Clark Gable & Greer Garson in Adventure (1945)

I’ve been watching classic movies since before I was in double digits, and just when I think I’ve seen every great movie before 1950, I get a surprise. This time, it’s Adventure, from 1945, with Clark Gable and Greer Garson.

I have actively avoided watching this movie for decades because it was always described as a horrible flop and painful to watch. I knew that it was Gable’s first studio movie after World War II, and the ad campaign was “Gable’s Back and Garson’s Got Him,” making me think this was some kind of screwball comedy, which seemed so inappropriate for Gable’s first film after the war, and after losing Carole Lombard.

So I watched it at last, on TCM, of course, and I was stunned. It’s a poetic, complex, dark drama always flirting with great tragedy. There’s no way a 1945 audience would have been ready for these characters, this story or the dialogue, which is often presented more as verse than scripted lines. Watch Gable when he argues with Garson’s character, almost to the point of physical blows – I’ve never seen him not be Clark Gable until this character, until that moment, and I cannot imagine we aren’t seeing his grief at his loss of Lombard and what he witnessed during World War II. It’s overdue for this film to get the recognition it deserves. Joan Blondell and Thomas Mitchell (you remember him as Uncle Billy in It’s A Wonderful Life and Scarlett’s father in Gone With the Wind) are outstanding in their supporting characters.

The biggest problem with this movie is its ridiculous title (the book on which it is based is called The Annointed – a much better title).

Here’s how I imagine the marketing meeting for this movie went:

Director: Hey, I made this complex drama about a seafaring man searching for purpose in life, who clashes with a sophisticated, quiet librarian, and they don’t get together until halfway through the movie because they are having heated philosophical arguments about the meaning of life, and by the time they do get together romantically, you’re stunned and also feel like this relationship is completely doomed, and the whole thing almost ends in utter tragedy, and the script is, at times, more poetry than dialogue.

Louis B Mayer: “Gable’s back and Garson’s got him!”

This would be a terrific film on a double bill with The Razor’s Edge.