MOGAMBO

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 771, 30 April 1954, Page 19

MOGAMBO

(M.G.M_.) A LL the best film critics will tell you that John Ford is a great director who has reached a modus vivendi with the film industry-producing commercial potboilers so that he may have the freedom necessary to achieve the occasional masterpiece. It is true that sometimes the higher critics can’t agree on which is which, but there should be no serious doubts about Mogambo. This is strictly commercial — no studio could afford to hazard a valuable property like Miss Ava Gardner and I don’t suppose Clark Gable is expendable yet. But even if it is a potboiler, Ford can still make it good to look at, and he has a wealth of material to work with. Mogambo was filmed in Kenya, Tanganyika, the Belgian Congo and French Equatorial Africa, and if we get all the routine shots-the wallowing hippos, bounding impala and massed flamingos-we are also shown some first-class landscape and animal photography. Ford has a feeling for the wilderness that is as true for the savan-. nah lands of Kenya and the matted. jungle of the Congo as it is for the more arid landscapes of Utah or Arizona. He at least has no difficulty in filling a wide screen with life, movement and meaning, and except for one or two brief lapses in back-projection (studio foreground against location background) the picture of "Africa- its ominous green vastnesses, its broad waterways and its teeming life-is absorbing and exciting. So far as the human element goes, | the story is trite enough. Gable, as a professional big-game hunter and safar7 guide, looks not so much a Hemingway character (Hollywood can’t move round in Africa these days without bumping into Papa) as what Hemingway himself. might have been if he had let his biggame hunting instincts get the upper. hand. The women fall for Gable, tooin fact, for a few reels Mogambo looks | like turning into another short happy life of Francis Macomber. Miss Gardner, however, makes it a quadrangular | affair an@ eventually gets the rogue. male tet%ered before he can do any serious mischief. Mogambo, in short, is not the aeepest notch on John Ford’s tally-stick, but there’s no reason for him to be ashamed of it. If Folly to be Wise fell a little short, Mogambo substantially exceeded my expectations. What you lose on the swings (if I may coin a phrase) you gain on the roundabouts. Bookshelf DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS, The Fourth Musketeer, by Ralph Hancock and Letitia Fairbanks; Peter Davies, English price 15/-. DON’T suppose Douglas Fairbanks left behind him the same fanatical following as Valentino did, but there are doubtless tens of thousands who remember him with sentimental affection. This biography is aimed at the sentimentalists. If you are interested in Fairbanks you will find 250-odd pages about him herebut you will have to be pretty interested in him to wade through them. It’s not in the same class as, say, Good Night, Sweet Prince, but then Fairbanks was not in the same class as old Jack Barrymore.