Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
Katharine Hepburn’s Rose Sayer and her brother Sam are busy attempting to bring Jesus to villagers in 1915 German East Africa, which suddenly goes rather poorly when WW1 breaks out and ze Germans forcibly conscript the villagers, in the process as good as killing Sam. With Sam dead and their mission over, Rose goes along with local mine engineer / handyman Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart), as he makes his escape with the mining and blasting equipment that the Germans would otherwise seize on the banged up little tramp steamer The African Queen.
The two come from very different classes, Charlie a cheery, practical greasemonkey and Rose being an upper-class, prim and proper type, and, well, I don’t think I need to tell you how that relationship is going to pan out over the course of the adventure.
Said adventure is a cockamamie plan devised by Rose to sail down the thought to be un-navigable Ulanga River, past dangerous rapids, falls and German fortifications, to sink the top-of-the-line German Königin Luise gunboat that’s been bothering the British war effort with some improvised torpedos made from Charlie’s explosive supplies. It’s a one in a million shot, so I don’t think I need to tell you how that pans out.
This is for the most part pure adventure bunkum, and I can see why it was so successful back in 1951. Now, there’s little point in critiquing the special effects from a standpoint seventy years later, but while you’re unlikely to see the rear projected shots as anything other than dated there’s more than enough actual on-site footage to keep the illusion up, this being another one of John Huston’s successful attempts to get the studio to pay for his travel desires.
I quite enjoyed this, for sure, although I’m perhaps a little confused by the very high esteem it’s held in. For sure, Hepburn and Bogart play the hell out of their roles and have decent, if not scintillating chemistry together here, but I feel they are a touch hamstrung by some very broad roles and characters, and some not too brilliant dialogue. None of it’s a deal breaker, but for me at least it’s not quite holding up to its reputation. And if you’re only going to give Bogart one Oscar, it’s very weird that it’s for this.
I suppose there’s other reasons to admire it from a technical or production standpoint, like the difficulty in wrangling Technicolor cameras in tricky locations, and the gastrointestinal challenges the location presented, but that’s very much divorced from the on-screen results of it which are good, but not mind-meltingly spectacular.
Still, a breezy adventure that’s well worth seeing have you not done so already.