Waste of time

Good start, but then it gets ruined

Absolutely Fantastic

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

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?

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.

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.

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!