The African Queen was co-written by Huston and James Agee, from a novel by Horatio Hornblower creator C.S. Forester. It’s an uncomplicated story, rendered in a screenplay that doesn’t linger over matters of faith, colonialism, patriotism, class, or any of the other themes that some movies might place front and center. But The African Queen is hardly unsophisticated, either. After Bogart and Hepburn are thrown together on the river, they have a few short conversations in which Hepburn proposes her boat-as-bomb plan and Bogart explains the layout of the river, and a few short conversations where they share a little about their backgrounds. Much of the rest of the chatter is in-the-moment, concerned with imminent danger or the beauty of the day, and there’s meaning behind the words: the way the two speak too quickly, or overcompensate in their gestures of kindness, reveals how middle-aged people, stuck in their ways, could fall into each other’s arms.
The African Queen arrived at a crossroads in movie history. The year Bogart won his Oscar, An American In Paris won Best Picture, representing old-school Hollywood spectacle, while Bogart beat out Marlon Brando for A Streetcar Named Desire and Montgomery Clift for A Place In The Sun, both representing the new breed of Method actors. (And the Academy’s Board Of Governors voted a special Oscar for Akira Kurosawa’s Rashômon, representing the coming New Wave from overseas.) Bogart and Hepburn were very much of the old guard, but for The African Queen, Huston often seemed to pick takes where they interact endearingly but awkwardly, forcing non-Method actors into a Method context. And though Huston has the great Jack Cardiff serving as cinematographer, the shabby blue-screen effects and limitations of shooting on water keep Cardiff’s work primarily flat and functional. The movie’s most expressionistic moments come over the opening credits, which play over a shot of the tree-covered sky from the perspective of a boat drifting down the river. Like everything else about The African Queen—the story and the story behind the story— the shot is all about inexorability.
Key features: The special-edition Blu-ray adds a slick hourlong documentary about the movie, a CD with the 1952 Lux Radio Theater adaptation, and a paperback copy of Hepburn’s brief, charming making-of memoir.
