Out of Africa (1985) on Netflix
PG19852h 41mBiographyDramaRomance
Danish aristocrat Karen Dinesen proposes a marriage of convenience to Baron Bror Blixen and leaves for Nairobi. On the way, big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton entrusts her with his ivory.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.2/1094,228 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes62%
Trailer
Plot summary
In 1913, Karen Dinesen, a Danish aristocrat, proposes a marriage of convenience to Baron Bror Blixen and travels to Nairobi, British East Africa, where he intends to invest her money in a dairy farm. The big-game hunter Denys Finch Hatton stops her train and entrusts his ivory to her. Farah, the Somali headman who works for Bror, meets her at the railway station. The Blixens marry, and Bror buys a coffee farm on land too high for the crop to thrive. He prefers leading hunting safaris to running the farm, so Karen takes charge of it herself.
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Cast
- Joseph Thiakaas Kamante
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Out of Africa (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Audrey Hepburn was Pollack's first choice, and he had originally thought Meryl Streep did not have enough sex appeal for the role; Streep landed the part by showing up for her meeting with the director wearing a low-cut blouse and a push-up bra.
- The steam locomotive, taken from display in the Nairobi Railway Museum, was non functional, so a diesel locomotive was hidden inside a box car behind it and pushed the train along while steam and smoke effects were provided.
- Out of Africa was filmed using descendants of several people of the Kikuyu tribe who are named in the book, including the grandson of chief Kinyanjui, who played his own grandfather.
- The passenger car used in the film was a small combination office and sleeper originally used by supervisors during the building of the Uganda Railway, and it was the actual car from which a man was taken and killed by a marauding lioness.
- Denys was an English aristocrat and son of the 13th Earl of Winchilsea, but that was minimized by hiring the all-American Robert Redford; Redford intended to play him as an Englishman, Pollack told him to use his real accent, and he reportedly had to re-record early lines still carrying a trace of English.
- Jeremy Irons was considered for the role of Finch Hatton, but Robert Redford was cast instead, with Pollack thinking Redford had a charm no British actor could convey.
- The veteran English composer John Barry composed and conducted the music, and the soundtrack garnered him an Oscar for Best Original Score and sits in fifteenth place in the American Film Institute's list of top 25 American film scores.
