The Macomber Affair

This film deserves a DVD release. Excellent script, direction, and editing carry the film into Hemingway's world. The results are excellent. The three leads do very well with their parts. I particularly liked Joan Bennett. Her cynicism and brazen effrontery towards husband Preston held my attention as she carried on an obvious affair with Peck. The dynamic between the three stars smolders across the screen as Preston attempts to "prove" his manhood by killing wild beasts. In true Hemingway style the "big game" adventure turns into one of more human proportions. Pretty bold stuff considering the Production Code was still in full swing. Reginald Denny plays with authority in a minor role.

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.

Taking into account the shortcomings of the period: rear projection and non location filming this is a solid adventure film. Really a three person chamber piece the success or failure of the film rests on the performances of its leads and there it's on solid ground. Both Peck and Preston do good work but the standout is the under-appreciated Joan Bennett. Always at her best as a conflicted character here as a woman turned into a hard article by a bad marriage though subtle gestures and sly looks she gives the film a tough grounded center and she has rarely looked so beautiful. Not having read the book I'm not sure how closely it follows but the film does have a Hemingway feel.

According to the Michael Freedland biography of Gregory Peck, The Macomber Affair was the second of two films he owed Casey Robinson the screenwriter who occasionally produced and directed. The first was Peck's debut film Days Of Glory and for the second since Robinson did not know what he wanted to use Peck for, he let Greg pick the property. As he had just got around to reading the story which had been published a decade earlier in Cosmopolitan Magazine, Peck chose the Ernest Hemingway short story, The Short Unhappy Life Of Francis Macomber, the title shortened to The Macomber Affair for marquee purposes.

Producing this film with Robinson was Benedict Bogeaus who usually did B films with real limited production. A second unit crew did go to Africa and got some real nice black and white jungle footage, but the cast did this one strictly on the back lot. I have to give Bogeaus and Robinson good marks for editing the film shot with the cast in with the background.

In fact this film is a notch or so above Gregory Peck's second film with a Hemingway subject, The Snows Of Kilimanjaro which was shot in Africa. This one is no frills Hemingway with the exception of a changed and cop out ending to please the Code.

Gregory Peck plays the white hunter who escorts Mr.&Mrs. Francis Macomber on a safari where they are trying to recapture the magic that has gone from their relationship. Peck warns them up front that women and safaris don't mix and what follows seems to confirm his point of view.

The Macombers are played by Robert Preston and Joan Bennett and they have the much showier parts than Peck does and they make the most of it. Especially Bennett who essays one of the great bitch roles of all time, successfully poaching on a part that Bette Davis or Barbara Stanwyck would have gone to town with. How that woman just demeans Preston especially after he shows some understandable fear as a newbie in the jungle during a hunt for a wounded lion is really just sad.

Under Peck's tutelage who is the ultimate machismo Hemingway hero, Preston starts losing his inhibitions which Bennett cannot stand. The result is tragedy.

Hemingway's timeless writing and subject matter hold up well for today's viewer. We get a realistic portrayal of Africa that you normally don't see from American studios. The Macomber Affair is a film that fans of all the principal players and Papa Hemingway will appreciate centuries from now.

This is a very turpid Hemingway story, which he must have told out of his own experience as a qualified game hunter in Africa, here acting as a guide (Gregory Peck) for a married couple (Robert Preston and Joan Bennett), the man being very rich and bringing his wife to Africa in a vain effort to impress on her and save their marriage. Of course it turns the other way around. The film starts with his corpse being carried off an airplane and Gregory escorting a very depressed wife down from it, then concentrating on Gregory to deal with the aftermath of the matter in the shape of hangover thoughts, turning to a long flashback, which is the major part of the film. Was it an accident or was it murder? Neither Joan Bennett nor Gregory Peck can anser that question, which will follow you out.

Hunting wild animals, especially when they are of the noble kind like lions, must be perhaps the most despicable sport in the world, especially today, when so many of those finest animals are facing extinction, but this film shows clearly the rotten turpidity and destructive meaninglessness of it as a sport. There is some comfort in that nowadays safari tourists don't shoot animals except by cameras, but there are still abominable poachers around, that should be shot themselves, everyone of them.