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.
I think it important you put the movie in its proper prospective. Remember the place women occupied in the post-war period:
We have here in Gardner's character, a 30 year-old (ish) woman. Now think about that woman's past: Born in NY in '22 or '23, she was 6 or 7 when the Great Depression hit. She grew up in a time when every member of the family was out working any menial job just to make enough to feed the mouths in the house. At the age of 18 or so, the entire world was thrust into a World War, and most women without skills ended up working in war factories making around 30 dollars a week. She meets and marries a fella who is then blown out of the sky, and after the war she is a 22 or 23 year-old widow with no skills and $10,000 from her husband's military life insurance ($122,500.00 in today's dollars.) She (according to the movie) went a little wild and on a self-destructive streak, and seven years later ended up in Africa.
Does anyone here think this is the making of a Rhodes Scholar? She was all balls and brass, but I don't expect her to be able to discuss quantum physics; her school was the school of hard knocks, and there ain't a lot in the way of world culture in it...
The Grace Kelly character was the exact opposite: a 27 year-old well-educated but sheltered upper-class Brit. Her first escapade into the real world is with a larger-than-life big game hunter. She's not the person who is going to easily cope with the raw meat eating and rifle-toting male without a little quiver in her nethers...
..Joe
Or as my daughter would say, "Mom, it's a movie. They're supposed to act that way."
Besides, any man that would choose the virginal Linda over Kelly (ok, that's her last name, I know. But it fits!) needs to have his head examined. But that's what I love about the old movies. You even had Grace Kelly recoiling in horror with her hand to her mouth when she thought the gorilla was going to charge. Now I've gotta see Red Dust. Thank God for the library and Netflix! With the networks taking off Harry's Law and the next season of Big Brother, my VCR is gonna be humming!
"I can never touch meat until it's cooked. As a youth I used to weep in butcher's shops."
You even had Grace Kelly recoiling in horror with her hand to her mouth when she thought the gorilla was going to charge.
It was 1953. And he was Clark Gable. Clearly, you're too young and stupid to grasp that simple concept. College doesn't make you intelligent. That's quite obvious in your case.
Actors are mere products of a good writer's imagination
I don't know if they were stupid or not (though I suppose it inflates your 'I'm-oh-so-modern' pomposity to think so) But I'd take a fair bet on the fact that Kelly and Gardner were far better looking than the nose-in-the-air geek of a student who asked the question.
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