Sydney Pollack's Out Of Africa

Glenn, don't you have some horrible reviews of your hillbilly movie to read?

It is a beautiful film but Robert Redford is totally miscast and is a shitty actor.

For the life of me I don't know why the Redford character wasn't changed to American if his casting was so necessary

[quote] Klaus Maria Brandauer stole the show. He was sexy as all hell.

Can you please post pic? Because when I Google him all I find is a pasty white guy with thinning hair.

Supposedly, Meryl bickered a lot with Oscar-winning costume designer Milena Canonero on this and Canonero and Streep never worked together again. FWIW Meryl never looked better than in this film.

Took 6 months to shoot and Meryl got pregnant on the shoot.

Is Redford the father?

r3 Yeah, great idea, making a movie about an English aristocrat who's in love with a Danish upper class woman who is married to a Swedish nobleman, who are all based on real people, into a story about an American. Great homage to the author of the memoir on which the movie is based on, who was several times considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature during the grandest time of literature since the invention of the prize, as well.

r4 One could also mention highly accomplished stage actor and director and professor at the Max Reinhardt Seminar In Vienna, but that wouldn't be of any value on dl or elsewhere today.

Who would’ve been better Finch Hatton than Redford?

R8 types pompously.

R4

Here's a still from the movie.

Pauly Shore

Redford was dull and miscast but he was the kind of box-office draw that Streep wasn't at the time, and he is the reason the film got made and why it made money.

Denys Finch Hatton was good looking. I researched him and Blixen for a screenplay. The film messed with so much about her story. Streep's accent--quelle horreur!

They should have cast Jeremy Irons and dyed his hair blond.

Streep recreated Karen's accent from voice recordings.

Gee, R16, you seem to hang out

on this forum just to contradict what I post. It's weird.

Anyway, that just makes her 'accent' even more inexcusable. She must have a rotten ear for languages.

R18 sod off you cretin

OUT OF AFRICA is one of Meryl's alleged "classics" that really doesn't hold up well over time.

Some of the cinematography is gorgeous. (I don't really understand the choice of the Mozart soundtrack, which is not historically or geographically appropriate, but, whatever. It's pretty.) As stated previously, it's fatally miscast. Redford is awful. I don't love Meryl's performance or physical transformation. And in hindsight, it all seems a little overblown, silly, and self-important.

OOA doesn't seem to have much of a life these days. I rarely (never) see it on TV and I don't think younger generations are even aware of it.

Back then Michael Douglas would have been a better choice than Redford.

Jeremy Irons? Terence Stamp? Anthony Hopkins, Sean Connery (yes, I know they're not English)?

[quote] Anyway, that just makes her 'accent' even more inexcusable. She must have a rotten ear for languages.

Oh yes. Her rotten ear for accents is Hollywood legend!

The trouble as they wanted a big name star, and there just wasn't a handsome British blond male star at the time who was the right age and would have been an above-the-title star in the US.

R20, I see Out of Africa on cable quite a bit. More than some other Best Picture winners....

Mr. Redford isn't an Actor, he's a Movie Star.

I found it beautiful to look at but dull. Agree that Redford was miscast but Streep and Brandauer were good

I loved this film then and I love it now. Just watched it again last week. It has aged well.

Weird how the movie comes alive when Redford - the poorest actor among the stars - is on screen, but that’s beauty and the mystique of starpower which Sydney Pollack uses so well. But I love Brandauer in this. The last thing I saw him in was playing Otto Preminger in Halle Berry’s Dorothy Dandrige vehicle.

The Beauty Of The Hunt hasn’t aged well and the British filmmakers tend to film the wise memsahib Lady Muck with a bit more irony, even in the 80s.

Klaus Maria Brandauer was the odds on favorite to win the Oscar and in an upset, Don Amchee walked off with the Prize for his "back flip" in Cocoon

R30, is that really so? I thought Ameche had gone into the night as the sentimental favorite but that might just be a wrong impression. I was only seven years old at the time.

I live the scrappy, tomboyish woman who comes onto the scene later in the film. And Iman looks stunning.

The man who is with Iman (who later dies) was always hotter to me than Redford.

I preferred the porn In and Out of Africa

[quote] I thought Ameche had gone into the night as the sentimental favorite

the nomination was his prize

The movie is a very poor representation of the book, which it barely resembles. Almost none of the book’s signature incidents appear in the film and it is not a romance! It’s a pastoral. Finch Hatton appears in the book but as a friend and not a love interest. The fact that Kurt Ludtke won the Best Screenplay AA for this is a travesty. He didn’t “get” the book at all and replaced its intelligence and delicacy with a grab bag of Hollywood cliches. I actually think it’s one of the very worst book to film adaptions. Both Redford and Streep are ludicrously miscast. This is a prime example of Hollywood vulgarians butchering a classic they don’t understand. It’s a shame because the book is magical. The book was published in 1934 and at the time it was talked of as a vehicle for Garbo. That’s a tantalizing “what if?”!

The goal of the movie was to make money. Thus Redford. Christ, in every movie thread the basic economic foundation of Hollywood is completely ignored. These aren't museum pieces, honey.

Charles Dance would have been perfect as Finch Hatton. But he wouldn't have gotten the asses in the seats the way Redford did.

Charles Dance is being talked up right now as a possible Best Supporting Actor nominee for “Mank.”

[R36] Meryl starred opposite Charles Dance that same year in PLENTY and they did not get along.

R38 That's because Dance is an actor and Streep is a diva.

[quote] I thought Ameche had gone into the night as the sentimental favorite

Klaus Maria Brandauer won the Golden Globe and TWO out of the four major film critics awards (National Board of Review & New York Film Critics Circle Awards)

Don Ameche won NOTHING for Cocoon leading up to the Oscars

So this was an upset

Dance in his day.

>> the scrappy, tomboyish woman who comes onto the scene later in the film

“Hello the house!” ?

That was Elspeth Huxley, a real person and worth checking out. She wrote a series of memoirs. You might have heard of the first one, The Flame Trees of Thika. It was made into a Masterpiece Theatre production in the 80s with Hayley Mills and a pre-Downton David Robb. I’m not sure how well it holds up today, probably very slow moving, but that’s where I learned that coffee plants take 7 years to mature, definitely not a quick money-making scheme, so when Karen Blixen learns her husband has sunk their (her?) money into that, I knew it was doomed.

It’s interesting how all these people all knew each other and have all had different movies made about them, Blixen, Beryl Markham, the White Mischief crowd.

I think it's funny the OP titled this thread "Sydney Pollack's Out Of Africa," as if to confer some international auteur status on Pollack, who was the very definition of a middlebrow Hollywood director (and occasional bit actor).

His best work is arguably Tootsie. I think They Shoot Horses is intriguing (if overreaching--Pollack is really overmatched here). Look at his output: he made some very commercially successful films, but a lot of it is just... crap.

Pollack was a hack, for the most part.

Brandauer was sexy? He would be sexy if Putin was sexy for you. The movie was boring and overrated.

[quote]Blixen, Beryl Markham, the White Mischief crowd.

Blixen and Markham knew each other before and after WW1. The White Mischief crowd was later on the eve of WW2, by which time both Blixen and Markham had left Africa.

God yes, Charles Dance would’ve been perfect. Jewel in the Crown came out in 1984 and he had a very sympathetic role-so plenty of people in the US were familiar with him.

Hot Charles Dance.

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

Blixen and Markham both had Hatton.

It’s a terrific movie except for Redford. I liked him in the Sting, but nothing else. He’s beautiful but so wooden.

What other actresses did Pollack consider? I know that Jill Clayburgh auditioned.

With Warner Bros releasing every movie to streaming, I thought of this movie.

My favorite parts were the scenery, particularly the flying over Africa set to music. I saw that on an enormous screen -- and it was different, better, from watching it on my 65" 4K TV.

Some movies really were made for enormous movie theater screens.

Yummy package at R47.

Sex appeal has nothing to do with looks.

He kicked as in Colonel Redl.

R34, I think you put it well. The book was more about Karen Blixen's struggles and glories as a coffee farmer dumped by her husband and on again off again with Finch Hatton. It also is a non-racist account of the Kikuyu and Somali she worked with. There's a good bio of her from around 1970 that I liked a lot. Beautiful photos. The film seemed to have put together by Hollywood hacks who used every racist, sexist trope to make an "adventure picture" out of a tragic, intimate memoir.

R24, you put it well. The 1934 book was about Blixen's struggles and glories as a doomed coffee farmer dumped by her husband and on again off again with Finch Hatton. The film seems to have been put together by Hollywood hacks as a racist, sexist "adventure picture" instead of a quirky, intimate memoir.

sorry for the above--I'm only able to post using weird work-arounds and never know if it went through until I refresh the screen

Loved the movie. One of my favorites.

You would.

[R56] She really doesn't discuss personal romantic relationships in the book at all - she emphasizes her relationships with the natives (her young and extraordinarily gifted cook, Kamante), her Somali major domo (Farah Aden), European expats (Finch Hatton and Berkeley Cole), various eccentrics (Belknap) and even animals (Lulu, a semi-domesticated antelope; a lion that bedevils the natives). The book is very broadly about loss, nature and the ideal, transcendent experiences, the meaning of the hunt and the notion of civilization. The movie has little to nothing to do with any of this - some of the key characters do appear but in ways in which its impossible understand their significance to Blixen. Correction: it was published in 1937, not 1934.

The movie is very frustrating in its insistence of changing the story to accommodate romance movie tropes. It's not as if anyone ever went to the movies to watch Meryl Streep fuck.

Kamante was my favourite character after the genial snake Bror.

OP, Out of Africa is my favorite movie of all time.

The cinematography, the musical score, the actors, the script . . . to my mind, it's all sublime. It's one of the few films based on a book that I thought was equally good.

[italic]If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me? Will the air over the plain quiver with a color that I have had on, or the children invent a game in which my name is, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?[/italic] -- Isak Dinesen

[italic]When it gets so bad that I think I can't go on . . . When I am certain that I can't stand it . . . I go one moment more . . . And then I know I can bear anything.[/italic] Isak Dinesen after the Death of Denys Finch Hatton

Have to agree with R35. This was a big budget film which only got the green light because they signed Redford and Streep. Were there better actors to play those roles? Certainly, with many referenced above. But that's not how Hollywood studios work. Expensive films require deep pockets and the studios do everything they can to ensure they recoup their investment, and that influences casting. Low budget independent films have the luxury of more realistic casting.

I thought it was a beautiful, enjoyable movie. I wasn't bored in the slightest, I never got the hate.

It did better box office than just about any movie Streep ever made--it was a big hit.

It was a classic "coffee-table book" movie that were so popular starting in the 60s with "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Doctor Zhivago," where you were meant to be impressed with the sweeping scenery against which the characters act out their passions--"The English Patient" was about the last of these.

[R66] The movie is easier to take if you haven't read the book. If you read and loved the book the movie was a major disappointment and a wasted opportunity. Even if you could get past the fact that it was more of a biopic than a depiction of the book OUT OF AFRICA, it's still a lousy representation of Karen Blixen. Judith Thurman bio, ISAK DINESEN: The Life of a Storyteller (National Book Award winner), which covers the same material and beyond, is a wonderful and fascinating read. For instance, at one point Karen Blixen is said to have become pregnant with Finch Hatton's child and miscarried - to have left out such an event in the movie makes zero sense - it's as the filmmakers had a mandate to make it as boring and white-washed as possible. They couldn't see the dramatic possibilities of a miscarriage?

The real Karen Blixen - Karen Dinesen aka "Tanne" - was a fascinating person. She studied art in Paris, could speak several languages, was a literary genius, knew her Shakespeare by heart, was physically brave and could more than hold her own among the intellects of her day. She published her first book - SEVEN GOTHIC TALES - late in life at age 46, after which she became a literary star. Her literary output is utterly unique in style and subject matter. Apart from OUT OF AFRICA and SHADOWS ON THE GRASS her books are collections of tales set in the past that deal with religion, myth, folklore, art and philosophical concerns. The movie captured none of her sophistication, humor or vitality, or her appreciation for cosmic ironies.

[quote] The book is very broadly about loss, nature and the ideal, transcendent experiences, the meaning of the hunt and the notion of civilization. The movie has little to nothing to do with any of this - some of the key characters do appear but in ways in which its impossible understand their significance to Blixen. Correction: it was published in 1937, not 1934.

Though I consider the film a guilty pleasure (I certainly don’t revere it), it’s a shame that your summary of the book isn’t what was adapted. I would’ve like to have seen that movie!

r69 The movie portrayed her as a plucky, if ladylike, provincial girl. Or maybe that's because of who Jersey Girl Meryl is herself.

Probably something to that. Interestingly, Karen Blixen loved America because she was a success in America long before she was appreciated in Denmark, who thought her too strange, wild and decadent. She didn't fit in to the political categories that were popular during the '30's - she'd spent so much time outside of Europe she was somewhat removed from the warring ideologies (fascism, communism, socialism, etc.) - and she was thought of as being snobby. Her struggle to get published was very difficult but her debut - SEVEN GOTHIC TALES - was picked up by the Book of the Month Club in the U.S. and became a surprise best-seller. She loved America for understanding her in a way that Europe didn't - or at least it seemed so at the time.

R60, true, but between the lines the relationship is definitely there and subtly drawn. I've read just about everything she wrote and a few books about her. Did you know several movies were made from her stories?

She said, "It was worth it having syphilis in order to be addressed as Baroness for life. So DL a sentiment!

I’m glad to read he’s out — the place is full of lions!

Why didn't it culminate in a scene where Meryl meets Marilyn?

{R60] Yes - big Isak Dinesen aficionado here, although I have not re-read her in several years. OUT OF AFRICA, BABETTE'S FEAST, THE IMMORTAL STORY, etc. I wish they'd make more of her Gothic tales - including a full, deluxe rendering of THE DREAMERS, featuring her signature character/alter ego, Pellegrina Leoni, the great opera star who lost her voice during a fire at the Milan Opera House during a performance of Don Giovanni and now travels the world in disguise under various alter-egos.

Ugh, always hated it. That music by John Barry, ugh.

The thing I remember most about this movie is how totally undeserving it was of the fuss made over it at the Oscars. It was just so boring.

The better and more memorable film of that year was The Color Purple, but it was completely shut out, shamefully.

R41 Charles Dance was beautiful in his day.

R63 I agree with you. It is also my all time favorite movie. I saw it in a movie theatre and the scenery and music were superb. It is one of those movies that is much better on a big screen. I also have read most of Isak Dinesen. Loved her work also. I don't think the movie needed to follow the book so closely. I didn't know who she was until I saw the movie and then read her books. I think a lot of people were turned on to her after the movie. Same thing happened to me with the movie Julia. The movie sent me on a huge Lillian Hellman kick. I knew who Lillian Hellman was but hadn't read her before I saw the movie.

It's one of my favorite films. Seeing it on a big screen was amazing, especially for the scene when Denys takes her flying for the first time. And I loved John Barry's score.

Meryl Streep getting syphilis was the best part about it.

John Barry's score was amazing.

Barry’s scores were always amazing. His scores for “King Kong” and “Frances” are so moving.

Does syphilis cause bad acting?

My Limoges!

I think the film The Journey with Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner is based on one of her stories (can't think of the name) wherein the heroine is almost forced to give her virtue to a commandant so a group of travelors can be released from a kind of elegant detention. I thought the film was crazy great when I was 10, an embarrassing piece of crap when I was 30, and now in my senescence I watched it the other night and it was not that bad. Yul was great, posturing around in his tight pants as a Russian captain.

Redford has such a huge ego and is so image driven he thought that he could play the role sans accent...he didn’t even cut his hair. And he was too old. He’s a cipher onscreen.

"The Journey" is based on the short story "Boule de Suif" by Guy de Maupassant.

R89, actually he wanted to use an accent. They tested it - and Pollack decided against it. It's mentioned in a few of the articles about the filming.

That Dinesen story is "The Heroine". Orson Welles planned to make a movie of it (starring Oja Kodar) in Hungary, but he abandoned production after one day of shooting in 1967.

What about Michael York or Timothy Dalton for Finch Hatton?

Blixen was a very imaginative story teller, successfully weaving reality and myth. Especially when it came to her life in Africa, her relationship with Finch Hatton, Bror Blixen-Finecke, her African servants and syphilis. In their biographies, Judith Thurman and Parmenia Miguel simply reiterated the mythical life that Blixen created. Linda Donelson's "Out of Isak Dinesen in Africa-The Untold Story" and Olga Pelensky's "Isak Dinesen-The Life and Imagination of a Seducer" provide fascinating deconstructions of much of that myth/fantasy, especially about her relationship with Finch Hatton.

In The Director's show on Pollack Meryl says she heard via her agent that Pollack would not consider her at first because she wasn't sexy enough. She says she wore a push-up bra and low-cut shirt to the meeting with him so show she could be sexy.

I think this was the film that Pauline Kael labeled Streep "Our Lady of the Accents."

[quote] Barry’s scores were always amazing. His scores for “King Kong” and “Frances” are so moving.

His score for "Body Heat" remains one of the greatest neo-noir scores ever, up there with Jerry Goldsmith's score for "Chinatown."

I actually like Sydney Pollack a lot more than the comment above but it IS funny to see “Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa” in the thread title, like he were fucking Bergman.

R93, I don’t think Timothy Dalton would’ve been right for the part. Too pretty? Michael York would be good but I can’t picture him with Streep. She’d devour him.

Thank you, R90 and R92--you're both more informed with better memories! I'll read or re-read both stories, but I believe Dineson's story was about a noblewoman (of course!) and more subtle in theme and depiction than de Maupassant's sounds. Both involved the selfishness of the group over the feelings of an individual.

Recent DL fave Helmut Berger also claimed to have been in consideration for a role in the movie.

Pollack is in the title to differentiate the film from the book

It was a boring prestige picture, the kind the Academy loves.

This was when we all realised... "OMFG. She's going to do a fucking dialect in EVERY film."

Pollack should have picked another actor instead of Redford. Some British actor or someone who sounded believable as an English aristocrat. Redford was woefully inadequate.

And wasn’t it revealed that Hutton was gay?

I couldn’t believe it beat Color Purple

I HAD A FARM IN AFRICA... I swooned watching this movie from the very first frame. Thank you OP. It's been so long since I've seen a grown up film of this scale for grown ups.

Ahh hahhd a fahhhm eeen Ahhhhfreeeka, at der fuut if the Neeeyungoo heeellllz.

This film really highlights the limited acting range of Robert Redford.

Robert Redford is one of the most useless most overrated film stars I’ve ever seen. He’s blond, that’s about it. He has a flat ass and an average hairy body. All he has ever cared about was his brand. He’s a phony, pretentious person. And someone should have a conversation with him about the dead tabby that sits on his head.

Redford was cast to guarantee the fraus (and the gays) came to see the film.

[R109] Agreed. He's the epitome of and the template for the sanctimonious Hollywood star who believes his pretty boy looks and a modicum of talent equate to him knowing all of art, science and politics (paging Leo and Brad Pitt). He's in fact a bubble headed actor from the Valley who was gifted to be born with an authoritative-sounding speaking voice. He's vapid. The secret to his staying power is the Sundance Film Festival, which he founded. Luckily he stays mostly out of sight.

r95, what is a low-cut skirt?

[R112] Showing her Yale Drama School twat.

[R111] Redford made pivoting to "the environment" standard crap in softball interviews with "serious" actors. He's very tiresome.

He also refused to cut his hair in THE WAY WE WERE. Because he thought that he looked better with an anachronistic hairstyle. The ego has landed.

I always liked the story about Meryl shooting the welcoming scene when she meets all the staff at the home in Africa and staying perfectly in character until they called “cut” and then frantically tearing her costume off because some large African bug was crawling on her body. I always thought this was one of the basis for her being proclaimed one of the greatest living actresses.

Hollywood has seldom made casting decisions on talent - or at least talent alone. It's a complicated mix of ability, market appeal, availability and commerce (how much an actor costs and their potential to impact the bottomline).

Well, it looked like all the men in TWWW followed his lead because they all look ridiculously shaggy in the 1940s and 50s .

Isak Dinesen was like the original poster child for anorexia, about twenty years before she died she basically stopped eating and existed on air. I always thought Patsy was somewhat based on this aspect of her.

I was obsessed with this film and loved the part where she gets syphilis. I went through a phase as a teenager where whenever I had an opportunity to issue a denial, I would do so in character as Baroness Blixen behind the modesty screen, saying “that’s not possible”.

"Robert Redford is one of the most useless most overrated film stars I’ve ever seen. He’s blond, that’s about it."

Redford's blondness comes from a bottle, his real hair color is reddish brown, kind of like the wig he wears now. And if you've seen The Great Gatsby or even a still from it, you'll see that Redford isn't a tenth as handsome without the blond hair....which got unrealistically blonder during his film career as he aged. It was a romantic drama that made him into a sex bomb (The Way We Were), ironically, since he's so wooden and has great difficulty conveying deep emotions.

This review of a book biography of him sheds more light on Redford's career calculations.

Redford also cozied up to communist dictator Fidel Castro, whose many human rights abuses are well-known. Bobby called him "Fidel" in interviews - as if he were a fellow celebrity with whom he was on a first name basis ("When Marty directs me..."). Bobby should watch BEFORE NIGHT FALLS with Javier Bardem to learn of the wonders of living in Castro's Cuba. Movies he understands.

[R121] Thanks for linking to the article. Interesting read. It seems that Redford asserts Tom Cruise levels of control in managing his image. That couldn't be healthy.

Meryl was OK in it but Redford is just eternally boring on screen. Also the movie was full of cliches.

Redford was very good looking, sexy, charming, and funny. The reviews of his run in Barefoot in the Park on Broadway in 1964 said "hail, the next Cary Grant." That was his talent. He ruined it by appearing in serious dreck like Jeremiah Johnson and Out of Africa.

P.S. He has red hair, actually red, not red brown. He was the quintessential ginger, though he never appeared in film like that.

I haven't seen this movie but does anyone know what the fuck these colonisers were doing in Africa? What was wrong with their own fucking continent?

"Redford was very good looking, sexy, charming, and funny."

Redford was very good looking, sexless, withdrawn and smug.

One more thing,though I can't find a photo, Robert Redford is covered, covered head to toe, in freckles.

Charles Dance in 'White Mischief' was incredibly sexy.

He’s really, really good in All the Presidents Men and i also like him a lot in The Candidate and Three Days of the Condor. I think as he aged all the drawbacks everyone has discussed here just got more and more apparent and he got image conscious to the point where he couldn’t give a performance anymore. It’s evident in The Natural.

Kevin Costner was in great danger of going this route as well but he somehow saved himself.

This movie was so boring

Control freak?

I don't know what you're taking about!

Could Rutger Hauer have played Deneys? Or is he to gruff and dark?

[R133] I'd say no because the character is supposed to be quintessentially English, a highly educated aristocrat who's a product of Eton and Oxford and who maintains a near-ideal balance between the mental and the physical. He was a man of learning who was also a man of action. Not many of those left.

"He’s really, really good in All the Presidents Men"

What good? He didn't have to do much except ask the other actors questions. As far as mere presence in that film, Dustin Hoffman won. I do agree with you about The Candidate.

R127, that's why Downhill Racer (I recommend it) is my favorite film of Redford's. He is perfectly cast.

There could easily be a Danish remake of Out of Africa or perhaps call it Tania, and show the full life story of Karen Blixen. It's worth knowing, I think. As for the colonialists, they were exploiting the natural resources of Africa (or 'investing in them,' if you prefer). Denmark is small and didn't offer much scope for minor aristocracy to make some loot.

[R136] It was an earlier form of globalization and despite all of the ridiculous contemporary critiquing of colonialism as inherently evil, the Europeans left behind advanced infrastructure in countries like India, which hugely benefitted from it. In the case of India, it was easy to "conquer" (it wasn't really) and administers with a shockingly small number of British because many of the natives preferred British rule to that of the Maharajas. In the case of South Africa, black Africans flocked there because of clean water, the availability of food and the comparatively first world conditions.

R137, I didn't assert anything against colonialism, but you like to lecture, don't you? You happen to be full of shit. Colonialism was nothing but exploitation, enslavement, naked aggression and racism. A bit of lipstick consisting of missionaries and some infrastructure was put on this pig, but it still was an ugly power grab. Read Joseph Conrad. He was actually there. Read any good history book. Colonialism left us with Northern Ireland, the Middle East, much of Africa and parts of Asia still trying to shake off the effects of colonialism.

Ever heard of a little sweetheart named King Leopold of Belgium? Give me a lecture on his benevolence.

Klaus Maria Brandauer is a short, fat, balding troll, and the weakest link in the film

I want to be DPed by Denys Finch Hatton and Charles Dance.

[quote]Charles Dance would have been perfect as Finch Hatton. But he wouldn't have gotten the asses in the seats the way Redford did.

The late Christopher Cazenove, who I often got confused with Charles Dance, would've been a great choice; and he would've had great chemistry with Meryl.

Had Out of Africa been made 10 years later, then Ralph Fiennes would've been perfect (but then we would've been stuck with Nicole Kindman as Karen)

[R138] Typically conventional and idiotic views. Thanks for being a cliche - you make my job easy. Moralistic fool.

Rufus Sewell looked like Finch Hatton and is a good actor. For the Baroness I think Hanna Shygulla would have worked.

Why didn’t it spawn sequels having done so well? Out of Asian, Out of South America, Out of Australia, etc. colonialism was rife the world over?

It inspired the critically acclaimed Belami series “Out IN Africa”.

Christopher Cazenove Is dead? When did that happen?

10 years ago, r146. I thought he was so handsome, like a young, blond Christopher Plummer.

IN AND OUT OF AFRICA

R106 Yes one of those movies for a cold winter's afternoon, with a decent coffee and Christmas cake, or a nice brandy and port ,watched sat by a roaring fire.

R142, if your job is to sound like a cut rate Steve Bannon, then he has succeeded. Trash.

Oh god yes, Ralph Fiennes would’ve been perfect. Not sure about Meryl in that case though, even if their ages had worked.

Ralph Fiennes, Rufus Sewell? FFS. Please at least be faithful to the mid-80s. Fiennes was still at Rada and Sewell was still a teenager.

But yes, they would have been fine, though I don't think Redford's Americanness or his acting ability ruined the movie. His blankness at its best implied there was something deep and mysterious behind the surface.

If it were made with Fiennes or Sewell in the 1990s maybe Kristin Scott Thomas or Juliette Binoche would have been cast.

I’d read in the Dinesen book that she had a victrola and played Mozart

The movie isn’t based on Dinesen’s memoir of the same name but the biography Life of a Storyteller by Judith Thurman. Thurman got an associate producer credit on the movie.

Then they shouldn't have called it Out of Africa. Blixen herself said that she was entitled to tell her story the way she wanted. She didn't need Thurman's take on it as she'd already written a bestselling memoir, n'est pas?

And above I'm referring to her comments when asked if Finch Hatton had had affairs with a lot of women. She replied that since it was her life, she was allowed to construe it as she liked. I'm aware that Blixen was dead before the Thurman bio came out.

[R154] It doesn’t adhere to The Life of a Storyteller, either. It replaces facts with reordered cliches that have little to do with Dinesen’s life. She had a farm in Africa and some sort of relationship with Finch Hatton - that’s about all the stupid movie retains. Her life was much deeper and more interesting than what’s portrayed in the rather tediously genteel coffee-table-book-as-film Out of Africa with St. Meryl miscast in the lead role. She had much more vitality, intellect and personal style than St: Meryl could muster. St. Meryl was deep In her “queen of accents” period here. Rich Little could also do dead-on accents and no one mistook him for Laurence Olivier.

The movie superimposed a crass Jewish Hollywood sensibility over material it shouldn’t have touched, typified by the anecdote about Sydney Pollack being concerned that St. Meryl wasn’t “sexy enough” for the role. In the movie there’s absolutely no sense that this is a woman of extraordinary talent and creativity who would go on to practically invent her own literary genre. Uncle Sid was concerned that her tits weren’t big enough.

R158 Bigot much, cunt?

The movie was based on Thurman's and Trzebinski's biograhpies. Neither of which contained a whole lot of reality about Blixen's time in Africa or her relationship with Finch Hatton. Blixen's "extraordinariness" had nothing to do with the 17 years she spent in Africa. Whatever "talent" she possessed exhibited itself only AFTER she left.

[R159] Wrong - Thurman’s biography is very comprehensive in terms of biographical/historical context. Pointing out a “Hollywood Jewish” sensibility isn’t bigotry - everyone knows what that means. You mustn’t have read the Thurman book.

I saw Out of Africa when it first came out. Streep seemed like the way overly serious 17 years old girl in a high school production. While Redford was the typical HS punk walking through the play for credits after flunking out of French. In other words: laughably miscast for both, and both together.

I think you nailed it, R161. I wanted to love this picture because as I mentioned above I'd tried writing my own screenplay from the Thurman bio and other material, but my script wasn't that good and neither was the one they went with for the film. I admired the photography and the actor who portrayed Farah (was that the name of her butler/manager of the house guy? Anyway, this thread is a good discussion imo.

Meryl overdid her accent, while Robert didn't use one at all.

It's not about Meryl being sexy or having big tits. But the character (as portrayed in the film, and given time it was produced in the mid-80s) but liberated, sensual and without sexual-hangups. Consider the hairwashing scene. A no-brainer for Deborah Kerr, but Meryl, not so much.

Total snooze fest. I tried several times to get through this movie but never could.

[R164] Well, that characterization is just fine as a typical example of mid-80's Hollywood Feminism Light, but it has nothing to do with Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen.

I loved Iman in this as the stoic mistress of John Hurt. So beautiful. But not enough emphasis was placed on how the colonials treated the Kiyuku. Just just touched on it. As flawed as THE COLOR PURPLE was, it resonated with blacks, especially women because it did address sexism as well as racism and I thought that it was better than OOA in many ways, mainly Whoopi Goldberg's performance. Oprah, not so much; she plays the same character in every film by simply dropping her articulate speech patterns and slipping into the black Southern dialects and pronunciations. She was like that in PURPLE, NATIVE SON, THE WOMEN OF BREWSTER PLACE and BELOVED.

OOA was so self-congratulatory it made me sick. I watch it when it comes on, but I hate watch it.

"Consider the hairwashing scene"

Please explain why this scene is supposed to be so great. I saw it as a bleached blonde non-acting geezer washing the hair of an over eager "actress."

[QUOTE] I loved Iman in this as the stoic mistress of John Hurt.

I think you’re mistaking Michael Kitchen (as Berkeley Cole) for John Hurt.

[quote] Pointing out a “Hollywood Jewish” sensibility isn’t bigotry - everyone knows what that means.

R160 It means that anti-Jewish bigotry is culturally entrenched. You and "everyone" are BIGOTED SCUM.

It’s too bad they used Mozart when there are so many very talented—though less well known—Danish composers for them to have chosen from.

Just watch Meryl's little silent moans of ecstasy.

She's not the only one getting wet during that scene! Hee.

[R170] Oh, please.

There have been 173 posts and no one has brought up the great clothes in the movie? Turn in your gay cards.

Sydney: “It’s about this rich Danish broad with a big nose who goes down to Africa to grow coffee and gets fucked by a faggy Englishman.”

St. Meryl:”I could play that!”

[quote]and gets fucked by a faggy Englishman [bold]without an accent[/bold].”

FIXED

B o r i n g

I prefer Streep's other film that year Plenty

Now Jessica Lange would have been GREAT in Plenty. She would have been gorgeous fucking Sting and Charles Dance.

I like listening to those big febrile scores by John Barry but I don't want to have to watch that movie with that Streep woman who's as bothersome as a tick on the skin.

Isak Dinesen was a tiny fragile thing who looked a malnourished as the Darfur Orphan.

It seemed obscene that this over-fed millionaire diva be imported to star in this extravagant, nay flabby, technicolour extravagance while the malnourished POC huddled off-screen.

Tiny, yes; fragile, no.

You're an expert on fragility, Marilyn.

Actually, Blixen's weight fluctuated over her lifetime. She could look a little chunky in some photos, but would lose weight during times of particular stress (her whole life was pretty stressful) and in old age was notoriously thin. She supposedly only ate oysters and drank champagne. That may have been because of digestive problems. Her body had been nearly destroyed by the syphilis and the cure for it in those days, part of which was to ingest silver, I think. I'm a little fuzzy on the details as I did all this reading in my twenties.

[R183] She became seriously malnourished in old age after gastrointestinal surgery in which part of her stomach was removed. What the previous poster said was correct in terms of her weight. It hadn’t been much of an issue before.

I lived my life like a candle in the wind.

[R185] Slut:

Please honor the Queen of Accents. If she impresses as Danish she’s better than Bette Davis.

tick-tick-tick..

I know I watched it but I don't remember a fucking thing about it.

I don't disagree with most of the criticisms stated earlier, but I nevertheless do love this particular scene: "There was a wandering Chinese..."

“Chang Wong lived among the Green Lantern - and made the best hot and sour soup”

[quote] I haven't seen this movie

Don't bother, R126.

[quote] does anyone know what the fuck these colonisers were doing in Africa?

They were probably doing similar things to your father and grandfathers, R126.

[quote] What was wrong with their own fucking continent?

When you see this movie you might get to understand that the 19th century is different to the 21st century, R126.

Out of Africa takes place from about 1900 to about 1920, I believe. Joseph Conrad and other writers had already exposed the public to issues of colonialism. Mark Twain was enraged at the Philippine American War in 1900 and wrote some white-hot prose about it.

[quote] … issues of colonialism

Yes, it's obvious Karen Blixen was a monster! She mist be cancelled now!

R194, what is obvious is that you are a troll who crawls all over DL making no original, informative or entertaining posts, just picking away at others and being a pain.

Enjoy yourself!

“Chang Wong was cursed with a tiny little cock aspiring to the length of an inch worm, which created enormous difficulties in satisfying his sexist, racist, imperialist, homophobic English mistress, Lady Foxalot. To this end, Chang Wong plotted to steal the phallus of a sperm whale from the British Royal Museum, located on a hill overlooking the local prison where many Chinese like himself were wrongly detained and where he himself risked inhabiting.”

I recently re-watched Out of Africa and realized it’s really just The Way We Were in the African Bush.

Karen Blixen's brother won the Victoria Cross, the UK & Commonwealth's highest award for bravery.

Some family!

Wonder if Redford ever saw Out of Africa. He's usually a chickenshit when it comes to watching himself onscreen and avoids it...you see, every movie he's in is about HIM.

In his dishy book Frank Langella mentions that Jill Clayburgh met with Sidney Pollack but said she didn’t know why she was bothering since Meryl wanted to do it.

I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills...on TCM now!

Costumes, especially the hats the best part, all I remember. Frankly wouldn't waste time to watch it again. Can't abide meryl in much of anything. Although Devil was great. Even Hagaway was worth a watch.

Gowns by?

Designer Milena Canonero

Still can’t stand it.

I had a farm in africa.

Where in Africa, R206?

I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills. 🥱

Who is this . . . Ngong?

Ngong was the king of the Ngongos.

He was a tyrant who slew the Bgongos.

Unlike the book, the movie was about as compelling as a shampoo commercial.

I saw this on cable for the first time last week and I knew there would be a DL thread. I avoided it for decades because I just assumed it was long and dull. Yes, it’s long but, otherwise, I loved it. Meryl was gorgeous. Redford was terrible and she blows him off the screen. Klaus was really outstanding and Oscar worthy. Funny how Redford gets top billing but Meryl’s name is first in the credits. I doubt if the movie would have gotten made without him.

Brandauer was robbed. Lost to Ameches breakdancing that he didn’t even do himself.

Klaus Marie Brandauer stole the movie. Frankly I found him so sexy it was a bit distracting with the plot. If I had been married to him, I would have been obsessed with maintaining the relationship and stuck by his side no matter what. I would not have cheated on him with wimpy dim-witted Redford.

I thought Brandauer was perfectly cast because he physically really has the look of a blue blood aristocrat. He has that Scottish/German/Anglo look. Smooth skin, traditionally handsome feature. Also the “man’s man” effortless unstudied arrogance many of these blue bloods have. They are at ease, they don’t come across as stressed or anxious. It’s a kind of natural confidence.