The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

(On Cable TV, November 2020) Some movies come with impressive pedigrees, and so The Snows of Kilimanjaro can boast of being based on a Hemingway short story. It’s certainly in the grand dramatic tradition of other Hemingway adaptations: The framing device has Gregory Peck playing a writer dying on the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro and flashing back to earlier episodes of his life. You can see here an early attempt at the kind of epic film that would come to dominate the later half of the decade: going through decades of history and many foreign locations (although much of the film is visibly shot in the studio), it’s meant as a grand tragic statement, a sweeping romance and a summing-up-a-life kind of film. The effect is slightly ruined by the unexpectedly happy ending invented for the film, although it does end the film on a more positive note than you’d expect. Some of the resonances with other Hemingway stories get predictable (oh no, another love interest killed while working in ambulances during the Spanish Civil War!), but that only counts if you’re familiar with the Hemingway-Hollywood corpus. Otherwise, The Snows of Kilimanjaro is very close to what we think of when we picture “old-school Hollywood romantic drama” for better or for worse—I found it a bit long, a bit predictable, a bit dull and a bit overdone. But so it goes.