I'm a 19 year old student and happened to watch Mogambo recently. I just have a few questions:
Were women really that stupid back then or does the movie just depict them like that?
And how can Clark Gable's character manage to be soo manly, romantic and dreamy? which leads me back to my first question.
movie styles change you know? Look at Woodstock--my generation. Ever seen such unhip people, and hippies no less. Ah, but back then...waaaay cool! What youth now consider cool will eventually seem, you'd better believe it, DUMB!
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If you think they appear stupid here, you should see them in Red Dust. This movie was remake of Red Dust, made 20 years earlier and with Clark Gable in the exact same role, and the way the women were represented almost made me cringe!And, while I actually love both movies, I do see your point about the representation of women.
But you're judging it by modern standards, and you have to remember that when you're viewing old films you have to sort of suspend your views on such things in order to appreciate them. In this day and age, a movie depicting women like this would be burned.
Hang on. Did I hear someone say "American Pie"? Objectification of women in THIS day and age?? Hmmm.
Fiddle-dee-dee!
Are you Debbie Reynolds?
Help stamp out and do away with redundancy
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The question is are YOU really that stupid, lusso250, it's a fair question to ask.
Why do you feel the women were stupid? Linda certainly knew how to manipulate men. She had her cake and Gable too. I got the impression it wasn't her first affair. Her husband was by far the most clueless character.
I thought that at the beginning, when her husband gets sick, she was not mad at Gable for his callous attitude toward her husband as she pretended, but was angry that he didn't take her hysteria as seriously as she hoped he would.
Yeah, but Ava Gardeners character thought the hippo was a kangaroo, for example. Doesn't really have anything to do with intelligense, just... why wouldn't she know that?
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It was a rhino, not a hippo...
shareOh. That's embarassing. Sorry.
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But wasn't Ava's character a safari explorer? I think she was being sarcastic in calling the hippo a kangaroo.
In my opinion Ava Gardner's character was naturally somewhat intelligent but hopelessly uneducated, while Grace Kelly was just the opposite. I didn't think of them stupid while watching the movie, but they aren't particularly smart. However, it is integral to the plot for them to be that way, so I wouldn't call this movie chauvinistic or something. I highly doubt all women were like this back then.
"You know what I want? I want yesterday."
No, she really didn't know how to identify the animal; her formal schooling was limited. And she wasn't a safari explorer. It's a bit vague, what she is, so we can assume that she's some kind of entertainer/Holly Golightly type.
shareYeah, but Ava Gardners character thought the hippo was a kangaroo, for example. Doesn't really have anything to do with intelligense, just... why wouldn't she know that?
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How about, she grew up before tv came around, and at a time when you probably didn't read a lot about exotic animals in natural history class at school? Supposing that Eloise comes from the eastern U.S., the stuff about any kind of animals or flowers in her school books would have focused heavily on the ones in her own country. If she hadn't been to a major zoo at some time, she would never have seen neither a kangaroo nor a hippo in real life, and any encounter with pics of a hippo would have been a rare occurrence. Her schooling is likely to have been limited, but honestly many middle-class women who had stayed at school till they were 18 at the time would still have been low on occasions to really learn what kind of animals hippos or kangaroos were.
Linda, on the other hand, knows about what a chastity belt is, as hinted in the river scene. But then she's an educated woman.
I agree the two ladies are not depicted as ultra smart (not to mention those natives), but on the other hand they are far more eloquently verbal than many young women today - okay, that's because this is based on a stage play. Courtesy of the screenplay writers.
You are a lunatic, Sir, and you're going to end up on the Russian front. I have a car waiting.
It was the boring stupid acript that made the women appear stupid and the whole movie a waste of a top director, big name actors and maginificent scenery. That is often the problem with movies based on stage plays, they are often too wordy and padded with trivial chit-chat. There are many notable exceptions of course.
shareI saw this again recently and could not believe how stupid both female characters were. The Gardner role in particular mistaking a rhino for a kangaroo?! And never having heard of an anthropologist. I'm not sure what the filmmakers were after here I guess she's supposed to be the sympathetic everywoman but instead she's just a moron. Then there's Kelly, a hysterical twit. Gable is the only one whose character has any dignity and so he gives the best performance along with the third chimp on the left.
shareI'm trying to watch it right now on TCM but frankly the acting is so over the top ridiculously bad, it is distracting me from everything else.... including the story, plot, setting, characters and alleged stupidity of the women.
shareOkay, for one thing I believe Gardner's character was joking when she called the rhino a kangaroo b/c of the way she looks at Gable; as if he thinks she's dumb so she was playfully going along w/ it seeing if he'd realize she's not as stupid as he thinks she is.
As far as the female characters - don't we all act like idiots when we're in love?!?!?!
"Are you going to your grave with unlived lives in your veins?" ~ The Good Girl
A half century ago women had to be portrayed as incompetent in order for the Gable/Cooper types to come across as 'manly' and 'heroic.' That's just the way it was.
Anyone know when the first strong woman movie got boxoffice success???
Reading through the posts, I think people are going overboard and also mixing education with intelligence.
1. Rhino for kangaroo. I think was a joke, as Ava later showed she knew that kangaroos had pouches in which to carry their young.
2. Anthropologist--Being long enough in the tooth to have interacted with older generations back in the forties and fifties, I think it useful to point out that most people of those generations were not educated beyond the eighth grade. Many did not even get that far. They had to drop out to go to work. Neither of my parents graduated from eighth grade. That didn't mean they weren't intelligent. My father could tell the amount he should be paid for a 400 pound hog if the price was 3.25 cents per pound in seconds, figuring it out in his head. He probably wouldn't have had the slightest idea what an anthropologist was. He was never taught that and it was not relevant to his life as a farmer.
3. I think it very obvious in this movie that Grace was well-educated and Ava was not, and this was important in establishing character. Ava may have been down on herself as a "soiled dove" but she also felt inferior as a woman from a poor background and with little education interacting with an upper-crust British lady.
4. As for Gable's character, I don't think he was well-educated, but he had a great deal of knowledge about animals because that was his business.
My bottom line--I think one gets more out of movies by coming to them and by trying to understand why the characters behave and talk like they do. Remember these movies are from a different world. The screenwriter is giving hints about the backgrounds of his characters. We see without being expressly told that Ava probably had a harsh background, is not well-educated, and, by the way, is deeply religious. Audiences in 1953 would have understood this easily and probably would not have thought of using "stupid" to explain her.
People at that time were more educated than today. Most went to high school, which was more academically rigorous than college is now. Not as many went to college as today; however, college today is more about ideological indoctrination than education.
shareIts not that women were so stupid, but the acting was horrible. Ava Gardiner couldn't act her way out of a paperbag in this movie. It was all about her looking sexy...
This is just a lousy, over-rated movie. There are great ones like "Casablanca" "All About Eve" and so on.
Everyone's allowed an opinion, but I love Mogambo because it i so corny and outdated..."Casablanca" on the other hand I find extremely over-rated and tedious. To each his own.
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