The Snows of Kilimanjaro story

Ernest Hemingway author

Home pages:

The Greatest Literature of All Time

Movies of the Greatest Literature

Selected Authors

Selected Greatest Works

Editor Eric

The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952 DVD)

Buy in U.S.

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

The famous Hemingway short story, "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a simple tale of a writer dying of a wound on a African safari and ruminating over what he sees as the failures of his life. The only film adaptation of this story fills in the lack of dramatic action with flashbacks to events similar to those in Hemingway's other works and in his own life. This makes some kind of sense and need not violate the spirit of the story. But the implementation is lame, and in the end the story is Hollywoodized beyond redemption.

The 1952 film stars Gregory Peck as the writer Harry Street. Peck would seem too urbane to play such a hardboiled character but, in this his second outing as a Hemingway hero, he is actually pretty good as we tour through Hemingway's...I mean, Street's life. In continual flashbacks, we see his early Paris days, his fighting in Spain, his big-game hunting, his success as a novelist, his women. Susan Hayward, as his latest and doting wife, has a melodramatic role that plays on her status as Hollywood's sob-queen of the 1950s.  Ava Gardner, who practically made a career of being Hemingwayesque femme fatales in films of his books and others, simmers beautifully as the great love the writer sacrificed for the sake of his career.

With all the historical interruptions, the present-day relationship of Street and his wife is never given time to gel for the viewer. Yet at the end we are to believe the writer comes to recognize the love he has now and the couple have a joyful reconciliation. Worse, he is thus inspired to recover from his illness—for a heart-warming ending that betrays the short story.

Not a good adaptation of the literary work and not a good film in its own right.

Unbelievably, this mess was a very big hit in its day. It was nominated for Academy Awards in art direction and cinematography.

— Eric