Mogambo (Blu-ray Review)
Director
John FordRelease Date(s)
1953 (February 24, 2026)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
A very entertaining adventure/romantic drama made in the wake of MGM’s hugely successful King Solomon’s Mines (1950) and the award-winning The African Queen (1951), from United Artists, Mogambo (1953) was also one of many surefire, multi-star-packed Technicolor remakes MGM produced during the period. In this case, it is a remake of Red Dust (1932), the spicy pre-Code film starring Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, and Mary Astor, with Gable, now older but still ruggedly handsome, also headlining Mogambo. It’s fascinating to watch this version for Ava Gardner channeling Harlow, a stark deviation from her ’50s sultry and mysterious screen persona. But what’s most intriguing about this John Ford-directed hit is its myriad connections to director Howard Hawks’s later Hatari! (1962).
In essence, Mogambo is like a Howard Hawks movie directed by John Ford but without John Wayne, while Hatari! is like a reworking of Mogambo but starring John Wayne, with Hawks shrewdly capitalizing upon and expanding Mogambo’s best elements. (Another connection: Hawks originally wanted Clark Gable for the lead, but he died before production began.) Warner Archive’s restoration of this three-strip Technicolor production, one of the last, is another treat, showing off the gorgeous location cinematography of Freddie Young and Robert Surtees.
Set in present-day Africa, Gable stars as Victor Marswell, an American animal catcher for zoos and circuses, working out of a remote outpost with English business partner John “Brownie” Brown-Pryce (Philip Stainton). The story opens with the unexpected arrival of New York socialite Eloise “Honey Bear” Kelly (Gardner), looking to meet up with a rich maharaja who canceled his safari without telling her, leaving Kelly stranded. Though under-educated and somewhat disruptive, Kelly is also gregarious, gorgeous and game for anything, and she and Marswell become lovers.
But then British anthropologist Donald Nordley (Donald Sinden) and his beautiful if prim wife, Linda (Grace Kelly), arrive, he hoping to go on a safari to record the sounds of wild gorillas. Marswell takes advantage of Nordley’s sudden illness to set his sights on the vulnerable Linda, for which Kelly can do little but watch from the sidelines.
This was just Grace Kelly’s third movie role and only her second leading part after High Noon (1952). The refined blonde beauty she’d all but own from Rear Window forward during her brief film career hadn’t fully flowered, and here Kelly projects an almost baby-faced innocence. She’s certainly not much like the Mary Astor of Red Dust, who exuded an almost dirty sexuality beneath the veneer. (For my taste, Astor was infinitely sexier than Harlow, or Grace Kelly for that matter.) Grace Kelly is in every way almost the complete opposite of Ava Gardner, she almost impossibly beautiful but with a profoundly earthly sexuality—no virgin she. During this time, in movies like the following year’s The Barefoot Contessa, she tended to play unattainable, mysterious goddesses men put on a pedestal; by the time she made 55 Days at Peking she had taken on an almost mythic quality, with nearly all the men madly in love with her. In Mogambo, however, she plays a character that’s part Jean Harlow, part Gardner herself (probably brought out in large measure by director John Ford), part Ford heroine in the Maureen O’Hara mold, and part Howard Hawksian tough dame. Rarely was her talent and appeal used so well, and DPs Young and Surtees photograph her magnificently.
There’s little doubt Hawks used Mogambo as a blueprint for Hatari! One scene has Gardner interacting with a baby elephant that playfully knocks her down into the mud. “Why, we’ll use three baby elephants!” one can almost hear Hawks say. Mogambo is kind of stuck between Tarzan-jungle movie genre concepts of “Untamed Africa,” despite its present-day setting, with art direction and costumes (including pith helmets) that could have been leftover from Stanley and Livingstone, but also with more enlightened views of that continent. Hawks in Hatari! emphatically depicts a quickly modernizing Africa with lots of comfort and conveniences. Where in Mogambo Gable and his men crudely set pit traps with straw, the old-fashioned way, John Wayne & Co. catch animals with heavy-duty, customized jeeps and trucks.
The animal-catching sequences in Hatari! is where all the money shots are. The footage in that would be impossible to do for real today—especially with most of the cast along for the (dangerous) ride—so in Hawks’s film, the romance becomes so perfunctory it becomes funny, with its let’s-get-this-over-with attitude, though the typically sharp Hawksian dialogue keeps it interesting. In Ford’s film, the love triangle among Gable, Gardner, and Kelly is 90% of the show; spectacularly beautiful Africa and its indigenous peoples are merely a colorful backdrop, but the star power is immense. People don’t much remember Elsa Martinelli or Michèle Girardon from Hatari!, or which one winds up with John Wayne and which one winds up with Red Buttons, but the three leads in Mogambo make a lasting impression.
Remastered in 4K from scans of the original black-and-white separations, Warner Archive’s Blu-ray of Mogambo is excellent. The remote location, thousands of miles from any processing lab, combined with the unpredictability of the animals, etc. resulted in a few less-than-perfect shots, and the gorilla footage seem sourced from 16mm stock film, but overall it’s a great presentation with much outstanding footage of both the scenery and the two female leads, particularly Gardner. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is also fine; the all-indigenous musical score comes off well here, and optional English subtitles are included on this Region-Free disc.
Supplements are, again, a little disappointing, limited to an up-rezzed Fitzpatrick Traveltalks short, Land of the Ugly Ducking, and a full HD Tom & Jerry cartoon, Just Ducky. A trailer is also included.
Most enjoyable and now looking better than ever, Mogambo is highly recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV