The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Hemingway's Snows of Kilimanjaro starts with a terse and inscrutable paragraph about a dead leopard atop a snow-clad African mountain. That paragraph stopped 20th Century Fox dead in its tracks. Faced with the problem of going along with an essentially plotless and often unfathomable character study or scrapping it for a more conventional plot, 20th Century screenwriter solved it by choosing neither and writing in a mass of extras and animals instead. The result is a spectacular mudflat of a film, neither good Hemingway nor good on its own.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro is about an unhappy writer, dying of gangrene under a treeful of vultures while he thinks in flamboyant technicolor flashback thoughts about his misspent life and the stories he has failed to write. Hemingway used those flashbacks effectively to tell you a little about his writer: 20th Century Fox uses them only to sneak in one colossal scene after another. Thick and fast they come: Gregory Peck by the Seine, Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner at the bullfights and in the Spanish civil war, Gregory Peck and Hildegarde Neff splashing about the Riviera, Gregory Peck, friendly natives, and several hippopotami in an African river. All this is interpolated into a clinical, wince-by-wince history of the progress of Peck's gangrene. By the time things really look black for Peck, one has only the impression that if he was really so unhappy doing all these things, he deserves to die.

The overwhelming defect about Snows is that it is based on a formation used in the original book to develop a character, yet disembowels character study by substituting pageantry for perception. It seem like a waste, somehow.