The 1947 drama The Macomber Affair stars Gregory Peck as Robert Wilson, a down-on-his-luck American big-game hunter in Nairobi hired to lead a rich American couple on a trophy hunt. As the film opens he's accompanying Margo Macomber (Joan Bennett) back from the savanna. Also on the plane is her husband's corpse. The story of their fateful safari spins out in flashback as the authorities push the stoic Robert for the details: the failing marriage and spiteful behavior beneath the façade of a happy vacation for Margo and husband Francis (Robert Preston), the growing attraction between Robert and Margo, the determination of Francis to find a renewed sense of strength and confidence on the hunt. Classic Hemingway themes and macho values played out on the author's favorite field of battle: man against nature.
In 1941, Samuel Goldwyn announced that he was making a film of the story with directors Howard Hawks and Victor Fleming and star Gary Cooper, to be shot in Africa. The film was never made, and a few years later producer-screenwriter Casey Robinson, a veteran of Captain Blood (1935), Dark Victory (1939), and Now, Voyager (1942), optioned the story with an eye toward Gregory in the lead. Robinson had brought Peck to Hollywood in 1943 for his first film, Days of Glory (1944), and the actor still owed him a picture. "I happened to love the story," Peck later recalled, and he took an active role in developing the film. He was "kind of an uncredited coproducer on the picture," in his own words. It was Peck who suggested Zoltan Korda, the Hungarian-born director of The Four Feathers (1939) and Sahara (1943), films with exotic locations and muscular action. Joan Bennett, a former ingénue whose career was getting a second act as a femme fatale in the films of Fritz Lang, was cast as the beautiful but bitter Margo. Robert Preston, a sturdy second lead in numerous films, had been absent from the screen since leaving Hollywood to serve in World War II. The role of Francis Macomber, a complex and complicated character, marked a welcome return to the movies.
The filmmakers sent a second unit to Africa to film scenes on the veldt but the actors never left North America. Instead, they found a location near Tecate, Mexico that had previously doubled for Africa in the early sound adventure Trader Horn and moved south for six weeks of shooting in the desert, matching shots of the actors firing into the distance with footage of wild animals on the African plains.
"He could be could be bad-tempered," Peck later said of director Korda, "but not to me; he liked me and I liked him. He was one of my favorite directors." Korda did not, however, like co-producer Benedict Bogeaus, a flashy Chicago real estate mogul turned independent producer. During a difficult scene, Bogeaus arrived on the set during to share his brainstorm. "I finally figured out what we should call the picture," he called out to the director, interrupting his concentration. "Congo!" According to biographer Michael Freedland, Korda pulled out his pocketknife, walked up to Bogeaus, and pressed the blade to his body. "You stupid son-of-a-bitch," he shouted. "You get off my set and if you ever come back here again I'll cut your liver out." According to Peck, he wasn't seen again.
While Hollywood was notorious for rewriting the books it brought the screen, Robinson had a reputation for honoring his source material. For The Macomber Affair he added the flashback structure and changed Wilson from British to American, but otherwise made very few changes to Hemingway's story. The Production Code censors, however, demanded changes to the ending to meet their requirements that characters be "punished" for their bad behavior. The filmmakers reached out to Hemingway to help them brainstorm an alternative that would satisfy the censors while preserving the author's sensibility, but Hemingway never responded. "We appealed to Hemingway to write the new ending himself," recalled Peck. "We appealed by letter, by telephone, by telegraph. Nothing! Total silence!" So the filmmakers came up with their own ending, which Peck later described as "the best and least compromising ending we could think of." But even while the ending was criticized, reviews were positive. It was "a brilliantly good job-the best yet-of bringing Hemingway to the screen," read the notice in Time magazine.
Peck returned to Hemingway five years later for The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), a glamorous Technicolor production co-starring Susan Hayward, Ava Gardner, and Hildegard Knef, but the more modest The Macomber Affair, independently produced in black-and-white, is still considered the superior adaptation.
Bibliography The Bennett Playbill, Joan Bennett and Lois Kibbee. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970.
Gregory Peck, Michael Freedland. Morrow, 1980.
Gregory Peck: A Biography, Gary Fishgall. Scribner, 2002.
Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life, Lynn Haney. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2003.
