Mogambo (1953)

BACKGROUND​

Mogambo was Ford’s most financially successful film which is hard to imagine considering how overlooked it was by film scholars over the years failed to detect the immensity of its artistic accomplishment. It is hard for many to believe that a safari film with a love-triangle at its center could be of great social significance.

Yet it is interesting to compare Mogambo to the more intellectually ambitious adaptation of Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro directed by Henry King in 1952 starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward. Despite King’s highly profitable achievement, it is Ford’s film that continues to dazzle critics, scholars and film buffs to this day while The Snows of Kilimanjaro seems to be fading into the mists of time.  

PLOT SUMMARY

An African hunter is torn between a wandering playgirl and an anthropologist’s wife whose proper upbringing intrigues him enough to consider breaking up a marriage.