The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952)

What the trade papers reported

The Exhibitor’s issue of 5 Nov 1952 placed the Rivoli’s $32,000 seventh week in a list of Broadway first-runs, during a weekend the paper described as average business. The newsreel listings in the same issue show that Movietone News (Vol. 35, No. 88) carried a story on the film’s Hollywood premiere, shown only in Los Angeles and San Francisco. The paper’s column of trade notes also joked that the early snow falling on many eastern towns was not, whatever some believed, a tie-up for the picture. In Canada, the Canadian Moving Picture Digest of 29 Nov 1952 listed the film in Technicolor “with Gregory Peck” at the University in Toronto, at Loew’s in Montreal for a second week, at the Orpheum in Vancouver and held over at the Palace in Calgary. The same issue reported a roadshow engagement at Ottawa’s Regent Theatre, where manager Bill Cullum charged 75c for matinees, $1 in the evening and 39c for children, with amusement tax included. The Digest described the film as the screen version of Hemingway’s “new book,” though the story dated from 1936. On 8 Aug 1953 the same paper still listed the film at the Met in Winnipeg and the Capitol in Vancouver.

Opening day in New York

The film opened in New York on September 17, 1952, and crowds came out to see Gardner. Why Ava Gardner left Frank Sinatra in 1953, just as his comeback began points out that Sinatra cut his last session for Columbia Records on that same day. The article treats the coincidence as one of the clearest moments in the marriage, her career climbing on the day his was sinking.

Hemingway’s verdict

The accounts of how Hemingway took the film do not agree. According to one report, he disliked the Hollywood happy ending, accepted the money and could not bring himself to see the picture. Yet in a 1954 piece for Look magazine he named the hyena as the best performer in it, a hyena whose voice King supplied from behind the camera. In that same piece he renamed the film The Snows of Zanuck.

The reviews

Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the cinematography “magnificent and exciting” and found the color production “full of brilliant detail and surprise.” He praised Peck’s “burning temper and melancholy moods,” and found Gardner “pliant and impulsive” in a part he judged as “soggy and ambiguous” as any in the film. Variety saw a blend of “high adventure, romance and symbolism,” called the color “beautiful” and wrote that “Miss Gardner has never been better.” The same review said the script enlarged the short story considerably while keeping Hemingway’s leaning toward mysticism. Harrison’s Reports called the film “at once absorbing, exciting, and fascinating.” The Monthly Film Bulletin dissented: it heard the Hemingway dialogue as “stilted and a little dated” on screen and said that letting Harry live made the picture “a naive kind of spiritual success story.” Among later critics, Craig Butler of AllMovie wrote that the film has not aged well but praised its locations, its art direction and the romantic chemistry between Gardner and Peck. Bowker’s Directory called it “the popular ‘celebrity film’ of its time.”

On the set, as later accounts tell it

Peck’s injury is the best-recorded story of the shoot. On April 8, 1952, he wrenched his knee while carrying Gardner in a scene, and work halted for 10 days while he recovered at his Pacific Palisades home. For the encounter with the hyena, the circus animal trainer Pat Anthony stood in for him. Knef caught influenza at the studio but still sang two Cole Porter songs in the film, and Benny Carter plays in an early scene. The bullfights are not new footage; they were taken from Fox’s Blood and Sand (1941). The unit worked on location in Nairobi, Cairo and the French Riviera, with studio scenes on Stage 14 at Fox. The studio had paid $125,000 for the story in June 1948, and Humphrey Bogart, Richard Conte, Marlon Brando and Dale Robertson were each reported as candidates for Harry before Peck was cast.

The three stars

Peck’s earlier film with King was David and Bathsheba (1951), his third under King’s direction, in which Hayward played Bathsheba. For Hayward, The Snows of Kilimanjaro was one of three huge successes, together with David and Bathsheba and With a Song in My Heart (1952). The film earned $12.5 million at the box office, and Variety put its domestic rentals at $5.6 million. For Ava Gardner, it belongs with Mogambo and The Barefoot Contessa among the 1950s adventure pictures that made her a leading lady. Peck and Gardner made three films together, the first being The Great Sinner (1949), and they were paired again at the end of the decade in On the Beach. Peck later named her his favorite co-star, and when she died in 1990 he took in her housekeeper and her dog.

Readers who want more on Gardner can start with her own memoir, Ava (1990), or Lee Server’s biography, Ava Gardner.