Of late, I seem to be watching many impressively photographed but dull movies (Tom Horn, The Winter Guest, A Midsummer's Night Sex Comedy, Macao). The conclusion that looking good is not enough is especially relevant in reference to movies starring Ava Gardner. I have no doubt that she was an interesting person as well as being incredibly beautiful, but until she aged and was directed by John Huston (in "The Bible," and, especially, in "The Night of the Iguana") she usually came across as vacuous. I'll grant that she projects vulnerability in one scene in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro: (trying to tell Gregory Peck that she is pregnant), but her last overwrought scene is flat-out ridiculous.

Not that Susan Hayward—who was regarded as an actress not just a movie star during the 1950s—manages much better, especially through the first two-thirds of the movie. And Hildegard Kneff as a countess is also a cartoon vamp.

At least in the scenes on his deathbed (actually, a cot) in the shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro, Gregory Peck seems fairly credible. He fares less well in the flashbacks, especially the Spanish Civil War ones (as he searches for the love of his life, Gardner's Cynthia) and the Riviera Romeo ones (as Kneff's countess increasingly irritates him) and in playing the anguish of the writer who has lost his way and squandered his talent.

The movie is an adaptation of one of Ernest Hemingway's most famous self-mythologizing stories. Harry Street, a big-game-hunting successful writer who feels he has betrayed his talent, on a safari to Kenya arranged by Helen (Hayward) trying to supplant Cynthia's memory, is immobilized by an infected wound that draws vultures and jackals to a death vigil. Helen strides around and tries to keep Harry from drinking.

Lying there, certain that a rescue plane will not arrive and that he will never redeem the talent he has frittered away, Harry's life (or at least major amours) flashes before him. An uncles played by Leo G. Carroll appears in several of them making incredibly fatuous speeches about hunting, literature, and life (and bequeathing the riddle of the frozen corpse of a leopard near the summit of Kilimanjaro: what could he have been doing up there?).

Other than some photography of African wildlife (that was recognized with an Oscar nomination for Leon Shamroy) and underlining the sham in the Hemingway mythos (also see the movie director Henry King made five years later, with another instance of Ava Gardner wandering lost through a major part, of Hemingway's greatest novel, The Sun Also Rises), the major reason for looking at "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is to see and hear Benny Carter playing tenor sax in the Paris nightclub where Harry gives Cynthia a light and their offkey romance begins.

Henry King had directed Peck in two of his best performances before "Snows"— "The Gunfighter" and "Twelve o'clock High"—and would direct him in another in The Bravados, though also directing him in "David and Bathsheba" (with Hayward the year before "Snows") and "Beloved Infidel" (a later movie in which Peck played Scott Fitzgerald). Peck obviously trusted King. King and cinematographer Leon Shamroy—who shot "Twelve o'clock High," "David and Bathsheba" and "The Bravados"... and "Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie" and "Prince of Foxes" for King— sometimes did well by him.

However, it seems to me that King had a fatal attraction for the myth of "lost generation" geniuses." He had an uncredited involvement in the film of Hemingway's strained faux-simple "comeback" drek of 1952, The Old Man and the Sea (perhaps the story Harry Street was hoping to survive to write?), directed the mind-numbing adaptation of The Sun Also Rises and the wayward genius of the Fitzgerald legend in "Beloved Infidel" and "Tender Is the Night" (in which Joan Fontaine is as silly and wooden as Hildegard Kneff is in "Snows"). In the silly soap opera genre, King also committed "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" which strikes me as having Hemingwayesque bathos, though it can't be blamed directly on Hemingway. Despite my admiration for "The Gunfighter". "Twelve o'clock High", and "The Bravados," I will not be making a case for elevating King to the ranks of underrated masters!

It seems to me that most screen adaptations of Hemingway have showed what is most false (meretricious) in Hemingway— King's pair of bloated pseudo-epics, both versions of A Farewell to Arms, Spencer Tracy's simple fisherman impersonation in "The Old Man and the Sea" and Katina Paxinou's Oscar-winning hamming in "For Whom the Bell Tolls." I rather like the film of what was posthumously put together as Islands in the Stream, parts of "For Whom the Bell Tolls." The two best movies based on Hemingway work are Robert Siodmak's 1946 film of the first-rate story "The Killers" (in which Ava Gardner appeared as a femme fatale) and Howard Hawks's film (with a screenplay by William Faulkner) of Hemingway's third-rate novel To Have and Have Not with Bogart and Bacall igniting. (I have not seen the remakes of either.)

BTW, there seem to be multiple DVD versions out there that seriously compromise the photography that is the most outstanding good feature of this bloated carcass.


Recommended:
No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age