OVP: Mogambo (1953)

Film: Mogambo (1953)

Stars: Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden

Director: John Ford

Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Actress-Ava Gardner, Supporting Actress-Grace Kelly)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Grace Kelly-click here to learn more about Ms. Kelly (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As I mentioned in our kickoff to Grace Kelly Month, Kelly's story is not one of a robust amount of struggle in terms of getting into the upper echelons of Hollywood (in fact, more than almost any major star of the era, it's hard to find an actress who struggled less to make it in the industry).  A swiftly successful career in theater & television opened up doors for Kelly, first in Henry Hathaway's Fourteen Hours and then in the first of several genuine classics Kelly made, Fred Zinnemann's High Noon.  High Noon was a success, winning Kelly's costar Gary Cooper an Oscar, but her notices were middling, and she was worried she might be considered "just a pretty face" in Hollywood despite getting a lot of opportunity from the picture.  However, when Gene Tierney (who was off being wooed by Aly Khan at the time) dropped out of Mogambo, Kelly jumped at the opportunity to work with screen legends Clark Gable & John Ford in the role that would change her life.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is about Victor Marswell (Gable), a big-game hunter who spends much of his time trapping animals in Africa to send to zoos and circuses.  He meets Eloise "Honey Bear" Kelly (Gardner), a fortune-hunter who is trapped on their safari briefly.  Though initially they dislike one another, that animosity melts into attraction, and they clearly sleep together (despite not being married).  Honey Bear leaves, and in her place is Donald (Sinden) and Linda Nordley (Kelly), a couple that want to safari to record the gorillas, which Victor refuses to do because it's too difficult to find the gorillas.  However, slowly Linda begins to wear him down, and despite being a prim married woman, she & Victor begin to have a love affair.  This is complicated further when Honey Bear, obviously still in love with Victor, returns, and has to hide their relationship so as not to scandalize Linda.  As the film progresses, Victor clearly loves Linda, and wants to be with her, but doesn't have the guts to break up their relationship, so instead she has Linda catch him with Honey Bear, and in anger she shoots him.  The film ends with Honey Bear claiming that Linda was right to shoot him (since he'd been making advances on her, a lie only the audience and the love triangle knows), and though they have some friction, Honey Bear & Victor end up together while Linda & Donald return to domesticity.

The movie, if it sounds familiar, is somewhat based on a different Clark Gable film, Red Dust, which we reviewed for the blog a few years back for a different season of Saturdays with the Stars.  If you click that film's review, you'll see that I loved Red Dust...and if you look above, you'll see that I did not love Mogambo.  The difference here is the performances.  While Gable is in the same role, he doesn't have the same kind of chemistry with either of his leading ladies that he did with Jean Harlow.  Ava Gardner makes out the best of the two, as she's giving a decent performance (it's the only bit of light in the movie), as Honey Bear, though it's an easy part that Gardner nails thoroughly.  This was the only Oscar nomination in her long career, but it's not the best that Gardner could do-she plays a spunky, jaded lover, but they don't lean in hard enough into the sultriness that Gardner would brilliantly capture in earlier film noir.

That said, Gardner is miles ahead of Grace Kelly who, I'm sorry to say in a month devoted to her, is actively not good in Mogambo.  Kelly is given the more interesting, if also more difficult part.  Linda is a woman who has lived in a glass cage, always being asked to be perfect, and she's feeling something for the first time.  Unlike Gardner's Honey Bear, there's not a lot to like in her, and Kelly underscores that by making her seem stiff, guarded, & without any feeling.  Her romance with Gable should be steamy, a haloed saint deigning to come to life & play among the mortals, but Kelly can't get that across.  Instead she plays Linda as wooden & two-dimensional...I'm honestly flummoxed how Kelly got this Oscar nomination.  Gene Tierney, a more experienced actress, would've been a better choice.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that the real story of Mogambo wasn't what was going on onscreen, but offscreen, as the filming of this movie is the stuff of Hollywood legend.  Gable & Kelly were having an affair (this is basically taken as gospel even if neither party seems to have ever officially stated that it was happening), which would be something of a pattern for Kelly during her filming (we'll talk about this in the coming weeks).  Gable, Gardner, & Donald Sinden all fought repeatedly with director John Ford, and Gardner had to be flown off location after she got stuck with a bad case of dysentery.  Of course, this might've been the least of her worries.  Gardner was in one of the rockier patches of her legendary marriage to Frank Sinatra, and determined not to have a permanent connection with her husband, got an abortion during filming (the two would divorce, childless, in 1957).  Next week we're going to move just a year into the future of Kelly's career, but with it we're going to move beyond the early whiffs in her career to the one director who knew exactly what he had when she got onscreen.