Spencer Tracy, Walter Brennan in “Stanley and Livingstone”
“Stanley and Livingstone” screens at 1:30 p.m. Saturday, May 17, 2014 in the Durwood Film Vault of the Kansas City Central Library, 14W. 10th St. Admission is free. It’s part of the year-long film series Hollywood’s Greatest Year, featuring movies released in 1939.
In 1871 the American newspaper reporter Henry Stanley nearly died searching Africa for the “lost” Scottish missionary David Livingstone. It is one of those real-life adventures seemingly made to order for the movies.
And despite a couple of cheesy “Hollywood” touches, 1939’s “Stanley and Livingstone” is a hugely satisfying adventure yarn.
Spencer Tracy plays Stanley, sent by his publisher, James Gordon Bennett Jr. of The New York Herald, to find out what had happened to Livingstone, missing for four years in Africa’s vast interior.
An investigation by a British newspaper had concluded that Livingstone was dead, but Bennett wasn’t buying it. Besides, Bennett was pathologically anti-British, and he was willing to invest much time, money, and manpower in proving that the English newspaper got it all wrong.
And so Stanley mounted an expedition, enduring searing heat, driving rain, disease, starvation, and attacks by hostile tribes.
Tracy and co-star Walter Brennan (as a folksy Wild West Indian fighter who accompanies Stanley on the trek) never had to leave the comfort of the 20th Century Fox back lot to make the film. And yet the picture is crammed with stupendously authentic scenes set in Africa.
For that you can credit Mrs. Martin Johnson, identified in the film’s credits as the technical director in charge of the safari sequences shot in Kenya, Tanganyika, and Uganda.
Osa Johnson was the widow of Martin Johnson (1884-1937), a native of Chanute, Kansas. In the 1920s and ‘30s the Johnsons became household names for their exotic documentaries filmed in the world’s most far-flung and oft-times dangerous locales. The Johnsons were real-life adventurers whose exploits are celebrated in the Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute.
Butler's Cinema Scene 