Adventure (1945)

Redundant and unnecessary.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Adventure (1945)Surely the title is a huge pun, or a huge mistake. This is an adventure of a man who is no longer looking for the high seas and wartime survival, but the adventure of love with a woman who is not, at fist his type. It's not as bad as some of the reviews suggest, but there is something steady and normal and incipient about it all. While featuring Clark Gable in the lead, and with the same director as Gone with the Wind a few years earlier, there is something stiff about it all, even the humor and fun. Greer Garson is the "serious" woman, someone who has to force herself to have fun, and Joan Blondell is the racy one, out for fun above all else. And if Gable seems suited to the crazy woman, he's clearly also set to be tamed by the other.That's pretty much the adventure, after a few wild scenes from kicking down the door in Chile to getting torpedoed by the Japanese. Garson can be impressive in her cultured way, but here she is hot and cold, on and off. It's partly her speeches are more words than meaning. There's nothing more boring than people talking about being exciting. If in one scene you'll be laughing as Gable and Garson trap some chickens, in the next you'll be forced to think deep thoughts about true adventure and true meaning—when in fact the meaning was in the chicken scene.Blondell never quite gets her due in many of her movies because she plays against (or in contrast to) the leading female who is more grand, or more beautiful, or just more star powered than she is. Too bad. She's fun but she also has fabulous screen presence. That, to me, is what matters most (often) in this era.The movie is too long in parts, and the theme wears thin after while. In the end it's about a sailor's life or the landlubber's, the first filled with freedom, the second with a home and a family. It's 1945, the soldiers are coming home—guess which side wins?

PARNELL is often regarded as Clark Gable's worst film. While it is indeed terrible (with Gable being horribly miscast and the film playing very fast and loose with the facts), I have to disagree with Harry Medved's book "The Fifty Worst Movies" and say that ADVENTURE is probably a worse film. He listed PARNELL as one of the top 50 worst, but I found the film to be silly fluff and not annoying like ADVENTURE. Plus, PARNELL was quickly forgotten and Gable went on to greater things, whereas ADVENTURE really helped to relegate Gable to second-tier films for most of the rest of his career (with a few exceptions here and there).ADVENTURE was the first film that came out after Gable was released from military service and after the death of his wife (Carole Lombard). Three years had passed since his last film and the public was itching to see the box office king return. Oddly, however, MGM chose to not only pair him with an actress who seemed nothing like his usual co-stars but also gave him a god-awful script. The public naturally hated the film and fortunately it lost money--proving that sometime the public isn't so stupid after all! What didn't I like about the movie? Well, aside from the characters played by Gable, Greer Garson and Thomas Mitchell, it wasn't all bad--but considering that these are the three leads, that's a serious problem!! All three seemed to have been written by farm animals--they were that poorly written and stupid.Gable plays a merchant marine officer. While this role seems ill-suited for a pretty guy like Clark, it might have still worked had it been written well. Instead, however, he comes off as a 'Jeckyl and Hyde' sort of guy--with two contradictory personalities. One is an obnoxious jerk who is selfish and thoroughly unlikable--especially for a lady with an I.Q. above 50. He's this way through the first half of the movie and that way occasionally thereafter. The other is a lovable rogue--roughly like the same guy he played in about a dozen films in the 1930s. The end result is a guy that is really tough to like--a severe problem in a film billed as a romance! What an idiot...but at least he made no bones about this in the film! As for Greer Garson, like Gable, I love her in films. She was a classy and wonderful actress in such great films as RANDOM HARVEST, VALLEY OF DECISION and MRS. MINIVER. Pairing her style and persona with Gable was all wrong and made no sense at all. What made less sense was the character she played--a 'Dr. Jeckyl and Ms. Hyde' with yet a third personality as well! The first was a self-confident lady who rightly sized up Gable as a jerk the first time she met him. She didn't need a man in her life and was someone you could respect. Then, completely out of the blue, she went from hating him to marrying him--and there is no logical reason for this change. Finally, later after they are married, she becomes a petulant little brat--angry at Clark for being a shallow jerk even though she married him knowing exactly who he was!! What a mega-idiot! As for Mitchell, he's not at all believable and seems more like a plot device than a real person. You can't imagine this superstitious idiot as a seaman and in fact, you can't imagine any religious person being stupid enough to go to a library instead of a church when they are having a serious spiritual crisis. What an idiot! If you get the impression that nothing about this overly long romance makes any sense, then welcome to the club!! It's an embarrassing and boring mess. And, even if you rightly hate PARNELL, at least you can't accuse that silly film of being boring!

Despite the bad reviews from others I watched this film with much anticipation. After all how bad could any movie be when it featured Garson, Gable, Blondell and Mitchell, and was directed by Victor Fleming. And at first it went along just fine although I must agree with the reviewer who remarked that the chemistry between Blondell and Gable was superior. They just sparkled, they were sexy, they oozed animal magnetism. That's not to say that Greer Garson didn't hold her own. In fact she was the glue that held the whole, confused thing together. Without her there was nothing to maintain the viewer's interest because quite frankly, after a while Gable's barking became just annoying. Perhaps the way he took charge was meant to convey care and affection but came across as arrogance and thoughtlessness. His tendency to overact was probably because this was his first movie after his wartime service but why didn't someone ask him to tone it down a few notches. So there you have it: a good story (that tends toward the melodramatic toward the end) and a great cast should have yielded a much better product.

"Adventure" is an oddly generic title for such a singularly unique motion picture. Its superficial values are appealing enough--the Gable bluster is rarely put to such good use, and Garson is possibly the only actress with enough mettle to match him--but these attributes are hardly unusual and neither, indeed, is the storyline. What makes the effort favorably surprising is the story's aspiration to allegory through the use of poetics, which may occasionally seem overt but which never fail to ring true. It's an ambitious undertaking, and it works.In its time, the movie was dismissed for being both formulaic and even crude, which in itself betrays either an ignorance of its higher aspirations or, more likely, a reluctance to take them seriously. America in 1945 prided itself on street smarts and industrial might; on its not being taken for a sucker. It had saved Europe from the axis forces and was about to embark on a socioeconomic boom such as the world had never seen: It wasn't interested in philosophical musings about the nature of the soul. The idea that these musings could be given dimension in a simple and often predictable story about a rakish sailor and a repressed librarian drove reviewers to pronounce the script "foolish" and the poetic commentary "gibberish." But it is these very elements, this oddly ardent coloring, that have somehow deepened and mellowed with time, and which now provide the film with the kind of rich, subtle flavor found in only the most treasured vintages. More unique still is that the movie is less interested in the sentimentality of its story than in the metaphysical questions it poses. Its chief accomplishment is in avoiding any academic exploration of such questions (a choice which parallels the arc of the story itself), and it does so by illustrating with large, colorful brushes. Only the intelligence of the director and the skill of his actors keep the proceedings from veering off into caricature, a tipping point that when straddled with such finesse is delightful viewing indeed.