The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)
Directed by Henry King, Roy Ward Baker

Film Review

Satisfactory film adaptations of Ernest Hemingway's stories are so hard to come by that it is tempting to conclude that he belongs to that rare category of unfilmable writers.  Whilst there have been many acclaimed films based on Hemingway's work - A Farewell to Arms (1932), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), To Have and Have Not (1944), The Old Man and the Sea (1958) - few, if any, stay true to the author's intentions and most were rejected outright by Hemingway.  The Snows of Kilimanjaro is one of the few Hemingway adaptations that started out with the intention of being as faithful as possible to its original source - a short story of the same title first published in 1936 - but it ended up (as ever) being botched by interference from the studio executives.

It was Darryl F. Zanuck, top dog at at 20th Century Fox, who objected to Casey Robinson's original ending to the film, one which closely mirrored that of Hemingway's original story.  The idea that the main character in a Hollywood film could die in the last reel was anathema to Zanuck, so Robinson was obliged to discard the darkly poetic denouement which made sense of the whole piece and replace it with a rather pointless happy ending, on the assumption that this is what cinema audiences were paying to watch.  Hemingway was naturally bewildered by this bastardisation of his work, and was equally dissatisfied with the inclusion of plot strands which were not in his story and which appear to have been lifted from his other work.  The legend goes that the writer was so displeased with the film that he rang up the studio boss personally to tell him that it was a compilation of his work and should have been released under the title The Snows of Zanuck.

Whilst the Hemingway purists will no doubt hate the film, it is not without merit.  Director Henry King claimed that, of the hundred or so films he made, this was his favourite, and certainly he gets the most out of Casey Robinson's taut, well-structured screenplay.  Leon Shamroy's lush Technicolor location photography gives the film its exotic richness, which Bernard Herrmann's evocative score marvellously accentuates.  It's a shame that the film relies so heavily on matte shots (presumably because the budget would not stretch to allow the stars to travel to the film's far-away locations) as these have aged the film and reduce its visual power considerably.  Fortunately, strong performances from the three lead actors make up for this and the truly awful visual effects near the start of the film are soon forgotten.

In one of his more substantial early roles, Gregory Peck gives a convincingly tortured portrayal of a man who is not only facing death but the even grimmer prospect that his entire life has been a total failure.  Peck apparently based his portrayal on Hemingway's contemporary F. Scott Fitzgerald, the troubled consumptive writer who may conceivably have inspired the original story.  Ava Gardner and Susan Hayward make an effective contrast as the two women in the main character's life, the overt sensuality of the former played against the measured restraint of the second.  Whilst the dialogue doesn't always ring true (and some of it sounds jarringly pretentious), all three actors give it their best shot and bring an exquisite poignancy to the film's more dramatic sequences.  Ernest Hemingway was entirely justified in disliking the film, but it does at least reflect something of the writer's genius for unfussy storytelling and his compassion for his fellow man.

Film Synopsis

Harry Street is on Safari in Africa with his wife Helen when he falls ill with a gangrenous wound.  As he waits helplessly for medical assistance to arrive, Harry looks back on his life and soon realises how little he has accomplished in his chosen profession as a writer.  How quickly he abandoned his high ideals and became a hack purveyor of pulp fiction.  It was whilst he was living in Paris that he had his first success, around the time he met Cynthia Green, his one true love.  Harry recalls the pain he felt when Cynthia walked out on him, not long after she lost their unborn child in an accident.  He recalls their final tragic meeting, under gunfire during the Spanish Civil War.  Harry then remembers meeting Helen, who looked so like Cynthia that he perhaps always mistook her for his first love.  Throughout his life, Harry never seemed to find what it was he was looking for, that essential quality of truth, either as a writer or as a lover.  Perhaps the realisation has come too late...