Best Supporting Actress (Grace Kelly)
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Film.
Golden Globes - won Best Supporting Actress (Kelly).
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