Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 3-December-06
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Mogambo (1953)

"Mogambo" is a Technicolor extravaganza designed to make viewers swoon with primal passions and exotic lands. It takes place in an Africa so lush one has merely to walk out the door to encounter leopards, hippos, gazelles, and elephants. It boasts tribal drumming and natives both colorful and frightening. It includes a trek by jalopy, foot, and boat, complete with a stopover at a missionary's. There's a hero — efficient, independent, and occasionally bare-chested — along with female beauty and the desire it entails. In other words, it's very similar to the escapist adventure "King Solomon's Mines" (1950), which I spotlighted a few months back.

One thing that sets "Mogambo" apart, however (in addition to the fact that its title is kind of random), is the megawatt brilliance of its stars, who are on display as much or more than the wildlife. Playing safari leader and big game trapper Vic Marswell, Clark Gable works his middle-aged mojo with all the confidence of an established icon. Vic is a cool customer undaunted by danger and used to taking pleasure as it comes. He himself has never been trapped by a predator, so he doesn't take it seriously when playgirl Eloise "Honey Bear" Kelly (Ava Gardner) unexpectedly lands in his lap, having been stood up by a maharajah who promised her an African getaway. They fall into bed with mutual abandon, then when a boat arrives a week later he tells her to leave. But he doesn't get off so easily.

The boat that was to carry Miss Kelly away (and fails in the task) delivers another unexpected guest named Mrs. Nordley (Grace Kelly). Unlike Honey Bear, to whom she takes an instant dislike, she's a proper British lady accompanying her anthropologist hubby (Donald Sinden) on a mission of scientific research. Like Honey Bear, she feels an immediate need to lift her skirt at the sight of her host. Thus does a four-way love triangle, or rather rectangle, ensue, with manly Vic tormenting the two most gorgeous women ever to visit Africa.

The Eves in this Eden look perfectly splendid in their nightdresses and khakis and eerily perfect lipstick. I suppose it's only natural for them to crave knowledge of the alpha male, who can best even a gorilla in a stare-down. It's certainly inevitable that this fertile, fifties, Fabio-lous fantasy suddenly gets traditional after reveling in the scandalous heat. The way everybody's life gets tied up in a neat little bow doesn't seem very likely, but "Mogambo" isn't authentic or original and isn't meant to be. Like estrogen with a rugged outback hunk, one must just look at it and be swept away.

Copyright © 2006 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.