Out of Africa (Mirage Enterprises, Universal, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 19) my husband Charles and I watched the Blu-Ray disc of the 1985 film Out of Africa, one of the soundtracks I’m going to be reviewing for the May-June 2025 issue of Fanfare magazine. I was assigned to review some soundtrack CD’s from Intrada Records and ordered DVD’s or Blu-Ray discs of the films so I could watch them and hear how the music was used in context. I had fond memories of Out of Africa even though I hadn’t seen the film since it was new (and neither had Charles), and today it still seems a good movie but also dated in ways and awfully slow and ponderous. It began life as a 1937 memoir of writer Isak Dinesen’s (true name: Karen Dinesen Blixen) 18-year stint running a coffee plantation in Kenya from 1913 to 1931. Screenwriter Kurt Luedtke based his script on Dinesen’s own memoir plus two biographies about her, Judith Thurman’s Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Story Teller and Silence Will Speak by Errol Trzebinski. In the 1980’s it was made into a movie by producer/director Sydney Pollack, who gave it a sheen of Importance with a capital “I” and cast Meryl Streep as Dinesen and Robert Redford as her lover, British game hunter Denys Finch Hatton. With Redford in the male lead (even though we don’t see him until half an hour into the film) it turned into a star vehicle for him and the up-and-coming Streep. I once talked to a man I rode with regularly on a bus – whom I’m inclined to take more or less seriously as a source because he knew a good deal of film trivia and remembered more about who won the Academy Awards for what in which year than I did – who told me that when Redford showed up for the role (the exteriors were shot in Kenya and the interiors, as well as the scenes in a Danish castle, were shot in the U.K.) he had worked out a perfect British accent. But Sydney Pollack told him not to use it and instead to speak in his normal voice so people would realize he was Robert Redford and not think it was a British actor who looked an awful lot like him. Meanwhile, Streep did her best impression of a Danish accent; this was in the middle of a sequence of roles for her that drew on so many accents the joke around Hollywood was, “How do Meryl Streep’s kids talk?”

The film starts with Dinesen’s arrival in Kenya in 1913 to meet and marry her husband-to-be, Bror Blixen (Klaus Maria Brandauer) and join him on their plantation in Kenya. It’s established that she had originally dated Bror’s brother but he had turned her down. It’s also established that the Blixen family had noble titles but almost no money, while Karen was well-to-do because her late father was a landed aristocrat and her mom came from a family of shipowners. So Bror married Karen for her money and the two settled in Kenya in 1913. Their initial plan had been to run a dairy, but without telling Karen, Bror spent her money not on cows but on setting up a coffee plantation. It turned out Bror was a lot more interested in hunting and chasing after other women than he was in running a coffee plantation or being with his wife. Karen and Denys have a “meet-cute” when she’s getting off a train and encounters him wrestling with a pair of elephant tusks. Denys is already one of Bror’s regular hunting partners, and with Bror away from the plantation a lot of the time, Karen and Denys become friends and, eventually, lovers. In 1965 Dwight Macdonald, reviewing the film The Pawnbroker, coined the phrase “The Bad Good Movie,” as an analogue to “The Good Bad Movie” (the sort of film that, unlike “Good Bad Movies” like Plan Nine from Outer Space or Robot Monster that are so inept they work as camp, is clearly aiming at Significance but not quite hitting the mark). I wouldn’t quite call Out of Africa a Bad Good Movie, but through much of its running time it came awfully close. I think I’d say of it what I said of Stanley Kramer’s 1963 film of Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools: “It aspires to greatness and achieves goodness.”

Among the plus sides are David Watkin’s glorious cinematography – it’s so nice to see a modern-day color movie that’s actually colorful, that contains a great deal of the visible spectrum instead of those dank greens and browns that dominate most recent films – that does full justice to the locations, particularly the Shaba National Game Reserve in Kenya. Also, Robert Redford looks more credibly handsome than I can recall seeing him in any other film, either before or after. Though I wouldn’t put him in the group with Errol Flynn, Tyrone Power or Tom Selleck as performers who got to be better actors once they started to lose their looks, Redford’s 1960’s performances made him look like an animated tailor’s dummy. Out of Africa captures him at a significant point in his career, during which his face was starting to look careworn without the craggy mountain-man appearance he had (appropriately enough) in The Horse Whisperer (1998). Charles joked about Gary Liddiard’s credit as Redford’s makeup artist – Streep also had her own, J. Roy Helland, while two other people, Mary Hillman and Norma Hill, did the rest of the cast – and wondered, “What did he look like before he got made up?” And it at least feints at a critique of colonial and cultural imperialism – especially in a scene in which Karen demands of the creditors who are foreclosing on her failed coffee plantation that they save a space for the Kikuyu people who were her main work force because “it was their country, we stole it from them” – though it does little more than feint at it. On the down sides are the slow, almost soporific pace and the clunkiness in Kurt Luedtke’s script. Though Luedtke was actually from the U.S. (he was born in Michigan, and he died there as well), much of the dialogue was so stiff I wondered from his German-sounding name if he’d written the script in German and either he or someone else translated it into English. (This would actually have been appropriate for a film about Isak Dinesen, who wrote most of her books bilingually in both Danish and English.) Redford’s character, like the real Denys, died in a crash of his private plane – a yellow biplane that practically became an iconic image of this movie (the posters featured Redford and Streep in the cockpit together flying over the stunning African locations) – but in a mistake that would have earned Luedtke a failing grade in Screenwriting 101 we’re only told, not shown, that.

I also had an authenticity problem with the music; Denys is depicted as the sort of man who takes music everywhere he goes, courtesy of a portable gramophone and a supply of records. He even lugs along his equipment on safari (though I wondered how he kept himself supplied with styli, since in 1913 you were supposed to put in a new one every time you played a record). Most of his selections are classical, including Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto, “Rondo alla Turca” and Sinfonia Concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, but instead of using actual records from the period Pollack licensed modern recordings (usually by Neville Marriner, who also supplied the Mozart music for Amadeus) and put them on the soundtrack with a bit of filtering to shrink their dynamic range but without any hint of the ineradicable surface noise of real records from 1913 to 1931. Out of Africa is also the victim of changing notions of political correctness; in 2025 it’s hard to admire a character who kills elephants for their tusks, especially after all those TV commercials for the World Wildlife Fund that tells us elephants are an endangered species and need our contributions to save them from being hunted to extinction for their tusks. It reminded me of S. Z. Sakall’s comment in the 1945 Christmas in Connecticut, when Barbara Stanwyck’s character says, “I need a mink coat!” Sakall fires back, “The only one that needs a mink coat is the mink!” – which has become far more the consensus view of fur coats today than it was then. I also didn’t realize while I was watching it that the film takes place from 1913 to 1931; I had thought it had a much shorter time frame than that and ended in the early 1920’s.

Out of Africa was a major hit then and was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, winning seven: Best Picture, Best Director for Pollack, Best Screenplay for Luedtke, Best Art Direction for Stephen B. Grimes and set decorator Josie McAlvin, Best Cinematography for Watkin (who thoroughly deserved it), Best Original Score for John Barry (who showed a surprising skill for romantic music given that he’s best known as the “James Bond guy,” though it occurred to me later that his music, like the film itself, is strongly reminiscent of Another Dawn, a 1930’s Warner Bros. tear-jerker that’s also set in Africa during the First World War and also features a heroine having an adulterous relationship with a man who flies a private plane; the music for Another Dawn was composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and he recycled his big love theme for the first movement of his 1947 Violin Concerto), and Best Sound for Chris Jenkins, Gary Alexander, Larry Stensvold, and Peter Handford. Charles said after the movie that he’d assumed Isak Dinesen was a cult writer with a tiny following who’d become a star briefly only because of this movie – until I looked her up on Wikipedia and we found out she’d worked steadily between 1934 (after her return to Denmark following the events of this film) and her death in 1962, and three of her novels had been Book-of-the-Month Club selections. Overall, Out of Africa holds up as a good movie but not a great one, though it’s hard to dislike it while you’re watching Meryl Streep and Robert Redford in front of all that glorious African scenery (including one elevated mesa that made me joke, “Monument Valley, Kenya”), stunningly photographed by David Watkin and with equally inspiring music by John Barry.