The Macomber Affair (1947) User Reviews

One of the more successful attempts to film a Hemingway story...

[Doylenf · 7/10 · 23 January 2007]

THE MACOMBER AFFAIR has to be rated a success for the mere fact that it finally brings a Hemingway story to the screen pretty much intact and the way he wrote it. GREGORY PECK may not be the perfect choice to play the guide escorting a quarrelsome JOAN BENNETT and ROBERT PRESTON on a safari, but he acquits himself well enough in the role.

I found it a lot more satisfying than the later SNOWS OF KILIMINJARO in which Peck again was cast in the lead as a Hemingway white hunter in Africa. Although that film had the advantage of Technicolor and more expensive trappings, THE MACOMBER AFFAIR achieves more of an edge by being photographed in somber B&W, even though some of the stock footage and backgrounds are obviously studio shots.

Bennett is fascinating as the woman full of scorn for her husband and gradually showing her interest in Peck while Preston's resentment begins to turn paranoid. Miklos Rozsa's score gives it a film noir feeling despite the jungle setting--and it becomes a war of nerves before the satisfying conclusion.

Well worth watching for some interesting performances.

Safari Is A Man's Game

[bkoganbing · 8/10 · 20 September 2011]

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.

The performers make this

[jjnxn-1 · 8/10 · 15 August 2013]

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.

Hemingway would have appreciated this journey

[kartrabo · 14 May 2000]

The writing team of Casey Robinson and Seymour Bennett adapted Ernest Hemingway's "the Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" into a solid screenplay which enlarged upon the subtle themes of the original. A wealthy couple(Robert Preston,Joan Bennett) arrive in East Africa ostensibly for a safari vacation but it soon becomes apparent that they are ill-matched and resentful of each other's failings.Their safari guide,Gregory Peck,attempting to conduct things professionally,becomes an unwilling spectator to their petty arguments and vicious insults.But as the party trek through the jungle in search of game the true personalities of the warring couple emerge playing havoc with Peck's sympathies and his growing interest in beautiful Bennett.An ironic twist of events await these adventurers as they pursue game more dangerous than they bargained for. An enriching score by Miklos Rozsa,the superb direction by Hungarian director Zoltan Korda,and fine performances by the 3 principals(especially Preston's paranoid tycoon) all serve the viewer with a gripping drama.

Be my Macomber Coleen Baby

[sol-kay · 6/10 · 17 August 2013]

****SPOILERS**** It's in the early dawn hours when an airplane with the body of rich tourist and safari hunter Francis Macomber, Robert Preston, lands at Nairobi Airport that we get the story of what exactly happened to him and how he was killed. Going out hunting cape buffalo with his white hunter guide Robert Wilson, Gregory Peck, and man or macho man hating wife Margaret, Joan Bennett, Francis ended up with a bullet in his back. That while trying to hold off together with Wilson a wounded charging 1,200 pound cape buffalo. In just how Francis ended up that way we go into a long flashback that had to do with his martial problems with Margaret who couldn't stand the very sight of him. Being a coward at heart Francis loved to bully around those who couldn't fight back. But at the same time he looked or sucked up to those who were in positions of power over him.

Right away Margaret started to make eyes at the handsome and courageous Robert Wilson in him being everything that her wimpy husband Francis wasn't. Yet at the same time in being a women she hated Wilson for going out in the bush or savanna and gunning down helpless wild animals not for food or protection but just for the sport, and getting paid to do it, of it. Francis who screwed up the hunt for a 400 pound lion by not putting it down with a kill shot later, in tracking the beast down, wet his pants and panicked when the injured lion, that Wilson put down, charged at him with his disgusted wife Margaret not far from the scene. Now more then ever trying to show both Margaret & Robert Wilson what a real man he is Francis was determined to gun down much bigger game to prove to them and everyone else his worth as a both fearless game hunter and macho man.

****SPOILERS**** It was at the cape buffalo hunt that Francis did in fact prove to himself as well as Robert Wilson that he's got what it takes but at the same time took a bullet in his back killing him! And that bullet was fired by non other then his now hunting cape buffalo and at the same time macho hating wife Margaret. With Wilson together with the two native guides Kongoni & Abdullah, Earl Smih & Hassan Said, present at the scene of the shooting it was their testimony that would in the end absolve or convict Margaret of her husband Francis' accidental death or cold blooded murder. Margaret, who was already cleared of all charges, who's to tell in what she knows about her husband's tragic death is seen going to testify to an follow up inquiry board but we never get to see or hear what she says. The movie ends abruptly as if the movie projector was shut off and not having the usual "The End" splashed across the screen or even the film's ending credits.

A Brief Happy Life.

[rmax304823 · 6/10 · 11 September 2015]

I haven't read Hemingway's short story, "The Brief Happy Life of Francis Macomber", for years but as I recall it was one of his best. The earth didn't move, but the story was pretty good.

One of the reasons I think it was so good was that it left unsaid many of the things that Gregory Peck, as Wilson the safari guide, pours out at the end, as if to an audience of elementary school kids.

Papa had a little thing he used to say. If you sold a script to Hollywood, you drove up to the state line and stopped. The producers stopped on the other side of the line. You threw them the script and they threw you the check.

Peck's character of Wilson, he of the beautiful red face, as Mrs. Macomber, Joan Bennet, calls him, was based on the same character who played Isaak Dineson's husband in "Out of Africa." Not that it matters much but in real life the guide, I think his name was something like Percy or Percival, was British, and the script gives Peck some British locutions that sound odd coming from a man raised in La Jolla.

Joan Bennet is good as the bitchy wife who dominates and insults her husband, Robert Preston. Preston doesn't overplay the cowardly and henpecked bit. He simply looks too masculine to be such a wimp, so it was a good choice.

The story does enter boy's book territory though when Preston first runs from a charging lion, then finds that shooting a couple of buffalo has revitalized him and turned him into a wholly changed man, the master of his fate. It take sixty seconds to make him born again. But that's not Preston's fault. The weakness is in the script. Yes, it's true. Killing wild animals who mean you no harm makes a man out of you.

Also left out of the script -- because how could it possibly have been put in? -- is Hemingway's showing us the thoughts of the wounded lion who charges and is shot dead. (The lion on the screen really is shot dead.)

The movie could be interpreted as an insult to womanhood everywhere, but I found it a tense, concise, black-and-white movie that was a big improvement over some other Hemingway stories that were splashed across the screen in stupendous, colossal, magniloquent color and hectaphonic sound.

The score is by Miklos Rozsa, all of whose scores sounded alike, no matter what the subject. Well, I suppose he had two modalities -- dramatic and Biblical.

miscast

[blanche-2 · 6/10 · 9 January 2015]

From 1947, "The Macomber Affair" is based on a Hemingway short story about a safari. I watched it knowing full well I didn't want to see animals hunted down, so I admit a certain prejudice.

Joan Bennett and Robert Preston are Margaret and Francis Macomber, an unhappy husband and wife who go on a safari guided by hunter Robert Wilson, played by Gregory Peck. Margaret is openly derisive of her husband, whom she considers somewhat of a coward, and he apparently is on this safari to prove his masculinity. It isn't very successful at first, as Francis runs like a rabbit when he's charged by a lion. I don't know who wouldn't, frankly.

Margaret is attracted to Wilson -- again, who wouldn't be, it's Gregory Peck -- and he falls for her. I don't know why because she's a very unpleasant woman. When a tragedy occurs, Wilson has to decide what really happened - was it an accident or deliberate? This film is somewhat miscast, as it required a Peter Finch or Trevor Howard in the Peck role. Peck doesn't come off as much of a big game hunter. Joan Bennett's character is a little too harsh, which I blame on the director, Zoltan Korda. There doesn't seem to be any reason for his attraction to her; she comes off as emasculating.

The film has an ambiguous ending. I didn't care how it ended, which is a major problem -- you should be invested in the characters.

This is an old-fashioned macho Hemingway story that received better treatment than most of his work. Still -- Hemingway is very difficult to film due to his spare language and all that subtext.

If you like seeing animals shot and killed (though I realize they really weren't) so someone can prove his masculinity, this is the movie for you.

Some good points, but also a bit disappointing

[vincentlynch-moonoi · 7/10 · 18 October 2014]

I liked this film the first time I watched it, but liked even more this second time around. Of course, our attitude toward big game hunting in Africa has changed in today's world. But that's just the setting...what the film is really about is courage versus cowardice.

Robert Preston (Francis Macomber) has decided to do some big game hunting in Kenya, in part, apparently to prove his manhood to his not very loving wife (Joan Bennett). Gregory Peck is the professional hungting guide. Preston runs in fear when a lion attacks, only setting up more disdain on the part of his wife. Bennett seems to have designs on Peck. During a later day of hunting, Bennett shoots her husband in the back of the head when an African buffalo charges. The question is whether it was an accident or intentional. Based on the look of Bennett's face when it happens, it seems perfectly clear that it was an accident. Back in the village, the death is investigated by Reginald Denny, the British Police Inspector. The problem is that Peck began to like the husband and questions whether the shot that killed him was actually an accident...after all, Bennett had every motive.

There are a couple of problems with this film. First, it's understandable why Bennett would be attracted to Peck, but why would an intelligent man like Peck's character be attracted to Bennett, who clearly treats her husband so poorly? The other problem is the big game sequences which probably were shot in Africa years earlier. In one, the lion that has been shot with guns only dies from a spear. Huh???

The second problem here is the ending of the film, which I found totally unsatisfactory. It just ended with Bennett walking toward the courtroom door...but we never find out if she was convicted or not. It was almost as if they ran out of money before they finished the film.

Joan Bennett is certainly not a very sympathetic character here, but it's a good (if not totally consistent) portrayal. It does show off Bennett's range when you go from this film in 1947 to "Father Of The Bride" in 1950. She was versatile in both drama and comedy. Her best scene here is when she explains why she had such disdain for her husband. In fact, it will change your whole viewpoint toward her and her husband.

Gregory Peck is fine here -- wasn't he always? Although it mystifies me why his intelligent character would fall in love with a woman like the one Bennett plays.

It isn't often than Gregory Peck was ever out-acted, but he was here by Robert Preston. I wish the script had fleshed out Preston's past just a bit more, but his acting as a man torn between wanting to be courageous, but bordering on cowardice is particularly strong. I wonder if this might not have been his best film.

The film has some good points that make it very watchable, but also some real limitations. But if you focus on Preston's character, you realize he is the movie's real strength. It's a strong "7", although the print seen on TCM is not well preserved.

Absorbing Hemingway Drama

[sobaok · 9/10 · 22 August 2005]

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.

Remarkably okay....

[planktonrules · 6/10 · 11 September 2015]

Considering that "The Macomber Affair" is based closely on a Hemingway story and it stars Gregory Peck, Robert Preston and Joan Bennet, you'd think it would be an amazing film. However, oddly, it left me a bit ambivalent...not a bad film but one I just didn't care for one way or another. Some of it might be the extensive and overly familiar use of stock footage but I think this is only a small part of the problem. Much of it is that the film just never seemed very real or interesting...and it should have been.

When the film begins, you learn that Mr. Macomber (Preston) was shot to death by his wife while they were on a safari. Was it an accident or murder? Well, it's not clear and the events leading up to it and the killing are shown through a long flashback. During this portion of the film, it's obvious the Macombers are not a happy couple. The husband is a bit of a coward and the wife seems contemptuous of him. Into this mess comes a great hunting guide, Robert Wilson (Peck). What's next? See the film.

As I mentioned above, the story was just okay and there's little I hated or loved about the film. And, unusually, I have a hard time putting down in words exactly why...but it just left me feeling curiously detached.

A Hemingway primer on what it is to be a "man"

[rose_lily · 5/10 · 26 August 2013]

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.

White Hunter, Black Hearts

[telegonus · 9/10 · 7 November 2001]

This Zoltan Korda adaptation of Hemingway's bitter tale of big game hunting and marital infidelity is the best movie adaptation of this author's work I have ever seen. Only Gregory Peck seems miscast in what is basically a Trevor Howard part, but this doesn't bring the movie down, it merely limits it. As the superficially charming, boyish, gregarious and basically not very nice Macomber, Robert Preston is brilliant, and he gives a daring, emotionally open performance. Joan Bennett is good as his wife, better than Peck but not perfect casting, either. What makes the movie work is its nasty story, and Casey Robinson's excellent and correct interpretation of it. The Hemingway mood, macho and misogynist, and misanthropic more than anything else, is caught to such perfection one might almost suspect that he was technical adviser (he wasn't). British East Africa is given the Tarzan treatment on screen, typical of the forties but for some difficult to take now. I find that it works, as Tarzan and Hemingway weren't a million miles apart in temperament and values, though I imagine that Tarzan was nicer fellow to get along with.

Macomber Affair ***

[edwagreen · 7/10 · 22 August 2013]

The same year that he made the magnificent "Gentleman's Agreement," Gregory Peck portrayed a safari tourist guide in this 1947 film.

Joan Bennett is really something as she portrays a woman apparently trapped in a loveless marriage. Bennett is constantly condescending to her husband, Robert Preston, who gives a terrific performance as the emotionally scared man, afraid of life, a coward, who seems to attain manhood, only to meet up with a tragic end.

Peck allows his kindly image to continue as the safari leader who falls for Bennett; his part called for more rugged individualism and would have best suited Robert Mitchum.

The ending is questionable. Does the Bennett character get exonerated or imprisoned? What were the real circumstances that led her to pull the trigger?

Hated it!

[stancym-1 · 1/10 · 4 February 2011]

OK, I AM BIASED. I don't celebrate stories that theorize that the way you prove you are a man is you go out and kill a bunch of animals and then mount their heads on a wall. You don't even eat the meat, you just show off what a big man you are, even though you have a jeep, a gun, guides with guns, and everything else on your side and against the animal's.

Even with that said, there is not one truly likable character in this movie. We are supposed to believe that Gregory Peck actually falls in LOVE with the Joan Bennett character? She does nothing but make fun of men and snip their you-know-whats down to the size of raisins for most of the movie...then we are supposed to believe at the end that her hubby "made her that way" so it's not her fault. She also whines a lot. Peck's character might lust after her but for him to claim he's in LOVE? A bit much to swallow....

In any case the best you can do is sort of like Peck in this film and you can't stand the Robert Preston-Joan Bennett couple. It's hard to feel sorry for either, choosing to make each other miserable. I rooted for the lions and/or buffaloes to kill the whole bunch of them but knew they didn't have a chance. It would have made for a better movie.

But just remember, if you kill a lion, that's what makes you a man, according to Hemingway. If you don't, I guess you are not really a man. What an enlightened person HE was!

a man for a moment

[mukava991 · 29 September 2015]

Francis and Margaret Macomber, a wealthy, sophisticated American couple whose marriage is on the rocks, go on an African safari under the supervision of Robert Wilson, a professional game hunter. All Macomber wants to do is to be a "real man" and prove it to his wife by facing and killing dangerous wild animals in her presence. But then boom, she "accidentally" shoots him in the back while trying to protect him from the charge of a wounded buffalo. This moment is the culmination of two days of anguish during which we have learned about Mr. Macomber's fears and obsessions, from his panicked reaction to a charging lion, his subsequent turmoil and feelings of personal redemption after a successful buffalo hunt. Finally he is happy, for the few minutes before his death. Hence Hemingway's brilliant original title, "The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber."

This adaptation is virtually spoiler-proof because it gives away the ending at the beginning. On paper it was a tersely told tale with deep subtext to which the screen version adds dollops of Freudian-tinged expository and explanatory dialogue. For a Hemingway-based film, it's quite talky. Substantial framing material has been added at the beginning and end to explain the Macombers' unstable relationship and a scene midway is awkwardly extended into physical violence to emphasize Macomber's insecurities about his manliness.

Wilson has been Americanized and prettified by the casting of beautiful young Gregory Peck, who actually better fits Hemingway's description of Macomber (played ably but unexcitingly by Robert Preston). Trevor Howard would have been a closer match; the character's colonial- era Brit-flavored dialogue, retained intact in the screenplay, often falls flat delivered in Peck's American accent and he is just too clean-cut cute to convince as a veteran hunter in the hot and dusty wilds. (It is said that Hemingway based this character on Denys Finch Hatton, the real-life big-game-hunting English lover of "Out of Africa" author Isak Dinesen; coincidentally, in the glossy 1985 screen adaptation of Dinesen's story Hatton was effectively Americanized and glamourized by the miscasting of Robert Redford.) Also retained from the original story are numerous remarks about the fair-skinned Wilson's "red face" which make no sense because (a) the film is in black-and-white; (b) Peck's complexion does not lend itself to redness, even theoretically; he is basically as cool as a cucumber throughout. Margaret Macomber's screen embodiment is straightforward and loyal to the source: a glamour puss with attitude, just beyond the flush of youth, played appropriately by Joan Bennett during that interesting phase of her career when she was working with Lang, Renoir and Ophuls.

The outdoor hunting scenes look authentic. Miklos Rozsa intensifies the proceedings with strong musical strokes, but they sound like borrowings from his "Double Indemnity" score from a few years earlier.

The lure of the bush!

[brogmiller · 6/10 · 13 May 2021]

Ernest Hemingway penned his two short 'white hunter' tales in 1936 both of which have been adapted for the screen and starred Gregory Peck. He gives a strong performance as Harry in 'Snows of Kilimanjaro' but in this earlier film he simply cannot rise above his monumental miscasting. Physically he could not be further from the Robert Wilson of Hemingway's imagining who is an Englishman of middle height with sandy hair and a stubbly moustache. During the inner monologues of the original he reveals himself to be extremely cynical and always goes on safari with a double cot as he considers horizontal socialising with the wives of his wealthy clients to be 'a windfall'. In keeping with Mr. Peck's upright persona and dignified demeanour he sleeps in a single cot and is here motivated not by lust but by love which changes the whole complexion of the piece, makes the triangle less sordid and weakens the drama.

The object of his affections is Margot Macomber. As envisaged by the author she is not easy to love and is described as 'being enameled in that American female cruelty'. She represents the type of woman that has made Hemingway 'public enemy number one' in the eyes of feminists. The difficulty for an actress is to avoid making Margot too 'one-note' and Joan Bennett acquits herself pretty well.

The notion that a man only knows what it is to be a man when slaughtering various species of wildlife is of course anathema to the current generation but here it is what makes Francis Macomber such an interesting character. It is a means by which he conquers his fear and thereby liberates himelf, much to his wife's annoyance. His new-found freedom is alas short lived....... Robert Preston gives a beautifully understated performance and the film really belongs to him.

The final line in the book is Wilson's "Now I'll stop". If only the film itself could have stopped there but no! We are subjected to the customary Hollywood morality lesson imposed by the American Production Code in which Margot resolves to face the music and atone for her crime. It was to be another twenty years before this aggravating organisation bit the dust.

The film is capably directed by Zoltan Korda and is not without its moments.

Hemingway's terse dialogue which is eminently suitable for film remains largely intact.

I would strongly recommend reading the original. It won't take you long!

Faithful--up to a point.

[jdemoss · 8/10 · 22 January 2005]

In a certain sense this IS the most faithful filming of a Hemingway story. For one thing, it's probably the only one of his short stories that could be made into a full-length movie without adding some creative padding. (Cf. the first movie version of "The Killers," for instance: it's faithful almost to the letter for the first fifteen minutes, but then has to veer off into fantasy land to fill up the rest of the two hours.)

But in another sense, "The Macomber Affair" misses the point or theme entirely in the way in which a certain element of the plot turns out. This has to do with the relationship between two of the characters. (If I revealed this change I would probably be including a "spoiler," so will refrain from telling any details. If you ever get a chance to see the movie, you'll understand what I mean.) Furthermore, EVERY character is miscast, though I must say that all three of the Principal actors do their best with the parts they've been thrown.

Probably the most interesting thing about the film is that it deals quite directly with Margot's promiscuity--amazing for a movie of its time period. Despite my reservations, I highly recommend the film, and think it would be well worth re-issuing on video or DVD.

Under African Skies

[Lejink · 5/10 · 24 May 2023]

For all it's based on a hunting expedition in the wide open spaces of Africa, this is actually rather a squalid little movie, based on a 1930's Hemingway short-story. Basically a three-hander, it stars Gregory Peck, Robert Preston and Joan Bennett in a love-triangle played out on safari. However even putting to one side the adulterous moral issue at the heart of the drama, it's actually quite difficult from today's viewpoint to have any respect, far less sympathy for any of the three of them considering they get their kicks from shooting defenceless creatures in the wild.

Peck is the experienced hunter-turned-guide charged with helping Preston's mega-rich Francis Macomber to bag a lion and / or a buffalo and in so doing convince his uncaring wife Bennett that inside he really is a big brave man and not the meek, shrinking violet he's been up till now. Personally I can think of dozens of other ways to do this without shooting a lion in the face but we're in Hemingway country and this is the test of masculinity in his world.

Anyway, when Preston then chickens out on an encounter with a charging lion, Bennett needs no more excuse to throw herself at the tall, handsome, fearless Peck's Wilson character. So can Macomber get his mojo back and win back his woman? Well, no he can't, because right at the start of the movie we know he's dead, apparently shot by his wife in an apparent "friendly fire" incident...or was it? In the extended flashback that follows the viewer is led to draw their own conclusions although the Production Code of the day naturally takes a hand in dictating just how we're meant to view the actions of a cheating wife.

There is as you'd expect, some good dialogue no doubt lifted from the original but like I said earlier, it's hard to care what happens to these people given their abominable hobby never mind the dismissive way they treat their native Kenyan helpers. The performances are good in the main but I wasn't convinced by the Peck / Bennett coupling, in fact it's a real surprise when he confesses his love for her to Macomber.

Not without some interest, this dated movie in the end gives out more reasons to dislike than like it and ultimately misses the target.

Is this Love

[bruno-32 · 8/10 · 16 August 2013]

I did not read the short story, so i can only go by what i saw and heard in the movie. It is possible I missed some dialogue along the way that would tell me how long this couple ( Bennett and Preston ) were on the safari, for Peck's character to fall in love with Bennett, who showed a side of contempt of her husband in front of him...now that really should turn a man on, right? The leads do well in their parts, but it was Bennett that surprised me...she was really a 'bitch' as they say. I couldn't see her in this role as her usual natural Blond, but since her transformation of the Hedy Lamarr look ( she dyed her hair black ) cause she was enamored of the Hedy face, as millions of others had at that time, her career got a boost. That said, and the ambiguous ending made an interesting hour and a half for me.

Ernest Hemingway is great writer

[michaelbaram · 8/10 · 25 June 2022]

I've read his book, it is fantastic story of Hemingway.

Unfortunately the movie is just visual picture for it, never more. Even Gregory peck can't do more with the script and miserable movie. Still, literature base, it have some point, nothing more. The book is better!

Game hunters in Africa with naturally a very bad outcome

[clanciai · 8/10 · 25 February 2019]

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.

Hemingway--As I like it

[kijii · 10/10 · 6 November 2016]

This is taunt and good. It presents the way one expects a Hemingway story to present. It held my interest from beginning to end. Is this a love triangle? Is this a film noir set on an African safari?

I liked it because the cast was limited with only three principle characters: Wilson (Gregory Peck) as the guide on the African safari, and a husband and wife, Mr & Mrs. Macober (Robert Preston & Joan Bennett), with deep-set marital problems.

Perhaps, Wilson was right when he said, it is not good to take a woman on safari.

The back and forth emotions that occur on this safari mirror the stages of the safari and uncover the yin & yang of the husband and wife, and finally draw in Wilson too.

It was a good hunt and all was well.

The kills were clean---or where they?