The Macomber Affair (1947)

Powerful

Overrated and overhyped

Excellent but underrated film

A Masterpiece!

I haven't read Hemingway's short story, "The Brief Happy Life of Francis Macomber", for years but as I recall it was one of his best. The earth didn't move, but the story was pretty good.One of the reasons I think it was so good was that it left unsaid many of the things that Gregory Peck, as Wilson the safari guide, pours out at the end, as if to an audience of elementary school kids.Papa had a little thing he used to say. If you sold a script to Hollywood, you drove up to the state line and stopped. The producers stopped on the other side of the line. You threw them the script and they threw you the check.Peck's character of Wilson, he of the beautiful red face, as Mrs. Macomber, Joan Bennet, calls him, was based on the same character who played Isaak Dineson's husband in "Out of Africa." Not that it matters much but in real life the guide, I think his name was something like Percy or Percival, was British, and the script gives Peck some British locutions that sound odd coming from a man raised in La Jolla.Joan Bennet is good as the bitchy wife who dominates and insults her husband, Robert Preston. Preston doesn't overplay the cowardly and henpecked bit. He simply looks too masculine to be such a wimp, so it was a good choice.The story does enter boy's book territory though when Preston first runs from a charging lion, then finds that shooting a couple of buffalo has revitalized him and turned him into a wholly changed man, the master of his fate. It take sixty seconds to make him born again. But that's not Preston's fault. The weakness is in the script. Yes, it's true. Killing wild animals who mean you no harm makes a man out of you.Also left out of the script -- because how could it possibly have been put in? -- is Hemingway's showing us the thoughts of the wounded lion who charges and is shot dead. (The lion on the screen really is shot dead.) The movie could be interpreted as an insult to womanhood everywhere, but I found it a tense, concise, black-and-white movie that was a big improvement over some other Hemingway stories that were splashed across the screen in stupendous, colossal, magniloquent color and hectaphonic sound.The score is by Miklos Rozsa, all of whose scores sounded alike, no matter what the subject. Well, I suppose he had two modalities -- dramatic and Biblical.

Based on a Hemingway short story. And Hemingway knew how to craft stories that epitomized realms of male supremacy. His world was one of combat, African safaris, bull rings… all the places where "real men" constantly had to prove masculine courage. Women were an accessory… the old "Can't live with them, Can't live without them" philosophy.In this movie, all that comes across in spades. Robert Preston is Francis Mocamber, led around by the nose on a chain by his wife Margaret, played by Joan Bennett. They hire great white hunter Robert Wilson, portrayed by Gregory Peck, to guide them on safari. In the Mocamber marriage it's the wife who wears both the pants and the skirt. The trip is no picnic in the jungle but a miserable, forced emotional trek where the two men just get worn out by Margaret's constant authoritarianism and general bitchiness. Tragedy ensues…who woulda guessed it?!Not much more to be said. If you subscribe to the Hemingway universe, this movie is for you.

The same year that he made the magnificent "Gentleman's Agreement," Gregory Peck portrayed a safari tourist guide in this 1947 film.Joan Bennett is really something as she portrays a woman apparently trapped in a loveless marriage. Bennett is constantly condescending to her husband, Robert Preston, who gives a terrific performance as the emotionally scared man, afraid of life, a coward, who seems to attain manhood, only to meet up with a tragic end.Peck allows his kindly image to continue as the safari leader who falls for Bennett; his part called for more rugged individualism and would have best suited Robert Mitchum.The ending is questionable. Does the Bennett character get exonerated or imprisoned? What were the real circumstances that led her to pull the trigger?

This Zoltan Korda adaptation of Hemingway's bitter tale of big game hunting and marital infidelity is the best movie adaptation of this author's work I have ever seen. Only Gregory Peck seems miscast in what is basically a Trevor Howard part, but this doesn't bring the movie down, it merely limits it. As the superficially charming, boyish, gregarious and basically not very nice Macomber, Robert Preston is brilliant, and he gives a daring, emotionally open performance. Joan Bennett is good as his wife, better than Peck but not perfect casting, either. What makes the movie work is its nasty story, and Casey Robinson's excellent and correct interpretation of it. The Hemingway mood, macho and misogynist, and misanthropic more than anything else, is caught to such perfection one might almost suspect that he was technical adviser (he wasn't). British East Africa is given the Tarzan treatment on screen, typical of the forties but for some difficult to take now. I find that it works, as Tarzan and Hemingway weren't a million miles apart in temperament and values, though I imagine that Tarzan was nicer fellow to get along with.