STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE (1939)

Before I saw this movie, I knew nothing about the real life Henry Stanley and David Livingstone except that famous line, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" I don't know how factual this movie is, but it is entertaining and it does give an interesting, if certainly Hollywoodized, glimpse into an era (1870's) and a milieu that is rarely explored today in movies. Spencer Tracy plays Stanley, a reporter for a New York paper who is sent by his editor (Henry Hull) to Africa to find the missing missionary Livingstone (Cedric Hardwicke). One expedition, backed by a British paper and headed by its publisher (Charles Coburn), has come back claiming that Livingstone must be dead, but with no solid proof. Stanley and his sidekick pal (Walter Brennan) head off for Africa, most of which had not yet been mapped out by "white men." After a long and challenging trip, they find Livingstone, happy (if not terribly healthy) serving as medical doctor to a village of natives. Stanley stays with him for a while and helps him in his work, then returns to England bearing maps and documents in Livingstone's own hand as proof of his safety. However, the Royal Geographic Society, egged on by the London publisher, refuses to sanction Stanley's information, setting the stage for a climactic courtroom-like battle.

Tracy nicely underplays his part, though occasionally, especially in some of the African scenes, that acting strategy starts to come off as passivity or disinterest. Hardwicke is good, though his make-up always looks like make-up. Coburn is his usual blustering self and makes the most of his showdown with Tracy. Richard Greene is Coburn's son, who has returned from the original expedition in ill health and who sides with Tracy in the authentication dispute. Nancy Kelly is a young woman on whom Tracy has a romantic but ultimately platonic crush. Henry Travers has a couple of nice scenes as Kelly's father. Kelly's face is not exactly traditionally beautiful but interesting; she seems to have gotten bogged down in B-movies (I remember her as the title character in the thriller THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK) until her last hurrah as the mother in THE BAD SEED. Though all the scenes with the actors were filmed in Hollywood, there is some footage that was shot by a second unit on a safari in Africa which makes the film feel more real than the Tarzan films. My only real complaint is that we don't really get to know much about Stanley as a character, which is more the script's fault than Tracy's. [FMC]