Review: The Film, The African Queen…

Katherine Hepburn (The Lion in Winter) has great facial expressions. Couple these with Humphrey Bogart’s (The Maltese Falcon) large, expressive eyes, and you have a formula for guaranteed on-screen chemistry. 

Why didn’t they work together in other films?

The African Queen (1951), based on the C.S. Forester novel—which I duly added to my TBR List—is an exotic adventure romance about two completely different people working together against all odds towards a common goal: an act of war. That they fall in love with each other along the way is an added bonus. But, in the hands of Bogart and Hepburn, it’s as natural as travelling upstream along a calm river. 

But then come the rapids. 

Thrust together by acts of warfare, a willingness to survive, and a thirst for vengeance, Charlie Allnut (Bogart), a Canadian trader in East and Central Africa, and Rose Sayer (Hepburn) a missionary who has lost her mission, travel up the Ulanga and Bora Rivers. They seek the German ship that carries the soldiers who decimated the village where Rose and her brother, the late Reverend Samuel Sayers (Robert Morley, Beat The Devil), tried to spread religion and civilization to the natives. 

Will they meet their goals? Let’s just say that they become prisoners of war about to be executed, and a satisfactory resolution results as a nice twist. 

Written and directed by John Huston (Chinatown) and co-written by James Agee (The Night of the Hunter), TAQ combines raw, on-site realism with keen psychological character development. Huston, known for preferring real settings as opposed to Hollywood sound stages, filmed extensively on real African rivers and lakes, which provided the movie with a raw, genuine ambiance that amplified the feelings of isolation and peril.

In other words, Bogart, Hepburn, and Huston made this movie a classic. 

I highly recommend this film. I’m eager to compare this to the original source material, which should happen in less than two weeks from now.