The African Queen (1951) - film review

In 1914, Rose Sayer assists her brother, the Reverend Samuel Sayer, in leading a missionary village in German East Africa.  Their supplies are brought to them by Canadian Charlie Allnut on his steam-driven barge, The African Queen.  The Sayers disregard Charlie’s advice to leave the village now that Germany is at war with England and decide to stay on.  A short while later, a battalion of German troops arrive.  The Sayers watch on helplessly as the soldiers march the natives away and set fire to their homes.  The next time Charlie returns to the village, Samuel is dead and Rose is distraught, unsure what to do next.  Rose perks up when Charlie tells her that a German gunboat is stationed in a lake downriver from the village.  She immediately conceives a plan to destroy the gunboat with improvised torpedoes.   Charlie attempts to point out the risks – parts of the river are virtually unnavigable and their journey would take them past a German encampment.  But Rose is adamant.  They will go on! This could be a marriage made in Hell or the beginning of a beautiful friendship...

John Huston’s fifth collaboration with Humphrey Bogart stays with the quest motif (which forms the basis for most of their films) in this inspired tongue-in-cheek adaptation of C.S. Forester’s 1935 novel The African Queen.  This is the film which earned Bogey his one and only Oscar, playing opposite Katharine Hepburn in one of Hollywood’s most enduring screen romances.

The African Queen was Huston’s most ambitious and troubled production.  Apart from a few scenes that were shot at Isleworth Studios in England, the filming took place entirely on location in Africa, which presented no end of challenges.  Indeed, as Hepburn spells out in her book The Making of The African Queen, the location shoot was as much of an adventure as the film’s plot.  Many of the cast and crew fell dangerously ill during the shoot, the boat on which most of the action takes place sank on several occasions and Hepburn was very nearly crushed by the boat’s boiler.  Nice work if you can get it.

The film’s production may have been a nightmare but the ordeal of this cinematic adventure is certainly rewarded by the end result.  Jack Cardiff’s sumptuous colour photography captures both the beauty and savagery of the African setting, lending poetry and tension to the narrative.  The plot may be contrived (the ending ludicrously so), but this is easily compensated for by the quality of the performances from the two lead actors.  The sight of Bogart’s slovenly Charlie succumbing to the civilising influence of Hepburn’s Rosie is as poignant as it is amusing – a kind of role-reversed Pygmalion.  And the sight of the strait-laced Rosie warming to Charlie’s earthy charms is equally delightful.

Whilst it can be described as an adventure film, The African Queen is really little more than an old-fashioned romance.  Much of the film’s appeal stems from the fact that it eschews the usual Hollywood lavender- scented sentimentality for something much more attractive (particularly to the male sex)  – sweaty, mud-caked realism and dry gallows humour, with just a soupçon of sado-masochism without which no marriage would be complete.

© James Travers 2008

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