8
Popular Culture Review
with a saloon and men in cowboy outfits. African reality is provided by a set of
African buffalo horns and an African shield and spear hanging on the walls of the
saloon. Everyone speaks either with an American accent or an American
imitation of Cockney-except the “natives,” who speak “injun.”
Gene Autry: Where did you get that belt?
Namba: Me trade-um knife to native boy for belt, baas.. . .
Two, three, four moons. Meet-um boy on the river. Like-um
belt, make-um quick trade.
Gene Autry comments that “the rhythm of that tom-tom is very much
like the American Indian”, and again, “That was a drum-signal of some kind. The
Indians back in Texas use the same method to send their messages.” There are
also the requisite lions and gorillas, ignoring the fact that gorillas are not native to
South Africa.2 In 1967, Paramount/Vantors released Africa Texas Style, starring
John Mills and Hugh O’Brien and directed by Andrew Marton. This British
production tells the story of a Kenyan settler who hires two Texas cowboys to
help in his scheme of wild game ranching. The film does have excellent location
visuals in Kenya, but has a very boring script. Hataril, the Howard Hawks
directed film released in 1962, is basically a western set in Tanganyika where the
story evolves around John Wayne and Hardy Krugar who play international
hunters who capture wild game for zoos. Red Buttons provides comedy relief.
There are lots of animal capture sequences with Land-Rovers roaring across the
African plain, but critic Joseph Gelmis in 1970 really got to the heart of this film:
“Hawks was taking his friends and cast and crew on a trip he wanted to make
personally, and the film is both the incidental excuse for and the record of that
experience.”3 In 1937, the British studio Gaumont released King Solomon’s
Mines based upon the popular adventure story by H. Rider Haggard and also set
loosely in southern Africa. This version gave top billing to the American actor
Paul Robeson, the most popular black actor that the cinema had produced so far.
Robeson’s leading role in the film was enhanced by the addition of a number of
songs that allowed him to demonstrate his vocal prowess.4
Films such as these and others produced an intense interest in Africa,
particularly Kenya, among American film audiences and helped to produce, with
some variations, the standard Hollywood African genre film that always featured
stunning visuals. As Christine Pittel observed, “From then on, Africa became the
location for stories about people getting in touch with the ‘primitive’ part, or just
the basic truth, of their own souls.”5 If one could not physically make the African
quest with a Hemingwayesque safari, there were always the white hunter films
such as Mogambo (1953) directed by John Ford and starring Clark Gable as a big
game hunter and trapper caught between the attractions of Grace Kelly, the
beautiful, repressed wife of a British anthropologist, and Ava Gardner, the earthy,