What a waste of my time!!!

Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

I haven't read Hemingway's short story, "The Brief Happy Life of Francis Macomber", for years but as I recall it was one of his best. The earth didn't move, but the story was pretty good.One of the reasons I think it was so good was that it left unsaid many of the things that Gregory Peck, as Wilson the safari guide, pours out at the end, as if to an audience of elementary school kids.Papa had a little thing he used to say. If you sold a script to Hollywood, you drove up to the state line and stopped. The producers stopped on the other side of the line. You threw them the script and they threw you the check.Peck's character of Wilson, he of the beautiful red face, as Mrs. Macomber, Joan Bennet, calls him, was based on the same character who played Isaak Dineson's husband in "Out of Africa." Not that it matters much but in real life the guide, I think his name was something like Percy or Percival, was British, and the script gives Peck some British locutions that sound odd coming from a man raised in La Jolla.Joan Bennet is good as the bitchy wife who dominates and insults her husband, Robert Preston. Preston doesn't overplay the cowardly and henpecked bit. He simply looks too masculine to be such a wimp, so it was a good choice.The story does enter boy's book territory though when Preston first runs from a charging lion, then finds that shooting a couple of buffalo has revitalized him and turned him into a wholly changed man, the master of his fate. It take sixty seconds to make him born again. But that's not Preston's fault. The weakness is in the script. Yes, it's true. Killing wild animals who mean you no harm makes a man out of you.Also left out of the script -- because how could it possibly have been put in? -- is Hemingway's showing us the thoughts of the wounded lion who charges and is shot dead. (The lion on the screen really is shot dead.) The movie could be interpreted as an insult to womanhood everywhere, but I found it a tense, concise, black-and-white movie that was a big improvement over some other Hemingway stories that were splashed across the screen in stupendous, colossal, magniloquent color and hectaphonic sound.The score is by Miklos Rozsa, all of whose scores sounded alike, no matter what the subject. Well, I suppose he had two modalities -- dramatic and Biblical.

Considering that "The Macomber Affair" is based closely on a Hemingway story and it stars Gregory Peck, Robert Preston and Joan Bennet, you'd think it would be an amazing film. However, oddly, it left me a bit ambivalent...not a bad film but one I just didn't care for one way or another. Some of it might be the extensive and overly familiar use of stock footage but I think this is only a small part of the problem. Much of it is that the film just never seemed very real or interesting...and it should have been.When the film begins, you learn that Mr. Macomber (Preston) was shot to death by his wife while they were on a safari. Was it an accident or murder? Well, it's not clear and the events leading up to it and the killing are shown through a long flashback. During this portion of the film, it's obvious the Macombers are not a happy couple. The husband is a bit of a coward and the wife seems contemptuous of him. Into this mess comes a great hunting guide, Robert Wilson (Peck). What's next? See the film.As I mentioned above, the story was just okay and there's little I hated or loved about the film. And, unusually, I have a hard time putting down in words exactly why...but it just left me feeling curiously detached.

OK, I AM BIASED. I don't celebrate stories that theorize that the way you prove you are a man is you go out and kill a bunch of animals and then mount their heads on a wall. You don't even eat the meat, you just show off what a big man you are, even though you have a jeep, a gun, guides with guns, and everything else on your side and against the animal's.Even with that said, there is not one truly likable character in this movie. We are supposed to believe that Gregory Peck actually falls in LOVE with the Joan Bennett character? She does nothing but make fun of men and snip their you-know-whats down to the size of raisins for most of the movie...then we are supposed to believe at the end that her hubby "made her that way" so it's not her fault. She also whines a lot. Peck's character might lust after her but for him to claim he's in LOVE? A bit much to swallow....In any case the best you can do is sort of like Peck in this film and you can't stand the Robert Preston-Joan Bennett couple. It's hard to feel sorry for either, choosing to make each other miserable. I rooted for the lions and/or buffaloes to kill the whole bunch of them but knew they didn't have a chance. It would have made for a better movie.But just remember, if you kill a lion, that's what makes you a man, according to Hemingway. If you don't, I guess you are not really a man. What an enlightened person HE was!

THE MACOMBER AFFAIR has to be rated a success for the mere fact that it finally brings a Hemingway story to the screen pretty much intact and the way he wrote it. GREGORY PECK may not be the perfect choice to play the guide escorting a quarrelsome JOAN BENNETT and ROBERT PRESTON on a safari, but he acquits himself well enough in the role.I found it a lot more satisfying than the later SNOWS OF KILIMINJARO in which Peck again was cast in the lead as a Hemingway white hunter in Africa. Although that film had the advantage of Technicolor and more expensive trappings, THE MACOMBER AFFAIR achieves more of an edge by being photographed in somber B&W, even though some of the stock footage and backgrounds are obviously studio shots.Bennett is fascinating as the woman full of scorn for her husband and gradually showing her interest in Peck while Preston's resentment begins to turn paranoid. Miklos Rozsa's score gives it a film noir feeling despite the jungle setting--and it becomes a war of nerves before the satisfying conclusion.Well worth watching for some interesting performances.