52. The African Queen (1951)

by Judy Geater

There’s no mistaking the fact that ‘The African Queen’ was made on location – with all its breathtaking scenery, shot by Jack Cardiff in the most vivid Technicolor. I was lucky enough to see John Huston’s great film on the big screen when it was rereleased a few years ago, which was a memorable experience. And yet, how merciless the baking sun and bright colours are to the faces of the ageing Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart.

According to the featurette included on the UK Blu-ray, Bogart asked Cardiff not to do anything to make him look good, saying he had “worked to get this face”. Hepburn never looks remotely glamorous either, and is so painfully thin that you flinch when at one point Bogart sneers: “You skinny old maid”.

They’re not at all the sort of couple who would normally take centre stage in a major Hollywood romance, and you can see why studios were nervous. Or can you? Looking at it now, the sheer pace of the adventure seems as if it would always have guaranteed the film’s success. One threat and action sequence segues into another, as they shoot down the rapids or battle a plague of insects or leeches, showing the way forward to the non-stop blockbuster films of subsequent decades.

However, where some later action films lose sight of the people in the middle of all the stunts and techno-trickery, this pre-CGI example never does so. The audience ends up rooting for the central couple all the more just because they are older, physically flawed and vulnerable, and they do have those weathered faces – together with the memory of how they looked in their earlier movies. (Bogart admittedly lost his boyish looks early on, but black and white is far more forgiving to his weary features than this dazzling colour cinematography.)

Based on C S Forester’s 1930s bestseller, the film is set in German Central Africa during the First World War. It follows an unlikely couple – missionary Rose Sayer and working-class engineer Charlie Allnut – as they take a small, elderly boat, the African Queen, on a daring journey along the river, hoping to destroy a German warship with their homemade torpedoes. Huston captures the spirit of Forester’s novel, and the script he wrote together with James Agee and Peter Viertel sticks fairly close to the original plot, except towards the end. But it heightens the romance element and the characterisation, via a lot of sharp, witty dialogue.

Hepburn had often starred in romantic comedies about strangely assorted couples, such as ‘Bringing Up Baby’, where – as Pat described in her great piece for the countdown earlier this week – she is the free spirit who changes Cary Grant’s world. In ‘Holiday’ and ‘The Philadelphia Story’, it’s the other way round and Grant is the one invading the household and blowing away the cobwebs.

However, in The African Queen, both halves of the couple alter each other. Really it’s impossible to say whether Rose – rechristened Rosie – or Charlie, who has to give his name as “Charles” at the wedding, changes more. He gets her to loosen up, let go of the Bible and start to enjoy living, while she pours away his bottles of gin and persuades him to leave his comfortable life and become a hero.

The class divide looms large in the book because of the constant use of a Cockney dialect for Charlie, even though it’s stated that Rose is from fairly humble origins too. In the film, if anything the social distance is even more noticeable, because it is Hepburn playing Rose and she always seems so upper-crust. Even so, Huston persuaded her to soften her portrayal in order to make the couple’s growing affection more believable. Bogart of course is not Cockney – the character has been made Canadian so that he doesn’t have to do an accent – but Charlie, though a skilled engineer, seems to be from a lower-class background than Rose.

However, as in the book, it is made clear that Rose comes from a background with little money. This is shown early in the film through the scene of her brother Samuel’s deathbed. Morley initially seems as plummy-voiced as always, but on his deathbed the mask slips and his origins are revealed. He wanders in his mind, talks about the family’s small shop, and remembers how hard he had to work to get taken on as a missionary in the first place.

Morley’s acting style is very different from that of Hepburn or Bogart, and more stagy. But he is an actor prepared to take risks, as in his first film role as Louis XVI in ‘Marie Antoinette’, where he sits and weeps because he is afraid of sex. Here he has another poignant scene, which gives an impetus to the hatred of the German army spurring the couple on, as he dies from the shock of seeing the village around him destroyed by fire. This opening is just about the only section where the African people are actually seen, since most of the film is a two-hander. But, even though the local population are largely invisible, that scene of the village being burnt down does bring across the message that Charlie and Rosie aren’t the only ones suffering here.

The ending is more upbeat than the one in the novel, where the couple fail in their quest and David can’t topple Goliath after all. That sort of ending was never going to fly in a film like this one, but at least the final twist and the destruction of the Louisa are cleverly achieved, even if it’s not quite believable. In any case, by this point the relationship between Rose and Charlie is utterly convincing, and the main thing which the audience is going to take away.

Just to add that, if you have only seen an old copy of this film, I’d definitely recommend seeing it in the restored version, which is of fantastic quality. There are also some interesting extras on the Blu-ray, like the featurette I mentioned earlier, which has a lot of detail about how the film was made. I was surprised to learn that a lot of it was made on a backlot in the UK – apparently it is possible to see the joins at times, but who’s looking?