Aventura

Gable and Garson make for a poor pairing in this overlong limp love story that goes in circles for over two hours. Gable fresh from war service looks like he's aged considerably and his tired abrasive performance shows it.

Harry Patterson (Gable) has a girl in every port and plans never to get tied down. Wandering into a library with a shipmate friend he meets staid and proper librarian Emily Sears (Garson) who is at first put off by the lug but opposites are known to attract and they ending up running off to Reno and getting hitched. But Harry's no land lubber and the two split up but not before Emily gets knocked-up. An oblivious Harry goes back to sea and his old ways but it just ain't the same.

There is little finesse to be found in Gables performance, just bluster. He does a lot of jabbering and doesn't really connect with anyone in the film. Garson's Emily on the other hand is too delicate and restrained to do a one-eighty. Victor Fleming's direction is loose and uninspired and the production values erratic with some terrible back projection.

"Gable's back and Garson's got'em" went the phrase back then but after seeing this you can keep them.

Maybe because STRANGE CARGO, THE HUMAN COMEDY and A GUY NAMED JOE dealt with whimsy and religious fantasy successfully, MGM kept trying with this kind of picture. But HIGH BARBAREE and ADVENTURE (both based on what must have been gassy novels) are dull failures.

I must dissent with the majority view here that ADVENTURE is good and that Clark Gable and Greer Garson are good in it. They are a dismal mismatch as a romantic team and neither is suited to this kind of heavy, 'meaningful' material. In their very different ways, both stars were grounded, practical, sensible, which is not what was needed to bring off this type of romantic fantasy. When they meet and for a long time after, Gable and Garson give too successful an impression of mutual loathing for us to believe later that they have suddenly discovered their great love for each other. Victor Fleming does a very glossy professional job directing this film and both stars get dazzling, dynamically framed closeups and two-shots, but they never seem right for each other. By contrast, in a supporting role, Joan Blondell seems exactly right for Gable, being his female equivalent, having humor and a juicy kind of sensuality.

ADVENTURE is anything but, and the mystical themes never make any sense and are never convincingly connected to the romance. It was a big hit, presumably because people were curious to see these stars together, and to catch Gable's first picture after the war. But this could only have diminished the luster of both of them. And pictures like this must be why Dore Schary was brought into the studio to supplant Louis B. Mayer, who had become lazy and complacent, squandering his two biggest stars on pretentious garbage.

I was 8 years old when I saw this movie and it impressed me so much. I will never forget 3 things in the movie "Adventure". How to hypnotize a chicken; how the water drains out of the tub in a different direction depending on which side of the equator you live; how Clark Gable was yelling at his newborn baby to breathe.It was such a good romance, even to a young girl and I remember how the friend, Mudgin, was afraid of losing his soul. I am 64 years old now and it is still as fresh in my mind as it was in 1946 in Hartshorne, Oklahoma.

This movie is better with each passing year. It is a semi-noir, pre-"reality" - psychological drama of intense beauty.

Clark Gable stars as a staunchly confirmed sea dog, crew leader (called a bos'n) and womanizer who is totally unprepared to meet Greer Garson's character, who forever changes his vision of what is possible in finding love with a woman. Academy Award winner, and beloved character actor Thomas Mitchell ("Uncle Billy" in "It's A Wonderful Life (1946)") plays his too-sensitive-for-this-world side-kick, who becomes Gable's conscience, but at a price.

The script of this drama is lyrically sublime, subtle and quite deep. The fire between the stars is evident and haunting. True 'soul-mate' love is the overt theme of this movie. Existence, conscience, and facing the pain and limits of life, so that you may truly pass into adulthood, are more themes explored here. I view this film regularly once a year and am always inspired by its deep message and raw powerful performances. This isn't your stock Gable. This is a bittersweet post-war love poem.(Really! E. B. Browning is quoted to great effect!)

Gable's "Harry Patterson" has seen tragedy and loss (as had Gable himself, recently losing the love of his life, wife Carole Lombard). He is made restless in search of "it" which he believes only exists in the danger and perils of sea voyaging. He is sickened by the way shipwrecked people, alive and on edge, once rescued, quickly become bored and lose that passionate awareness of their own lives. He is searching for that life where he stays excited and in the passionate present (probably true of many returning war soldiers in 1945).

In Garson's "Emily Sears" he sees "it" for the first time in a woman's eyes. He is intrigued by her equivalent strength and wit, and simultaneously threatened by the risk of pain in losing her. Their love develops as a series of intense battles. She sees a "caged animal" and for the first time a man she might really respect, even though she feels he needs to be reached through all of his rebellion...and rescued.

His actions are escapist (and make great movie scenes)...but sailing away to forget his new "queen," he finds things have changed and we know, as do the other characters, that it is the end of his former life ...even if he doesn't. "Emily" bravely allows "Harry" to figure it out for himself. She doesn't demand any change in him, instead she sends him off to find "it" and risks being without the man that she loves for the rest of her life. Her majesty the queen of MGM, Greer Garson, has never been lovelier.

Joan Blondel is a juicy, ripe 'tomato'(the returning soldiers must have hooted and hollered!). Lina Romay makes an incredible "girl in distant port" and even sings a bit!

Thomas Mitchell is the stand out support. He plays Mudge, the soul and conscience of the free spirited Gable and perhaps of the whole film. He brilliantly helps unite a lost sailor & seeker with what his heart truly seeks.

Watch this film and let it be poetry... just let it play as you marvel at the writing and the actors' eyes. I predict that this movie is about to be rediscovered in a big way. ( By you?)

"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.