Armed with the simplest of plots and three extremely capable actors, Zoltan Korda has transformed Hemingway's "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" into a first-rate motion picture. While the sparsely-worded, continually charged atmosphere of the original story has been preserved, the script-writers have only had to distort the plot a little to squeeze ninety minutes of movie out of thirty pages of tightly-written dialogue. The only place they slipped up was at the end, where long, out-of character explanations take the edge off Hemingway's subtlety.

The eternal triangle is well held up at all its corners. Robert Preston is just right as the boy-man who takes his heartless wife to Africa to hunt big game and changes in two days from a coward to a courageous man. As the wife and the professional hunter, Joan Bennett and Gregory Peck could hardly draw criticism from even the author.

Perhaps the best photography of its kind ever seen in the movies, the authentic hunting scenes convey vividly the feelings of two kinds of men when faced by a charging lion. This immediacy adds a great deal to the story, and before long the audience is participating in both the lion-hunting by day and the human drama of the night. The end of the picture is disappointing, but the climax is past, so it doesn't make much difference. Except for one or two incongruous touches in the portrayal of Macomber's cowardice, you'll like "The Macomber Affair."