I Don't Care What He Says, I Don't Hate Clark Gable

When we finished watching Betrayed last night, my dad said he hadn't realized Mogambo would turn me against Clark Gable so much. I'll explain. Spoilers throughout, if you need such a warning for movies made in the 1950s.

With Mogambo, Gable plays Vic, a hunting party leader/animal procurer in Africa. Eloise Kelly (Ava Gardner) shows up, expecting to meet a maharajah who was on a hunting party. But poor Maha was at risk of losing his kingdom, and had already left. So she's stuck until she can catch a ride downriver. Vic's irritated by her at first, but there are some sparks by the time she leaves on the boat with the animals he'd caught for a zoo. Enter Donald and Linda Nordley (Donald Sinden and Grace Kelly). Donald has a bad reaction to a tsetse fly immunization, and while he's laid up, Vic makes some sparks with Linda, right as Eloise returns (the boat got stuck on a mudbar). Vic's leading the Nordleys north, for an anthropological study, and Eloise comes along.

So it goes. Eloise likes Vic, but so does Linda. Vic likes them both, but will more readily admit his affection for the married woman, though not in front of her oblivious, but generally nice husband. Vic does have the decency to eventually feel bad, because Donald's a nice guy, who does care about Linda, but he's too geekishly excited about his work at the moment, and Linda's, I guess impressed with a guy who shoots a panther for her. Ultimately Vic settles things by getting a little drunk, then acting drunker and speaking harshly to Linda, so she'll hate him. Then Eloise makes up a story about Vic drunkenly trying to put the moves on Linda while Donald was out. The Nordleys go home together, Eloise stays with Vic.

Am I supposed to like Vic? He's a two-timer, he's messing around with a married woman. Yes, he ends up shot in the arm for his trouble, and Donald, who really liked him, now probably hates his guts, but he still wound up with a woman who likes him a lot. But I don't know how Eloise can go along with it. She ought to be able to see that as long as Linda was around, she was #2 in Vic's eyes. But it's OK because Linda's gone now? Linda's infidelity is swept under the rug. She didn't seduce Vic, but I'm not sure he seduced her, either. There was a mutual attraction, and they both made a decision to act on it, to the extent even Vic's drunken loser of a lackey, Boltchak, could tell they were messing around. The only person in the cast I really liked with Brownie (Philip Stainton), who was a friend to Eloise, but otherwise stayed out of the mess. It wouldn't have hurt him to tell Vic to pull his head out of his ass, though.

Which brings us to Betrayed. Gable plays Pieter DeVenter, a Dutch intelligence agent during WWII, who approaches Carla van Oven (Lana Turner) as a possible agent. This is despite the fact she seemed pretty chummy with the Nazis, but she assures Pieter that ended when they executed her husband. He trains her, but they fall in love, or so I was told. I remain unconvinced. She's sent to Holland to try and convince a local resistance leader, The Scarf (Victor Mature) to work with the British intelligence. He agrees after some of his mother's neighbors shave her head on suspicion of being a Nazi collaborator. The British will send the mission specs to her, she'll pass them along to The Scarf.

Almost immediately, the Dutch resistance starts taking heavy casualties on every mission. Someone's a traitor, but who? Carla? The Scarf? DeVenter? SPOILER!

It was The Scarf. He hated his people for what they did to his mother. He even faked being shot and captured by the Germans so he wouldn't be caught in Arnhem when Operation Market Garden went balls up. DeVenter manages to get in with a captured German intelligence agent, and get back out with the Scarf. He accuses him, the Scarf throws a knife and gets shot before he can make it out the window.

About the time that I happened I stood up and proclaimed, 'That ending blows.' I figured it ought to have been Carla, my dad asked if I didn't believe in true love, I responded not in that case. The movie had failed to sell me on Carla and Pieter, because based on the actions described for her before meeting Pieter and the name of the movie, I had no reason to take her at face value. I don't think that qualifies as turning against Clark Gable, other than recognizing his characters' tastes in women are questionable. If it's not a married lady, it's a manipulative schemer like Scarlet O'Hara, or a possible Nazi friend like Carla. Guy's taste in women is worse than Alex'.