THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 28, Issue 719, 24 April 1953, Page 19

THE SNOWS OF KILIMANJARO

(20th Century-Fox) _FOW strange, I thought, as 5 LL tg aye Gregory Peck dying rosely on his camp-stretcher under the shadow of Kilimanjaro (and knocking back ‘the~ whisky-sodas), how curious that. this should remind me of The. Secret Life of Walter Mitty. And yet, when the last Technicolored afterimage had faded from the retina, the association did not seem quite so grotesque after all. Thurber’s Mr. Mitty, with his comic-book daydreams, Hemingway’s dying Harry (for once unsure of where he is going) tormenting himself with memories, are both frustrated products of this arid century. Or they would be if Hollywood could leave well alone. " At that point I recalled what the subconscious had perhaps been trying to intimate earlier-that Thurber had made a public scene over the film version of his miniature masterpiece (which turned a small-scale satire on escapism into a general exodus for the cash-customers). I can’t say that that metamorphosis dismayed me-Danny Kaye was a more than adequate compensation-but I wonder what Ernest Hémingway thought of this present production. If he made any public comment it’ escaped my notice, but in a preface which he wrote to The First Forty-nine Stories there are a few lines that he might well have resurrected. Listing the stories he himself liked best he excluded "those that have achieved some notoriety so that ... you are always faintly embarrassed to read them and wonder whether you really wrote them or did you maybe hear them somewhere." The Snows of Kilimanjaro would now, I suppose, be added to the list of tales that embarrass. If you have read the story (and the best anthologies usually include it) the film is bound to remind you of .something you’ve read somewhere. Its defect is that it reminds you of too.much. I don’t know how Carey Robinson (who wrote the screen play) set about the assignment, but the impression I have is that he sat down

and did a fast semi-literary digest of all the Hemingway best-sellers, whittled the title-story down to the bare bones, then padded it out with excerpts from the novels. The result still sounds like Hemingway (a good deal of it is, of course), but not like The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Only the physical setting remains-the snow-capped mountain, the hunters’ camp, the vultures and the hyena waiting for the sick man to die, and the man-half delirious from his gangrened leg-wander-ing in his mind back along the long road he has come. Under the careful chaperonage of Mr. Robinson, and the director Henry King, these flashbacks become a sort of conducted tour through the more salubrious sections of the Hemingway cquntry-Paris (only the better bistros, of course), the Cote D’Azur, and the Green Hills of Africa. There are also a couple of Spanish interludes with an_ apparently composite source — For’ Whom the Bull Tolls, perhaps. Mainly, however, Mr. Robinson’s character remembers women. In this he differs from Hemingway’s' Harry, who remembered other frustrations and satisfactions-war and death, the fleshpots, and the hills of home. He remembered a hundred stories’ he had not written and now could never | write. And, of course, he died. Mr. Cary’s Harry doesn’t. He is saved by the devotion of his wife who puts hot packs on his leg, lances it with a hunting-knife-and lets the gangrene out. What is there on the credit side? An abundance of fine photography-excel-lent landscape shots from Kenya, good wildlife studies of hippos, rhinos, elephants, antelopes, and a_ particularly malevolent hyena; better-than-average shots of Paris and Madrid. And there is also. Ava Gardner. I don’t usually: take much notice of the lovelies-of their acting, I mean. But, this time, this young woman compels attention. Of all the players she is the most vital, the least a stereotype. I was sorry they killed her off so messily. The only other casualty was a story-and I suppose with that thought we can say Farewell to Hemingway (at least till next time).