“Stanley and Livingstone”

Northern Advocate, 17 February 1940, Page 8

“Stanley and Livingstone”

“Find Livingstone!” Exactly 70 years ago this October 16, James Gordon Bennett barked these words at his crack reporter, Henry M. Stanley. It was apparently the most hopeless assignment in all journalism. No one but a madman would brave the terrors of unknown Africa to hunt for a missionary-explorer from whom no word had come in two years. How Stanley found Livingstone, how the world called the newspaperman “the most colossal liar of his age,” and how he later became the greatest hero of his era, is the story of the 20th Century-Fox picture, Darryl F. Zanuck's production of “Stanley and Livingstone.”

Spencer Tracy, twice an Academy Award winner, portrays Stanley. Nancy Kelly, who rose into the front ranks of Movietown with her role in “Jesse James,” and Richard Greene, who in a year's time has become one of Hollywood's top romantic stars, are starred with Tracy. /

In 1937 Mrs Martin Johnson, the famous explorer, led an expedition of 27 Hollywood players and technicians into the wild Tanganyika country of Africa. They began at Bagamoyo, on the coast opposite the island of Zanzibar, and retraced Stanley’s historic nine-months’ trek in 1871. They spent five months in reaching Ujiji, the village where Stanley found Livingstone, filming the country, which had changed little since it first witnessed one of the most heroic adventures known to man.

More than a thrilling adventure story, the screen play by Philip Dunne and Julien Josepiison presents Livingstone's remarkable refusal to be “rescued” when Stanley arrived. The newspaperman stayed with the missionary to get his story and the contact with a great soul changed him completely.