Mogambo

Two decades after he originated the role in Red Dust, Clark Gable reprised it in the loose remake Mogambo. But a funny thing happened on the way to Mogambo, Gable was no longer the prime, alpha-male radiating star that he once was, and his presence is outshone and out-acted by the two female leads, Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly.

It’s not just that Gable looks a little too old to believably play this role and inspire the erotic yearnings for the youthful Kelly and street-wise Gardner, but most of the magic in Red Dust was the palpable chemistry between Gable, Jean Harlow and Mary Astor. Red Dust featured a commentary on class and power being a part of sexual attraction – Gable’s rubber plantation runner idealizes the owner’s wife for being a real lady and seeing their affair as a possible way for upward mobility, totally ignoring the lower-class hooker-on-the-run who loves him for who he is. Mogambo, by contrast, is purely about the cinematic aura of Gable as romantic ideal, filled to the brim with MGM’s pure spectacle.

The tired, creaky script plays everything far safer than the wilder and kinkier pre-code classic; the script’s not very good. Never truly becoming awful, but only mildly maintaining our interest. Part of the fun in watching Red Dust is to see the three leads interacting, with Astor’s brittle high-society woman and Harlow’s tough-talking dame providing as many dramatic sparks as the love triangle. Gardner and Kelly don’t provide the same amount of thrills in their scenes together, but deliver perfectly fine performances.

Gardner in particular makes the whole enterprise worth watching in the first place. Mogambo provided her lone Oscar nomination, and it’s very strong work. She lands all of her jokes, capably handles the dramatic moments, sells the little bit of sex thrown in for good measure and promptly walks away with the movie. When she’s not on the screen the film becomes a frightful bore. Kelly, for her part, is more uneven, but the scene where she and Gable stare at each other with passion and yearning before she frighteningly runs into her room is greatly played by her.

By this point in his career, Gable could play this type of role in his sleep, and that’s exactly what it looks like he’s doing here. He frequently seems bored in his love scenes with Kelly, manages a nice chemistry with Gardner and only comes alive when the film dips into the adventure story.

Red Dust focused primarily on the love triangle, Mogambo pads that story with a safari excursion that’s almost laughably bad. Much of the film was shot on location in Africa, and the scenery is gorgeous and atmospheric. The problem is whenever the film has to match it with studio work, it never matches. The overgrown jungle looks barren and plastic on the set, and the continuity between the shots dips into high-camp it’s so bad. Stock footage of animals threatening the stars or being glimpsed by them from afar is obviously edited in with a noticeably different grade of film stock.

But this is John Ford, and there are a few directorial decisions that he made which keep Mogambo from being totally awful. The on-location stuff is great, he got a career-best performance from Gardner (although The Killers and The Night of the Iguana are close on its heels), and chose to soundtrack the film only with African tribal instrumentation. It gives the film an exciting and atmospheric vibe which stands out in a positive way for being something different from MGM.

I have a bit of a love/hate feeling towards MGM, for every star and movie that they gave the big lush treatment to, they would turn around and give it to another project that couldn’t possibly support it. Mogambo is that kind of film. If the adventure story had been removed, if someone other than Gable had been chosen for the lead, if this, that and the other, not every movie needed to include so many mega-watt stars, and romance and adventure, sometimes scaling back is for the best. Red Dust remains the definitive version of this story because it managed to create so much atmosphere, heat and drama in a studio and gave them a good story with memorable interactions between the characters. Mogambo is pure spectacle without much heart, but it’s never completely terrible, which makes things all the more frustrating when you get right down to it.