African Queen (1951)
Humphrey Bogart is his gritty flawless best here--as funny as he gets, and as bitter, tired, and leach covered. That's enough to sustain any movie, and toss in that his friend and fellow manly-man John Huston directed, we have a brutally physical, man-against-nature and man-against-himself film. This is the Bogart of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), where Huston and he again create a character that is as three-dimensional, compelling, repugnant, and cutting as they get. And unlike Treasure, the public and the academy responded well. He won Best Actor in 1952.
Katherine Hepburn is another story, and why she was cast for this film I'm not sure (she was chosen before Bogart, and choosing Bogart was her idea). I'll guess it's because she is so physical and fearless, a perfect tomboy in church marm clothes. She overcomes the stiffness of her part by sheer presence, but also, eventually, by her getting tough and dirty, too. She becomes less the preacher's sister and more the pioneer woman caught in the middle of World War I in Africa. She had a rough time during the location shoots, getting sick and losing a lot of weight, so some of her gaunt appearance is not acting one bit.
The arrival of the Germans in two main scenes may have seemed necessary in post war American (though a different German-inspired world war). But it enters the movie at first as a curiosity and a necessity, to drive the two characters down the raging river. The second time is near the end, and it turns the movie into a farce. It's the bizarre tone of the ending that throws the movie out of balance. The sudden lighthearted, improbable, and almost goofy turn, so at odds with the rest of the drama (even at odds with the sincerely funny humor earlier on), makes you wonder, after it's over, whether the whole movie was meant to be a kind of excessive satire. If so, I missed it, and might need to see it again to read it differently.
But taking it as a high adventure where two unlikely people are stuck having to depend on each other to survive, the movie still stutters. The wildlife shots (from the bow, supposedly) make it a Discover Channel safari at times. The home brew fix-it scenes are interesting but scarcely believable (he welds a metal prop for his boat with a charcoal fire on the beach, for starters). And the key scenes, the second most famous (after the leach scene, which is pretty amazing), are the running the rapids. This occurs several different times, and we have a mixture of actual shots, backscreen shots, and faked shots using a scale model in a studio in England, the boat and stiff dummies shooting down the water unguided and with a fast motion peculiarity. It's almost comical, and I took it as "the best they could do" for the time, and didn't let it bother me.
Now, after the end, I'm wondering if they (Huston et al) never really wanted believability to be an issue. It is more a fable, an entertainment. Yet it seems hard to reconcile with the hype and the extremes required to shoot it. African Queen does have two of the most legendary actors of their time, and it takes location shooting to a new height, and it is a spectacular idea. I didn't know what to think by the end. Was I disappointed? Yes. Was I glad to have seen it? Absolutely. Now that it's finally out on DVD in the U.S. (and Blu-Ray, both very high quality), you should see it, too.
Humphrey Bogart is his gritty flawless best here--as funny as he gets, and as bitter, tired, and leach covered. That's enough to sustain any movie, and toss in that his friend and fellow manly-man John Huston directed, we have a brutally physical, man-against-nature and man-against-himself film. This is the Bogart of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), where Huston and he again create a character that is as three-dimensional, compelling, repugnant, and cutting as they get. And unlike Treasure, the public and the academy responded well. He won Best Actor in 1952.
Katherine Hepburn is another story, and why she was cast for this film I'm not sure (she was chosen before Bogart, and choosing Bogart was her idea). I'll guess it's because she is so physical and fearless, a perfect tomboy in church marm clothes. She overcomes the stiffness of her part by sheer presence, but also, eventually, by her getting tough and dirty, too. She becomes less the preacher's sister and more the pioneer woman caught in the middle of World War I in Africa. She had a rough time during the location shoots, getting sick and losing a lot of weight, so some of her gaunt appearance is not acting one bit.
The arrival of the Germans in two main scenes may have seemed necessary in post war American (though a different German-inspired world war). But it enters the movie at first as a curiosity and a necessity, to drive the two characters down the raging river. The second time is near the end, and it turns the movie into a farce. It's the bizarre tone of the ending that throws the movie out of balance. The sudden lighthearted, improbable, and almost goofy turn, so at odds with the rest of the drama (even at odds with the sincerely funny humor earlier on), makes you wonder, after it's over, whether the whole movie was meant to be a kind of excessive satire. If so, I missed it, and might need to see it again to read it differently.
But taking it as a high adventure where two unlikely people are stuck having to depend on each other to survive, the movie still stutters. The wildlife shots (from the bow, supposedly) make it a Discover Channel safari at times. The home brew fix-it scenes are interesting but scarcely believable (he welds a metal prop for his boat with a charcoal fire on the beach, for starters). And the key scenes, the second most famous (after the leach scene, which is pretty amazing), are the running the rapids. This occurs several different times, and we have a mixture of actual shots, backscreen shots, and faked shots using a scale model in a studio in England, the boat and stiff dummies shooting down the water unguided and with a fast motion peculiarity. It's almost comical, and I took it as "the best they could do" for the time, and didn't let it bother me.
Now, after the end, I'm wondering if they (Huston et al) never really wanted believability to be an issue. It is more a fable, an entertainment. Yet it seems hard to reconcile with the hype and the extremes required to shoot it. African Queen does have two of the most legendary actors of their time, and it takes location shooting to a new height, and it is a spectacular idea. I didn't know what to think by the end. Was I disappointed? Yes. Was I glad to have seen it? Absolutely. Now that it's finally out on DVD in the U.S. (and Blu-Ray, both very high quality), you should see it, too.