∞ "The Hucksters"

210 Words filed by Frank @ 22:55 | 11-May-09 in Cinema |

According to Lee Server’s biography of Ava Gardner, Clark Gable didn’t want to film 1947’s “The Hucksters,” his second post-war film, at first, because he considered the novel “filthy” and “not entertainment.” He relented and filmed it, but his performance seems completely phoned-in and phony, like a lot of his post-1945 performances were (with the possible exceptions of his gruff big game trapper in John Ford’s “Mogambo” and his final role as a broken-down horse trader in John Huston’s “The Misfits”).

Only Deborah Kerr’s swoony, moony performance (“Vic? My darling, where are you?” “I’m at LaGuardia Field. Oh — you sound so warm and sleepy”), so different from the roles in the movies she’d made for Powell and Pressburger, was more false than Gable’s.

Gable is only convincing when he starts angrily hectoring ad magnate Sydney Greenstreet about how tawdry and tyrannical his sadistic management and marketing tactics are, which seems to fit of a piece with his original attitude toward the Frederic Wakefield novel on which the movie is based. Kerr’s lecture to Gable about selling things “you believe in, and sell[ing] them with dignity and taste” ends the movie on a note which may have seemed earnest at the time. It’s hard to tell from such a remove. ★

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