The African Queen

USA, 1951

Director:

John Huston

Starring:

Matt: -

Adam: D

Well liked and well respected upon release, this John Huston classic starring two of America's best loved stars is a pretty painful sit 50 years on. The African Queen is the name of Humphrey Bogart's boat, which he uses it to deliver mail to expats in Africa. One of his regular stops is at a Christian mission, run by the brother and sister team played by Robert Morley and Kathryn Hepburn. Bogart arrives one day with news from Europe: World War I has just started. Soon after Germans arrive at the mission and round up the villagers in his mission and burn their houses. The Germans rather inexplicably leave the good old English siblings alone - a fairly odd decision given who they were at war with in Europe.

Morley can't cope with it all and communicates this by staring blankly and repeatedly mumbling something that I can't recall, but suffice to say this sudden onset of madness is not only a ridiculously written turn of events, and completely unrealistic, it is also completely unrealistically played by Morley, who gives one of the worst acting performances I've ever seen. So that's an unrealistic thing performed unrealistically, making it doubly unrealistic and at that point it was all I could do to stay with the damned thing.

However it does star Bogart and Hepburn, both of whom were nominated for Best Acting Oscars, alongside Huston and the ridiculous screenplay, so I stuck with it. After my two hours or so I realised all these nominations were a complete sham and, remarkably, Cardiff's cinematography - the one true asset this film boasts - was of course completely overlooked.

Hepburn and Bogart take to the river for refuge in the African Queen. The obvious thing to do next is to find a way to escape to safety and being the intelligent beings they were, they decide the best way to do this is to navigate an unnavigable river and then modify the African Queen into a supersized torpedo which they'll use to blow up the biggest ship in the German fleet. The obvious solution.

So we trundle along with these two buffoons who become increasingly irritating the longer they're on screen. Hepburn, playing a woman from the English Midlands, seems happy to go with her New England drawl. Bogart plays a jack the lad type who also does a great impression of the entire A Team. When a propeller breaks he actually sets up a fire and welds it together. Since he can weld a propeller blade using only a moderately warm coal fire, converting the boat into a torpedo-loaded killing machine proves no trouble at all. Hannibal and co didn't know what they were missing.

Other irritants include some appalling special effects, which I suppose were pretty amazing in their day but I can't possibly give credit to a film whose green screen work is so obvious you actually see a green glow surrounding Hepburn at one point. Either this was dodgy green screen work or Huston was implying Hepburn was half alien. Maybe she was. It's also very very clear at several stages that we're watching a toy boat instead of the real thing.

The whole story's so silly it's amazing they played it so seriously. Despite the talent involved, and despite all the great notices this has received over the years I am more than happy to encourage you to avoid.

AL