(major spoilers - if you're a fan, do not read!)
The atmosphere is hot and wet, the music is obvious radio-style highlighting of the plot, the subject matter is handled with the subtlety of a broom-handle by brash director Huston, but most of all, the script needed heavy-duty rewrites.
It is impossibly uneven: having only seen clips from the movie before, i'd always thought the thing that drew people to it was how such totally different people as the old ship's captain and the reserved school-teacher could get together - but this most interesting aspect of the story was not well developed at all. Her transition takes place by far too quickly. Within the space of ten minutes, instead of what it should have been, a gradual progression from school-marm to ship's captain's wife throughout the film, she goes from getting onto the boat for the first time and kissing Bogart for the first time. So we can throw this out the window as a point of interest for the story: and its loss is felt deeply: from this moment on, the script fishes around for a purpose, for narrative drive: it dabbles in rapids, leaches, waterfalls, and sentimental moments of "i love you and you love me and there's no conflict," which go nowhere, but most pretentious of all was how Huston pulls a fast one on us by trying to suggest that these two would involve themselves in the war, which is going on off-screen, however small their intended input may have been, by fashioning some torpedoes out of reeds and saw-dust and cutting some holes in the bow of the African Queen to lay them in (never mind how they were supposed to have shot out of these holes...).
In the 90's people used to make jokes about how MacGyver used to be able to fashion a parachute out of some matchsticks, or an aeroplane out of an old shoe and some shaving cream. Macyver thus became a metaphor for the ridiculous situations filmmakers sometimes ask us to believe people could get out of. I can't see why audiences in the 50's didn't feel the same way about African Queen. Charlie and Rose "weld" a propeller back together using a campfire and a billower, they make a torpeedo god knows how (Bogey explains it, but he says it very quickly, in hopes the audience won't listen), they repair a massive hole in the bottom of the boat and fix the mast by similar impossibilities. There is a technical name for these kinds of cop-outs, and its "deus ex machina": usually it only refers to when a new character or event is introduced to rescue the protagonists from some situation they could not have plausibly escaped from. But these kinds of implausible ways the characters get out of situations in this movie are very similar. You may have heard this term in Donnie Darko (towards the end), and in Adaptation (Robert McKee warns against using it). Huston cops out and uses one in the end of African Queen, as well as the various other big fish he expects us to swallow throughout.
Huston should have realized the more interesting aspect of the story was not the political one, the anti-war sentiments, it was not the down-stream adventure either - it was, or should have been, the relationship between Charlie and Rose. This is indeed what has drawn people to it across the years, but if you look back at it, its really the part of the movie that is copped out on. Look at Pride and Prejudice by comparison: Mr Darcy and Elizabeth spend the entire book/movie/mini-series despising each other, and only in the last five minutes/pages do they give in. By contrast, Charlie and Rose only TAKE five minutes to give in! Huston's interests lay elsewhere: he clearly was not interested in romance, and so got the two of them together as quick as he could bear, so they could begin to lie in each others arms and call each other dear and proceed to have a couple of adventures, which fill out the rest of the film.
No, this is not one of the greatest pictures ever made. It wasn't even the greatest picture in 1951: see Streetcar Named Desire and An American in Paris for that honour, or any of the movies on my profile for better movies of all time. It had the potential to be great, but it was too poorly written. Bogey and Hepburn are good in this - Hepburn especially (when Bogey acted, it was great, and not how he was in real life, but it was always that same fast-talking, wise-cracking persona, not much different here than in The Big Sleep and the Maltese Falcon, i'm sorry to say. It was a crying shame that the Academy decided to award the Best Actor of the year to Bogey, in honour of a phenomenal career, instead of to Brando, for a phenomenal performance). There are sweet moments (though they quickly turn to sap), there are great scenes, but these are not enough to make a great movie. Kurosawa once said that even a great director can not make a good movie out of a poor script, and this is what Huston has baned himself with in African Queen. The characters, so loved and praised by many, end up being more two-dimensional than they could have been, due to the simplistic story. At the moment when they kiss, they immediately become boring, because they're just like every other lovey-dovey romantic leads of the period, calling each other dear, willing to go anywhere with each other, beyond the bounds of normal reason, considering they only just met! And all of a sudden there is nothing more complex going on under the surface than a bumpy ride down the river. It tells a simple story, but unfortunately the story was too simple to retain my interest. 3 out of 5.
The atmosphere is hot and wet, the music is obvious radio-style highlighting of the plot, the subject matter is handled with the subtlety of a broom-handle by brash director Huston, but most of all, the script needed heavy-duty rewrites.
It is impossibly uneven: having only seen clips from the movie before, i'd always thought the thing that drew people to it was how such totally different people as the old ship's captain and the reserved school-teacher could get together - but this most interesting aspect of the story was not well developed at all. Her transition takes place by far too quickly. Within the space of ten minutes, instead of what it should have been, a gradual progression from school-marm to ship's captain's wife throughout the film, she goes from getting onto the boat for the first time and kissing Bogart for the first time. So we can throw this out the window as a point of interest for the story: and its loss is felt deeply: from this moment on, the script fishes around for a purpose, for narrative drive: it dabbles in rapids, leaches, waterfalls, and sentimental moments of "i love you and you love me and there's no conflict," which go nowhere, but most pretentious of all was how Huston pulls a fast one on us by trying to suggest that these two would involve themselves in the war, which is going on off-screen, however small their intended input may have been, by fashioning some torpedoes out of reeds and saw-dust and cutting some holes in the bow of the African Queen to lay them in (never mind how they were supposed to have shot out of these holes...).
In the 90's people used to make jokes about how MacGyver used to be able to fashion a parachute out of some matchsticks, or an aeroplane out of an old shoe and some shaving cream. Macyver thus became a metaphor for the ridiculous situations filmmakers sometimes ask us to believe people could get out of. I can't see why audiences in the 50's didn't feel the same way about African Queen. Charlie and Rose "weld" a propeller back together using a campfire and a billower, they make a torpeedo god knows how (Bogey explains it, but he says it very quickly, in hopes the audience won't listen), they repair a massive hole in the bottom of the boat and fix the mast by similar impossibilities. There is a technical name for these kinds of cop-outs, and its "deus ex machina": usually it only refers to when a new character or event is introduced to rescue the protagonists from some situation they could not have plausibly escaped from. But these kinds of implausible ways the characters get out of situations in this movie are very similar. You may have heard this term in Donnie Darko (towards the end), and in Adaptation (Robert McKee warns against using it). Huston cops out and uses one in the end of African Queen, as well as the various other big fish he expects us to swallow throughout.
Huston should have realized the more interesting aspect of the story was not the political one, the anti-war sentiments, it was not the down-stream adventure either - it was, or should have been, the relationship between Charlie and Rose. This is indeed what has drawn people to it across the years, but if you look back at it, its really the part of the movie that is copped out on. Look at Pride and Prejudice by comparison: Mr Darcy and Elizabeth spend the entire book/movie/mini-series despising each other, and only in the last five minutes/pages do they give in. By contrast, Charlie and Rose only TAKE five minutes to give in! Huston's interests lay elsewhere: he clearly was not interested in romance, and so got the two of them together as quick as he could bear, so they could begin to lie in each others arms and call each other dear and proceed to have a couple of adventures, which fill out the rest of the film.
No, this is not one of the greatest pictures ever made. It wasn't even the greatest picture in 1951: see Streetcar Named Desire and An American in Paris for that honour, or any of the movies on my profile for better movies of all time. It had the potential to be great, but it was too poorly written. Bogey and Hepburn are good in this - Hepburn especially (when Bogey acted, it was great, and not how he was in real life, but it was always that same fast-talking, wise-cracking persona, not much different here than in The Big Sleep and the Maltese Falcon, i'm sorry to say. It was a crying shame that the Academy decided to award the Best Actor of the year to Bogey, in honour of a phenomenal career, instead of to Brando, for a phenomenal performance). There are sweet moments (though they quickly turn to sap), there are great scenes, but these are not enough to make a great movie. Kurosawa once said that even a great director can not make a good movie out of a poor script, and this is what Huston has baned himself with in African Queen. The characters, so loved and praised by many, end up being more two-dimensional than they could have been, due to the simplistic story. At the moment when they kiss, they immediately become boring, because they're just like every other lovey-dovey romantic leads of the period, calling each other dear, willing to go anywhere with each other, beyond the bounds of normal reason, considering they only just met! And all of a sudden there is nothing more complex going on under the surface than a bumpy ride down the river. It tells a simple story, but unfortunately the story was too simple to retain my interest. 3 out of 5.