Stanley and Livingstone (1939)

You won't be disappointed!

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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

The interesting part of this film is the friendship between Stanley and Livingstone as transmitted by Spencer Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke. It's the ideal kind of role for Spencer Tracy, and he would continue developing characters in that direction still for many years to come up to the judge in "Judgement at Nuremberg" 1961. Cedríc Hardwicke makes the most credible possible Dr. Livingstone as both a missionary and a doctor, a character and mission later carried on by Albert Schweitzer. The great encounter is framed by a very epic adventure of Africa exploration, and this could be Henry King's best film - he certainly wouldn't always be that good. Almost the whole film is of a journey, starting carefully in Zanzibar presenting already from the beginning the major complications of infection - one presumes it is malaria - and how it must affect any European for life, like as if Africa in itself was an unavoidable mortal illness for any daring visitor. Spencer Tracy really knocks it off when he has to defend his exploits to the Royal Geographical Society of London headed by Charles Coburn as Stanley's leading newspaper competitor, a London journal completely dominating the field and feeling the threat of New York Herald. It's a great adventure film above all but very much enhanced and lifted to higher levels by the acting of Spencer Tracy and Cedric Hardwicke.

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.

As was common at this time in Hollywood, the facts of the Stanley-Livingstone saga were highly fictionalized and romanticized in this film. This was an era in movie-making when close attention was not always given to historical accuracy.The ending of the movie, with "Onward Christian Soldiers" playing in the background, turned the movie into a salute to the "spreading of Christianity to heathen lands," one of the common arguments used in the 19th century to justify European imperialism. It's another example of Hollywood portraying Christianity as the "true religion" superior to all other beliefs. On top of that, the ending clearly overlooks the fact that while Stanley returned to Africa after Livingstone's death, it was for purposes of exploration and empire building, not to follow in Livingstone's footsteps as a missionary.

Hollywood brings us Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika as it will never be seen again. The scenery is electrifyingly beautiful. But this is no story for the sake of a travelog...It is a beautiful account of the true historic struggles of newspaperman, Henry Stanley to find "lost" missionary, Dr. David Livingston.Spencer Tracy, Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Coburn, Nancy Kelly and Walter Brennan bring us wonderful performances full of humanity and depth. One fine scene in the movie when Stanley encounters extremely hostile adversaries on his way to find Livingston is just about one of the most exciting sequences I have seen on the screen and should there be only one reason to see this movie, then this is it. It is electrifying to see what certainly must have been true African citizens partake in such a very authentic looking ambush. No disrespectful depiction of Africans as seen so often in Tarzan movies will you see here.Rarely does Hollywood brings us such respectful detail in its depiction of the African citizen as he was when they encountered outsiders. Also, the citizens do not have that awful spurious look that most depictions of Africans are so prone to have from Hollywood in its racism of the past. But then 1939 was a landmark year, wasn't it?There is so much history that we are inclined to forget too easily and relegate to the dust of the shelves of history.This is one story that must be heard - if not for anything else than for its sheer humanity.Exhilarating, Tender, Human, Awe-Inspiring, Wonderful, See It!