The African Queen is a simple lovable film directed by John Huston. Huston is known to have made more powerful films than this one but none so appreciated and loved on a universal scale. Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn play the roles of an improbable pair amidst German East Africa in this film adaptation of C.S. Forester’s novel set during World War I. Bogart (who would win the Oscar® for best actor thereafter) is the drunken skipper unreliably chugging on the backwaters of the “Dark Continent.” After the death of her bachelor brother played by Robert Morley, Hepburn plays a squeamish Methodist missionary who is determined to use the “Queen” to attack a full-sized German gunboat making patrol watches over the lake to get back at Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops; the same troops that burned her village to the ground. John Huston is a director quite on terms with absurdity and this is one such inane proposition.
It was not until Huston got to the Congo when he realized that The African Queen was turning into a good funny film. This is all thanks to the comic sense that grew out of the daily performances of the odd pairing of Kate and Bogie. As stated by him, “One brought out a vein of humor in the other.” While only having a small boat available to him, Huston still managed to come up with countless ways for his leading characters to be on different visual planes even as the setting and raw emotional urgency complot to bring them together. This is also the first John Huston feature film shot in Technicolor by Jack Cardiff (The Red Shoes). However, neither of them could find a solution against the fact that the film has inadequate screen-processing technology for Hepburn and Bogart’s scenes on the rapids. This is just about the only failure in their goal of giving one enchanting fairy tale for adults. The script is written by James Agee, Huston himself, and Peter Viertel who was uncredited in the movie but was called in to write additional material while the crew was in Africa. Viertel would later fictionalize the experience into a roman a clef entitled White Hunter, Black Heart.
–Richard T. Jameson
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