The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Ernest Hemingway could never come to terms with Hollywood's preoccupation with The Happy Ending: he accepted the money for the screen rights to his short story The Snows of Kilimanjaro, but he could never bring himself to watch it. Gregory Peck plays a character based, in decidedly unflattering ...more

A tremendous hit when first released, The Snows of Kilimanjaro has not aged well over the years. Almost any screen adaptation of an Ernest Hemingway tale is faced with a difficulty: Hemingway's strong suit is his style, which is heightened and artificial. It works beautifully on the page, but translated into actual dialogue, it comes across as both flighty and stiff, and quite unnatural. Casey Robinson's screenplay does a decent job of bringing things halfway back to earth, but it ends up in a ...more