Mogambo (1953), directed by John Ford, is an eternal-triangle story in which earthy Ava Gardner and prim Grace Kelly compete for white hunter Clark Gable. Unfortunately, it's less engaging as a romance than as a travelogue -- it offers spectacular footage of African megafauna (hippos, giraffes, lions, gorillas, etc.).
Whenever I watch classic films set in "the colonies," I'm fearful that the native people will be exoticized and orientalized and trivialized, but I'm happy to report that Mogambo is less offensively Tarzanish than most -- setting aside a couple of embarrassing "fakelore" episodes. I would have been even happier if the Africans weren't just animated wallpaper -- bearers or rowers or dancers or spear-throwers -- and that they weren't depicted as entirely subservient to their white overlords. Mogambo is based on Victor Fleming's pre-Code Red Dust (1931) -- a much more sensual film than Mogambo and one which allowed Jean Harlow lots of room to wink and flirt. It's most odd that the glamorous sexy hunter in both Red Dust and Mogambo is played by Clark Gable - a rare example of filmic auto-reprising. He's hyper-masculine, at age 30, in Red Dust but in Mogambo it's too too obvious that his hair has been dyed a shiny black. When he pounces on Ava and Grace and mashes their mouths with unpersuasive 50s kisses, it is taken for granted that both ladies will immediately grow weak in the knees.
I grew even less Gable-dazzled when I discovered a weird anecdote in Donald Sinden's recollection of the filming of Mogambo. (Sinden played the part of Grace Kelly's spineless, intellectual, oblivious husband). Sinden reports that (prepare yourself to be stunned and disillusioned):
before leaving camp on the first morning [of shooting] I had been told to report to the hair-dressing department's tent, where I found the make-up men armed with electric clippers: 'I have to remove the hair from your chest.' 'Whatever for?' I asked, 'Orders.' It transpired that Clark [Gable], whose chest was completely devoid of hair, had always insisted that no other actor should appear on film exposing a hirsute breast. This included any member of the crew not wearing a shirt as well. He considered it a slight on his masculinity.
Surely, this is one of the most bizarre anecdotes in movie history. The King of Hollywood, the legend whose mere presence famously set roomfuls of maidens all a-quiver, was so sexually insecure that he required mass depilation of cast and crew! Follicular fragility! Big-time nuttiness?
Question: was it in Clark's contract that he had the right to dictate the degree of chest shagginess of cast and crew -- or was he just throwing his weight around? Suppose Sinden or some sweaty best boy had refused the electric clippers. Would the production have ground to a halt?
It's well known that since the time of Samson and probably before, male hair has been associated with strength, but even Delilah didn't set out to defoliate every man in Gaza.
But Clark Gable's chest hair insecurity is only Donald Sinden's second most curious anecdote. Even more astonishing, at least to me, is that Sinden suffered from "negative buoyancy." Negative buoyancy is a condition in which a person is unable to float in water. In Sinden's case, negative buoyancy was discovered, he says, while filming a shipwreck scene in The Cruel Sea (1953). Sinden started to sink and was rescued from drowning by his co-star Jack Hawkins.
Almost all human beings float. Bob like corks. I don't, and neither did my father nor my male descendants. As a family, we're sinkers. I don't know why, except that perhaps we have an eccentric specific gravity or because our swim bladders go on the fritz, like sick fish. We regularly and uniformly plunge to the bottom, like a stone or a heavy lump of lead.
How wonderful to know that there is a dignified name for our peculiar family trait: "negative buoyancy."
And now we can be consoled that we're not alone.
There's got to be a support group for the negatively buoyant out there, somewhere.
Lead.
Posted by: Jack Point | July 31, 2020 at 02:52 AM
Stone.
Posted by: Wilfred Shadbolt | July 31, 2020 at 02:50 AM