Mogambo

“Mogambo” is John Ford’s remake of the 1932 melodrama, “Red Dust.” There is an element of the morbid about the Ford picture made 21 years after “Red Dust” -- both pictures star Clark Gable as a tough “sahib” who seduces two women in an exotic locale but he is on the verge of a ruinous old-age in the latter film. In “Red Dust,” Gable was torn between the prim, if secretly wanton, Mary Astor and the overtly sluttish Jean Harlow; the 1932 film took place in a Vietnam imagined as some rooms equipped with Pier One wicker furniture, perspiration by the gallon, and murky tangle of vines in which rain is always falling. “Mogambo” is a large-scale, big-budget picture, filmed in Uganda and Kenya and Tanganyika; the elderly Clark Gable is a curmudgeonly codger who gropes Ava Gardner, playing the bad girl, and an impossibly prim and young-looking Grace Kelly (she has brunette hair) in the role of the upstanding, but frustrated wife who also loves the dashing white hunter. In “Red Dust,” Gable is handsome, dashing, insouciant, and its plausible that the women would immediately desire him. In “Mogambo,” the girls seem to be fawning over the hero because he’s Clark Gable; Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly desire him, it seems, as a souvenir of film history, as a relic of the great past of the medium -- but there’s no chemistry, no electricity between Gable and his leading ladies and all the jungle-fever lust seems pretty contrived. “Red Dust” is raw, erotic, and sketchy -- the picture is about 82 minutes long. “Mogambo” is a huge, lifeless epic -- it’s fully 40 minutes longer that its prototype and features vast amounts of wild-life footage, an Indian uprising of the kind that Ford staged in “Rio Grande,” although in this picture featuring Masai warriors, and lots and lots of hunting and hiking and canoeing scenes -- periodically both Ava and Grace are threatened by wild beasts that must be subdued by Gable’s great white hunter. The 1953 film is equipped with a laudatory opening title reminding us that it was really made in Africa but this only makes the obvious mis-match between wildlife footage shot in the veldt and jungle and the studio scenes with lurid-looking rear-projection seem more annoying. “Mogambo” is constructed of grainy wild-life footage, including what seem to be authentic shots of mountain gorillas in Rwanda, carefully composed African landscapes staged around the stars -- proto-”Lawrence of Arabia” location work or the kind of location shots that Ford favored in Monument Valley -- and studio sequences filmed with potted plants and vines and foliage so ridiculously green and tangled as to be obviously the work of over-active set decorators. Compared with the raw eroticism of “Red Dust,” “Mogambo” is stately, over-determined, and, yet, also curiously prurient and salacious. In one scene, Ava Gardner observes a bull elephant with its trunk rampant and in full erection and remarks to the virginal Grace Kelly: “Remind you of anyone?” This little tidbit of innuendo is followed by a wise-crack about female genital mutilation that is nothing short of shocking -- it has to be heard to be believed. In “Red Dust,” the leading ladies lounge around in silky lingerie. Ford is more realistic, Ava Gardner wears tight pants and camouflage blouses and she seems curiously dowdy -- in one scene, here breasts seem to be pointed like spear-tips, aimed in opposite directions, and separated by about two feet. Grace Kelly looks confused, pallid and out of place. Ford wants things to be dirty and he stages things to get mud all over Ava Gardner’s ass so that people can look at her buttocks and make comments about them, but he’s fundamentally prudish and, even, Victorian. The bad girl in “Red Dust” was a Saigon whore, nothing more, nothing less. Ava Gardner is a traumatized socialite who spends much of “Mogambo” mooning around baby animals and talking to elephants and giraffes and hippos. Ford even installs a Catholic priest in the center of the film, has Ava’s character submit to confession with him, and, in fact, implies that Clark Gable and the heroine are going to stop on their way out of the jungle to have the missionary marry them. Ford is good with drinking scenes and the penultimate sequence involving Gable and Gardner getting drunk together and encouraging the horrified Grace Kelly to join them for a menage a trois is convincingly nasty -- this seems to be something that Ford imagines with pleasure although it’s not certain whether his interest is in the women or the whiskey. But Ford’s not kinky enough to film anything like the perverse sex scene between the young Gable and Harlow in which the brash starlet uses a phallic probe to sound a bullet wound in the hero’s side. There is one memorable shot in “Mogambo”: as the young wife staggers away from a jungle embrace with Clark Gable, her naïve husband unwittingly asks her to pose for a photograph -- she freezes like a deer in the headlights against a drapery of vines and Hollywood jungle and it is obvious that she is terribly frightened and confused by her lust for the old man, something that her husband doesn’t even suspect. “Red Dust” is the better movie and its really not that good.