Safari Watch: Mogambo (1953)

Gable is just gonna take a peek right there on the poster

Watched:  03/15/2026

Format:  TCM on DVR

Viewing:  First

Director:  John Ford

This is a movie where Clark Gable's dilemma is choosing between Grace Kelly and Ava Gardner and I have never felt less sympathy toward any man in a predicament.  

Mogambo (1953) is a lavish spectacle of a picture, shot on location in multiple African countries, and probably John Ford's answer to The African Queen, which was released in 1951 and won all sorts of Oscars.  Clark Gable plays a 1950's Great White Hunter, now catching live animals for zoos, circuses, etc...  He lives in deep bush country and rarely ventures out (he must really stock up on Brylcream during those trips).  He works with an Englishman he calls "Brownie", and a thug of a Russian, as well as a large coterie of local labor.

Ava Gardner is a nice enough girl from the New York club scene who has come to Gable's jungle headquarters to join a maharajah on safari - but her suitor has already left by the time she arrives.  And they're so far out, the next boat isn't due for a week.  

Gardner and Gable spar a little, but it's also obvious they start having sex.  

She's due to leave on the next boat when a British couple arrives, the husband a well-heeled anthropologist, and Grace Kelly his proper wife.  They want to go into the lowlands and find some gorillas and record audio.*

Gardner doesn't quite make her way out as the boat wrecks a few miles up river and she has to return.  But she and Gable are already quits.  And - it becomes clear - Gable and Kelly are developing eyes for each other.  

I can absolutely see a remake of this film as a big, sprawling affair - maybe a multi-part mini-series.  There's plenty of unexplored narrative lanes to check out, and a slow burn romance between all parties could be interesting.  The tough thing about the movie, in fact, is that it seems to nearly rush parts of the story in order to get everything in during the near two-hour runtime.  

Do much focus is put on Gardner's appearance, it's oddly easy to forget that Ava Gardner is a really good actor.  She's fantastic in this movie - by far the better part than Grace Kelly's character, who feels like Melanie from Gone With the Wind discovering her libido.  But, yeah, this is a John Ford movie and he doesn't suffer bad takes or actors by 1953.  Gable is still dick-swinging his way through the movie, and I'm not sure he ever stopped that til The Misfits.  

I won't say what happens, but it's a corker of an ending.

Fun fact #1:  the word Mogambo is completely made up and I don't think anyone says it during the movie.  Insane.

Fun Fact #2:  this is a remake of Red Dust which a younger Clark Gable already starred in about 20 years prior.  And which my dad's step brother once told me was very racy, in a way I could tell meant a lot to him as a young man.

Yeah, the movie is essentially a safari in some ways that would have felt remarkable in a pre-basic-cable-documentary way.  Elephants, gorillas, cheetahs, rhinos, hippos...  Heck, we get an actual irritated Black Panther at the start.

Mogambo is worth watching as a 1950's movie that turns the camera on the local people (but, oddly, all men, I think).  Ford manages to capture some footage that likely would have been pretty unique in American cinema at the time, capturing scenes that are staged, sure, but also have a sort of authenticity to them with a cast of hundreds vibe.  And, when you consider what serials and B pictures were doing to show "darkest Africa" in the 1950's, this is nothing short of miraculous.  

I'll short-hand and say, yeah, this is pretty boilerplate colonialism white people nonsense.  Do not look for deeper meaning here because of the locale or who is on screen.  I think we're into the 1990's before someone really says "you know, all those people are people" - even Out of Africa, which is a hell of a movie, struggles with that and is about white folks having romance in a place that isn't their usual haunt.

*It's worth noting here, gorillas were believed to be myth for about two hundred years and weren't described by science until the 1840's.  They weren't seen for decades and only formally recognized in 1902.  The 20th Century's pop culture interest in gorillas and apes (see:  Tarzan, King Kong, etc...) is a natural product of amazement and ignorance - assuming such large apes with scary teeth must be ferocious.  Zoology and naturalism was a thriving study for gentlemen at the turn to the 20th century, as well as circuses, so pretty swiftly, gorillas became huge in the pop culture consciousness as a jungle beast that probably wanted to kill people.  All of which is to say, the treatment of gorillas in this movie is born from the same ignorance and feels positively nuts watching on screen if you've ever seen a documentary.