Mogambo

Linda Nordley (Grace Kelly): Feeling down darling? It must be those shots we took. The doctor said they sometimes cause a reaction.
Victor Marswell (Clark Gable): What shots?
Donald Nordley (Donald Sinden): Yesterday, at the settlement, the tsetse fly injections.
Victor: Tsetse fly? Your letter didn't say anything about going up into tsetse fly country.
Linda: We understood we had to go through that territory to get to the gorillas.
Victor: Not necessarily. And why gorillas?
Donald: It's a pet theory of mine. I want to study gorillas, their family life and so on. Even get some of their vocal sounds on a tape recorder I brought with me. It's a theory on the derivative evolution -

Victor (interrupting): I'm sorry, I wouldn't understand, and again, to be quite frank, it's a long and difficult safari. It doesn't fit in with my schedule.

Victor Marswell isn't interested in much more than his manliness, and Mogambo presumes that women, for example Ava Gardener and Grace Kelly, when confronted with this man, are unable to resist him. Contemporary social and cultural norms of manliness and man beauty are substituted for believable development of sexual tension, and a then-popular, widespread conception of Gable as attractive is necessary in order to understand the romantic triangle.

John Ford's Mogambo, 1953, is a remake of Victor Fleming's Red Dust, 1932; John Lee Mahin worked as a writer on both, from an earlier play by Wilson Collison. Clark Gable, somewhat ridiculously, stars in both films. Red Dust is a lean 83 minute film that still holds up, last time I checked, last year on my birthday for a rubber plantation double-feature with White Woman. Red Dust is pre-code and pre-manners, the kind of early Hollywood movie run by lunatics and preposterous behavior (the kind that's a lot of fun in my opinion).

Much of Mogambo has lost its flavor over time. For a number of reasons it was tough for me to think of Victor as heroically manly. First, he flirts with women using corny, transparent sexual innuendos. Coded sexual language is a familiar Hollywood device, but here the dialogue is strained and uninspired. It's just not sexy. Red Dust's famous Jean Harlow bath scene is fun, sexy, and surprising; in Mogambo, Ava Gardner's shower scene is pretend turn-on. Second, his Africa is both real and fake, on-set and on-location, a mixture of rear projections and cut-aways.

It's only real when it's safe, like when it's baby elephants. It feels like Victor lives in safety, which he does. Perhaps Mogambo's 116 min running time is a result of so much Africa documentary footage. Exciting on its own, it doesn't manage to add truthfulness to the movie's love story, and the worlds never converge, even when they're supposed to, for example when the gorilla charges. Third, the fiftyish Clark Gable did not win my heart, personally.

Ford's intention must have been to use the exotic as an intensifying backdrop. This would have worked if the love story itself had reached exotic heights. It remains standard love story fair, if not worse. I felt bad at the end, for everyone. Linda's husband's smartness and manners aren't enough to keep her, he isn't exciting enough, and when she wants to enjoy dirty hut sex with Victor she does. When Victor feels bad for Donald and gives Linda back, he decides to marry Eloise (Gardner), and Eloise is more than happy to be asked back.

There's a reality to the outcome that I respect Ford for observing, and the story and its consequences are basically the same as Red Dust. The difference is the bloated running time, and the visions and sounds of Africa (Ford used tribal music in place of a studio score). These are efforts to make the story something it's not, to transform it to a larger scale.

Overall it's a melodramatic vision of a standard drama, but maybe because it's Ford, there are also inspired moments. Like when Eloise first leaves on the boat, seen above, filled with nice little details, including the leopard in the box. In the next scene Eloise paces back and forth in front of the leopard, and the leopard paces along with her. That's charming. The moment Donald approaches Linda and wraps a scarf around her neck, clutching it, and the only noise is the wind, is a sexy thirty second scene. The shining moments are nice, and I wish there had been more.

Waterloo Bridge (1931) and Red-Headed Woman

Roy (on the right): It's about a girl.
Roy's stepfather, Major Wetherby: About a what?
Roy: Well, about a girl.
Major Wetherby (to mother): I don't know what he's talking about.
Roy's mother (o.s.): A girl, darling, you know, a girl. A girl.
Major Wetherby: Yeah, yeah, yes, I know, a girl is. Well, what about it, boy?

Roy (Douglass Montgomery) meets Myra (Mae Clark) on Waterloo Bridge during an air raid, each helping an elderly lady recover potatoes fallen from her basket. Fourteen days before he returns to the trenches, Roy, nineteen years old, falls for Myra, a sometimes chorus girl and hooker. He intends to marry.

"Identification...not only connects us to the protagonist onscreen but, at a deeper level, through our implicit understanding of cinematic language, to a basic sense of ourselves as cohesive subjects." - Todd Haynes introducing his book of screenplays for Far From Heaven, Safe, and Superstar.

Waterloo Bridge, a 1931 pre-code hyperdrama, is an early film by the forty-one year old James Whale. He directs with an eye for behavioral nuance, exhibiting an unusually prominent and sincere quest for the truth about his characters. There's more than mischief to the film.

There's mischief too. The narrative sometimes makes sharp-turns, or perhaps even performs a figure-8. It moves with surprising speed, passing through bouts of comedy, stretches of sympathetic character observation, and bursts of cinematic jubilance. When I watch pre-code films I wonder about the logic of the audience members' lives, so near the center of the depression. This is a narrative of hope struggle and strength, still questioning and being hurt by malevolent interior forces, not yet arrived at the cynicism of film noir, but headed for it, headed for worse, unaware.

Roy, if you can believe it, doesn't suspect Myra's "private income." He's unspoiled by reckless living, somewhat innocent. He's brave, but knows little of his enemy's nature. Myra knows the enemy well.

Whale shows deep concern for the nature of her dignity. She knows Roy's money comes from sweetness, which makes it different, but she wonders how to have a pure relationship with Roy.

Whale's characters, even when reciting pat, over-written lines, or under-performing as actors, maybe especially then, are connected with a pulsing sense of life. Curiosity in the true emotions of his characters brings him to explore the fringe details of their lives.

Backgrounds are often animated by gardeners pruning trees, or passing milk carts, everywhere the sense of the film opening into the lives of the living.

Were the lives of Waterloo Bridge's contemporaries as capricious and turbulent as the film, torn by internal and external forces, and are our lives now? The movie ends as it must, as truthfully as it could for its time. It might surprise you to know its final moment. I'd like to watch the 1940 post-code remake, and 1956's Gaby, to see how they handle some of the same questions Whales does here.

Myra's reluctance to legitimize the fiscal-sexual power of her femininity adds another layer to her determination. She wants to believe it's possible to preserve her personal integrity, and to establish customized boundaries based on life experiences and realistic expectations. The second time Roy offered her free money, and she attempted to refuse him, reminded me of a scene in the recent My Joy, a film separated by 70 years from this one.

Myra prostitutes herself for a degree of independence, and draws lines between her profession and romantic love, while Jean Harlow, in Red-Headed Woman, and Barbara Stanwyck, in Baby Face, each play a secretary who enters the pants of the man in the top floor office, in order to climb rungs on a social ladder from which they're otherwise excluded. They seek not nights with the men, not only a month's rent, but full lives of luxury and class.

There's mischief too, and open enjoyment of fulfilled desires. Harlow's journey in particular seems entirely joy-focused, as Red-Headed Woman deviates from the other two movies by never forcing the protagonist to change or learn from conflict. She jumps from one bed to the next without a glance back, either because she chooses not to confront the inner toll, or because for her there isn't an inner toll; it's an easy choice between gutter and glamor, and Harlow's Lil has freed herself from the social responsibilities of love and sex.

In this way Lil reminds me of Boudu from Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved from Drowning, 1932. Homeless Boudu was taken in by the wealthy but rejected the prospect of change, and the film rejected the idea that Boudu must undergo a transformation or epiphany because of his contact with high society and comfort. Boudu, in the end, is Boudu, and Lil, in the end, is Lil.