The African Queen
Canada
DVD Cover Information
Audio: English (Original Language); German (Original Language); Swahili (Original Language)Movie Reviews of The African Queen
Movie Review: One of the most unique classics in Hollywood history
Summary: 5 Stars
Familiarity can sometimes numb us to how very odd a movie is, and that is certainly the case with THE AFRICAN QUEEN. Most polls that have been done in recent years typically denote Humphrey Bogart as the greatest movie star of all time, and frequently Katherine Hepburn gets the number two slot (and always gets the number one slot for women). Yet, these roles are almost antithetical to everything else they ever did. Bogart, the great man of action of CASABLANCA and THE MALTESE FALCON and THE BIG SLEEP, is reduced to a dirty, disheveled, lewd, drunken captain of a remarkably inconsequential boat with the profoundly self-mocking name of "The African Queen." Hepburn, who has made her career playing unbridled, liberated, and self-assertive modern women, here is a prudish (though only for a while), repressed, tightly wound spinster. But despite this highly unusual pairing, the film was one of the finest that either was ever in, netting Bogart his only Oscar (and unbelievably, only one of three nominations) and Hepburn what was something like her 200th Oscar nomination. It seems perverse that the only other two nominations were for Best Director (Huston) and screenplay (the great James Agee and Huston). I'm not sure how a film can get nominations for four of the top five awards and not get nominated for Best Picture, but it did (the five films nominated that year were the deserving AN AMERICAN IN PARIS [the winner], the somewhat censored A STREET CAR NAMED DESIRE, A PLACE IN THE SUN [which has not aged well], and the considerably less deserving QUO VADIS and DECISION BEFORE DAWN).Today we take filming on location for granted, but in the 1940s and 1950s, few producers and directors opted for filming on the spot upon which the film was supposed to take place. Films might go to a famous locale and shoot a couple of scenes for realistic flavoring, as with a couple of scenes in ON THE TOWN or AN AMERICAN IN PARIS. Many Westerns had been shot on location, but that was no great challenge given the close proximity of Hollywood to Western locales. John Huston had previously filmed THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRE in Mexico, but going to the Congo and Uganda for extensive filming had rarely been attempted (sorry, all those Tarzan movies were filmed in California). It was a spectacular undertaking (which Katherine Hepburn recorded in a book she wrote about making THE AFRICAN QUEEN).
There is a war plot that provides the setting for the film, but to be honest it really isn't very important. What is crucial is the remarkable dynamics between Bogart and Hepburn, as they go from loathing one another, to liking, and then to loving. It has to be the most unlikely love story in the history of film, and yet somehow these two great actors not only manage to sell it, but make it quietly majestic. There is not much in the way of cast to speak of, apart from the two leads. Robert Morley manages a small but memorable part near the beginning of the film, but Bogart and Hepburn utterly dominate the film's onscreen time. Luckily, they have no trouble pulling it off.
As odd as this film was, there had been attempts to make it into a film for quite some time. If one is familiar with Bette Davis's career, there had been a couple of attempts to film it with her in the lead with various leading men (including James Mason). But surely Katherine Hepburn is the perfect Rose Sayer. Like in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, she can communicate self-righteousness better than anyone. Davis would only have managed egotistical haughtiness. But I'm sure everyone would agree that the casting ended up being for the best.
Summary of The African Queen
John Huston made better, more powerful films than The African Queen, but none so universally beloved, on first appearance and over the decades since. In this adaptation of the C.S. Forester novel, Humphrey Bogart (who would win the best-actor Oscar®) and Katharine Hepburn costar as an unlikely pair thrown together in German East Africa during the First World War. He's the gin-soaked skipper of what we might call the title character, a none-too-reliable steam launch chugging along the backwaters of the ""Dark Continent."" Hepburn's a straitlaced Methodist missionary who, following the demise of her bachelor brother (Robert Morley) and the burning of their village by Kaiser Wilhelm's troops, determines that the Queen should be used to attack the Königin Luise, a large German gunboat patrolling a lake downriver. It's an absurd proposition. Then again, John Huston and the absurd were always on familiar terms.It wasn't until he got to the Congo that the director realized what a funny picture The African Queen was going to be, thanks to the odd coupling of Bogie and Kate: ""One brought out a vein of humor in the other, and this comic sense, which had been missing from the book and screenplay, grew out of our day-to-day shooting."" Within the gunwales of a not-very-large boat, Huston managed to devise myriad ways to keep his two leading characters on separate visual planes even as circumstance and tender emotional urgency conspired to push them together. This was Huston's first feature film in Technicolor, and the peerless Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes) was there to shoot it. Unfortunately, neither of them could do anything about the process-screen technology needed for, and glaringly inadequate to, the sequence of Bogart and Hepburn shooting the rapids--just about the only lapse in an enchanting fairy tale for adults. The script is credited to Huston and James Agee; the uncredited Peter Viertel, summoned to the African locations to write some additional material, would later fictionalize the experience as White Hunter, Black Heart, a savage roman ŕ clef. --Richard T. Jameson
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