The African Queen
Directed by: John Huston - Starring Humphrey Bogart, Kathleen Hepburn
Released: 1951

John Huston directing and Humphrey Bogart starring is always worth watching, as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre demonstrated. They were a team, and Bogie called Huston affectionately, “the monster”. Huston had gotten a taste for doing productions on location, and Africa's Congo was as “on location” as you could get in I95I. He was also a disciple of the Hemingway white-hunter school of large dead animals. With his rifle and director's chair, Huston was in paradise; he surely enjoyed the Biblical plagues that the rest of the cast and crew went through while in the jungle.

It might have added something to shoot in Africa, although you won't see much of it on the screen. The wide shots are of stand-ins and the close-ups could be anywhere, probably the studio tank. There are some interesting adventures, notably some scenes in an area of reeds that give a sense of claustrophobia; reminding one why going down an uncharted river is dangerous. The natives are authentically African - but none get to speak - and they get precious little screen time. Maybe it was those high African SAG rates, but this is a white-bwana movie, as were all “African” movies of the era. None of the location African movies was good except this one. They were all done under the influence of Earnest Hemingway, white hunter.

We do have Humphrey Bogart in his prime, playing a role he makes his own; it’s a pleasure to watch him play his gin-soaked boat-stoker; the proletarian Bogart plays one of the lower classes in that class-conscious old British Empire, though from Canada, see mug, so none of that British accent needed.

And since this is an adaptation from C.S. Forrester's novel, the symbolism is easy to follow. Katherine Hepburn, plays the upper-class, which was not a stretch for her, and now that WWI has broken out, and the Germans have behaved beastly as usual, snobby Hepburn has to charm and cajole low-rent Bogart to take it to the Huns. Which is what happened on a huge scale in WWI in Britain. These two veteran actors do a superb job in their performances; finding coldness, wariness, warmth, humor, depression and a host of in-between emotions on board; even the boat seems to have personality.

These two actors are for the most part the only two in the movie, in a small boat, and yet the usual fatigue of that kind situation is absent. That’s pretty amazing by any standard; Bogart won the Oscar for best actor for this film and he deserved it. And Katy Hepburn is good, in her silk and sandpaper way. The African Queen could be thought of as one of the first of the non-comedic “road” pictures, even if by boat.

Scenes from the movie: Trailer --- Leaches --- Falling in Love --- ©Features-on-Film Inc.
CLASSIC FILM-DVD "THE AFRICAN QUEEN": A REVIEW STARRING HUMPHREY BOGART, KATHERINE HEPBURN AND DIRECTED BY John Huston

Director John Huston, Kathleen Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart on set.



Note:
The African Queen was based on real incident of WWI in East Africa. The real boats were not one but two, improbably named Mimi and Toutou. They originated in London as shipyard tenders, came by way of Capetown through southern Africa, across land and down rivers to Lake Tanganyika, where after some fighting the Germans were forced to scuttle their boat on the lake.