Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype

Tayloriona Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Cristal The movie really just wants to entertain people.

Robert J. Maxwell Spencer Tracy is Henry Stanley, whose editor at the New York Herald, sends him to Africa to seek out the lost figure of Dr. Livingtone, missionary, who is somewhere out there on the veldt if he's not dead. Others have tried before and come back broken men. Nancy Kelly is in there to issue dark warnings and provide something resembling a romantic interest that proves Stanley is heterosexual.Stanley succeeds. After much travail, after stumbling through vast wastelands where the hand of man has never set foot, he and his comic sidekick and his native bearers stumble into a remote village and find the amazed Dr. Livingstone, who looks exactly like Sir Cedric Hardwicke. The ragged, exhausted Stanley stares wide eyed, gulps, and asks hesitantly, "Say, where's the nearest toilet?" No, that's not it. I'm afraid I wasn't taking notes. "Can a fella get a cold beer around here?" That can't be right either. "One small step for a man?" Well, it will come to me.In any case, Livingstone, having found his bliss, refuses to leave. There's too much work for him here. Stanley is a little surprised and disappointed but no matter, he has his story. The problem is that no one back home believes him and he's denounced roundly by all the pompous authority figures. The climactic existential act is fictitious.You must enjoy these old black-and-white biographies and historical pieces from the 30s. There's nothing to dislike. The pretense at historical accuracy is always perfunctory. There's no confusion, no ambiguity. A man has found his Calvinist calling and if he misbehaves a little along the way to his goal, why he shapes up properly before the end. (He'd better -- or else.) Spencer Tracy is always reliable. His face has the magnetic appeal of a hard-boiled egg yet he never really steps wrong in any role. He's an easy guy to identify with because he looks so exceptionally ordinary. But he could have used a sidekick with funnier lines. I suppose the audiences, somewhere, were supposed to be amused by Walter Brennan's old Injun fighter, but it strikes us today as corny beyond belief. In Africa, he complains, "These folks don't know nothing about flapjacks and sour belly." And he's disgruntled to find that the Red Sea is the same color as any other ocean. It's hard to tell who the writers were aiming at. Still, there may be some residual educational value in the film. I wonder how many high school kids today could identify Stanley or Livingstone. Not as many as we might like to think, since neither the figures nor their story have had any impact on anyone's body sheath. God forbid that we ask about Sir Richard Burton the First. Mungo Park might be identified as a national monument in Georgia.That reminds me. The BBC produced a superb miniseries, "The Search For the Nile", in 1971 that gave a more accurate picture of Henry and Livingstone, but I don't think it's available.

bkoganbing If any of you have read some of my reviews of other films, you'll note that I've said that Jim Bowie of all the colorful frontier characters in American history gets the biggest whitewash in films. The man was a notorious scoundrel and half of this film is devoted to another scoundrel.Henry M. Stanley was just such a scoundrel. The film does not go at all into his later life as a paid shill of King Leopold of Belgium and his brutally administered regime in the Belgian Congo. Nor does it mention when he came to America, he enlisted and deserted from both sides of the Civil War.Stanley found his calling as a reporter for the New York Herald where on the strength of his reporting on the American Indian wars, editor James Gordon Bennett decided he was the guy to send to Africa and scoop the English papers in a search for famed missionary Dr. David Livingstone.Whatever else he was, Stanley was a brave man and his explorations into Africa added considerable knowledge for the Caucasian world about that continent.As for Livingstone, by all indications he was a Christian who did walk the walk in his beliefs in life and probably would have been aghast at Stanley's later activities with the Belgian Congo.Spencer Tracy plays Stanley as if he was doing one of his roughneck characters who finds the piety of a Father Flanagan in the African jungle. Cedric Hardwicke is a very proper and pious David Livingstone. Hardwicke's portrayal is the truth and Tracy does put his characterization of Stanley across, false though it is in real life.This was Spencer Tracy's only film away from MGM for the time he was under contract to them. It was for his former studio 20th Century Fox and he certainly never got as big a budget on his previous films with them except possibly Dante's Inferno.Though the film takes incredible liberties with the facts, fans of Spencer Tracy might like this story of a scoundrel in search of a saint in the jungle.

Longjohnbob I loved this movie as a young boy. It got me interested in history, especially the story of Europe's efforts to discover the geographic source of the mighty Nile River. Spencer Tracey as Stanley and Cedric Hardwicke as Livingstone are superb. Spencer Tracy didn't think much of the quote "Dr Livingstone I presume" and it took many takes for him to get it right. Supposedly he kept laughing when saying the line. Ironically that line helps make the film so memorable. If you enjoyed MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON you will enjoy this old black and white film classic as well.Not everything in it is historically accurate. In the film Stanley vows to return to Africa to follow in Livingstone's footsteps, but instead becomes a brutal exploiter of Africa for the King of Belgium.

kyle_furr A 1939 film that was directed by Henry King and stars Spencer Tracy, Walter Brennan and Cedric Hardwicke. Tracy stars as Stanley, a newspaper man who at first is seen talking to the chief of a bunch of hostile Indians and Walter Brennan is his guide. Tracy is then asked by his editor to go into Africa to find Livingstone, but they don't even know if he's alive. The next half hour is basically spent Tracy and Brennan spending over a year just trying to find Livingstone. When they finally do, they're surprised to see that Livingstone doesn't want to leave and Livingstone thought they were coming to help him. I love black and white movies but i thought that this movie would of been better if it had been done in color like Northwest Passage or Jesse James. Both Tracy and Brennan do a good job and Hardwicke also does a good job as Livingstone.