The African Queen (1952)

100 min, dir John Huston, Produced by S.P. Eagle

I enjoyed this film and it obviously alluded rather heavily to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which was interesting.  I did wonder, however, about its believability.  The missionary life of Rose Sayer (Katherine Hepburn) and her brother Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley) seemed unbelievable somehow.  Would a brother and sister team really stay in an isolated place, by themselves, for ten years?  And did they not have family or even a mother Church to refer back to?  The futility of their mission of conversion in this film was so apparent and obvious that it was two dimensional.  Who orchestrated and inaugurated their authority?  This was a glaring omission in this film and, as a result of this omission, it had a sense of unreality about it from the start.

I also found a couple of things about the ending to be rather odd.  For example, the couple insisted on raising the British Flag while the German target was looking for them.  Isn’t this rather stupid given that they are intending on sneaking up on the Germans to bomb them with a home-made torpedo?  I also wasn’t sure if the hanging punishment that the Germans were to inflict on them for spying was historically accurate – surely it would have been easier to just shoot them?  If the film ascribed to the stereotype of German efficiency (and Humphrey Bogart’s character Charlie Aunt refers explicitly to this) then the German’s would no doubt prefer this method of execution.

The request for marriage in the end fitted, I suppose, a Hollywood ending.  This provided the fatal mistake for the Germans, as it allowed the couple a little extra time and as providence would have it, the Louisa (the German boat) accidentally ran into their now overturned old ship (the namesake of the film, The African Queen) and blew up (the torpedoes now went off).  And there comes the happy ending!  The message is “god works in mysterious ways”!

What was good, however, was the setting and the acting of Bogart.  He played the gin-swilling almost-alcoholic quite well.  Katherine Hepburn was good at playing the prude – she looks the part!  But she looked painfully thin, even anorexic here.  Possibly this was because she was ill at the time of shooting (hence the title of her book – The Making of The African Queen: Or, How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind).  The scenery of the Congo was the star of this film, though – it was great to see it, after imagining it via Conrad’s novella for so long.  It wasn’t clear which parts were shot in England and which parts in Africa, which is perhaps interesting in itself but in any case the scenery was impressive.

***1/2 stars