Movie Review

The African Queen

The first time I watched a grown-up movie with an actual grown-up occurred when I was around 8 years old and staying overnight at my grandparents’ house. My grandmother wanted to watch The African Queen. She had seen it before and more than once. But she wanted to watch it again with me (I was incidental to the arrangement).

My grandparents had actual problems. My grandfather was born in Europe and migrated here around 1911 because of his parents’ fear of war (they came from an area very near where Archduke Ferdinand was careless enough to get assassinated and kickstart World War I). My grandfather—who was just a kid at the time—did not want to move to America and was coerced by his father who promised him if he went along with the move quietly, he never had to go to church again. Both parties honored that agreement.

The little family (parents, one daughter, and one son who was no longer going to church) lived in a tenement apartment in Alphabet City in Manhattan. My great-grandmother scrubbed the apartment building steps for a minor rebate on rent. While they lived in this building, she bore two more sons, both of whom died in infancy. After five years, my step-scrubbing great-grandmother left the family and returned to Europe with some of the children. The family was rocked by the separation; my great-grandparents never reconciled, in fact, they never saw each other again. My non-church-going grandfather was supposed to return to Europe with his mother but he ran away as she was boarding the ship and reappeared only after his mother was safely on her way across the Atlantic. My grandfather quit school a short time later and went to work. Although barely old enough, he joined the Navy and tried to go to World War I but the war was over before he got there. He did manage to get on a ship and make it halfway across the Atlantic before the ship turned around and returned to New York. Then came the Spanish Flu pandemic which was far worse than COVID, but he survived. He got married and moved to New Jersey, where he lived near a town that had a munitions factory explosion. He survived, but there was a lot of damage to the town and loss of life. Prosperity was modest and fleeting.

By the time he and my grandmother owned a little house, they had already buried their first-born son and were raising two daughters. The Depression took the little bit they had away. They soon lost the house to foreclosure, my grandfather lost his job, and more kids arrived.

So did another world war. My grandfather joined the Navy again for another war, and this time he got there. He was on board a ship that was shelled by the Japanese, but he survived. When he came home, the now-big family enjoyed a short spell of relative peace and tranquility. Then my grandmother got gravely ill and needed a major operation. Health insurance back then was different than it is now and her life-threatening illness wiped them out again. They managed to keep the house but they lost their money. They started over financially. Again. But my grandmother survived. The family soldiered on.

I say all of that to tell you that my grandparents had real problems. They didn’t have the sappy stupid problems of people today like being misgendered or having McDonald’s mix up their drive-through order or not getting free college tuition. They lost jobs, went to war, buried a baby, and counted pennies to keep the mortgage paid. And they never complained or took photos of themselves crying.

My grandmother’s favorite movie in the world was The African Queen. I don’t know if that was true or just grandmotherly hyperbole, but I never knew her to be much of a cinematic fan, except when it came to this particular film.

I can still remember drinking ginger ale in the living room and watching the film on the itty-bitty TV screen. There was no remote control, only me, jumping up to adjust the volume. She loved that movie, she told me again, and I often find myself loving certain movies because other people love them.

I have not seen The African Queen in at least 40 years. So I watched it again, and it made me think more of my grandparents than Bogie and Hepburn.

In the story of The African Queen, circumstances throw two unlikely people together as they jump into the dilapidated old boat owned by one of the main characters (Charlie, played by Humphrey Bogart) in order to escape the Germans. The movie takes place in Africa where, in a tiny village, Rosie (played by Katherine Hepburn) runs a missionary church with her brother. From time to time, Charlie, a Canadian man, drops by in his boat, The African Queen, with the mail for the little church outpost. What we now call World War I had broken out in Europe, and it seemed like Africa was insulated from the conflict, until Germans attack and destroy the village where Rosie’s little church stood. Her brother dies in the conflict, and the villagers who survive the assault flee into the jungle. British-bred Rosie lingers briefly, unsure of what to do, until the pragmatic Charlie, on one of his mail runs, suggests high-tailing it to Kenya. Kenya was a British colony at the time and might provide shelter to the Canadian and British subjects. Charlie knows the waterways and so they set off.

Well, let’s just say they encounter a lot of real problems.

This movie has wild animals, swarming insects, waterfalls, leeches, angry Germans, explosives, white water, a war, and even a gallows. Never once are Rosie and Charlie upset by minor issues. Their life vacillates from periods of extreme boredom as they put-put slowly down the river toward Kenya and times when they fight for their lives. The movie has a nice pace to it … There are times when you can see the scenery (film ads of the period boast that some of this film was actually shot in Africa, which is sort of like when a drink product advertises it’s made “with real juice!”). You also get a little romantic interest, but these mushy interludes are quickly interrupted by disasters. Over and over, terrible and sometimes nearly unbelievable things happen to this pair and, over and over, they get through it.

An interesting twist to The African Queen is that it is church-lady Rosie with her upper-crust accent and her penchant for high-collared shirts who comes up with an interesting idea to kill some Germans. It seems like Rosie holds a bit of a grudge after what they did to her brother and the people of her village. Together, Rosie and Charlie map out a plan to take revenge on their enemies, if they can manage to avoid the next disaster.

Directed by John Huston and released in 1951, The African Queen got five Oscar nominations and took home the trophy for Humphrey Bogart (the only time he ever won).

The weight of this film is carried almost totally by those two actors—there are few other characters in the film and they are only peripheral to the story. Bogart and Hepburn took turns playing action-adventure heroes, romantic partners, and occasional comic foils to each other.  The humor was an interesting angle. Originally, Hepburn wanted to play the role straight—as an uptight missionary woman put in an awkward situation. It was John Huston who told her to play the role as if she were Eleanor Roosevelt. That, Hepburn said, made the character funny, believable, and at times almost warm.

(I would like to point out here that my grandmother once had a chicken named Eleanor Roosevelt.)

This is not the sort of movie I would really consider great, although critics like Roger Ebert loved it. It is a well-made film, perfectly paced, well performed, and it has that nice balance of romance and being chased by sinister villains with bombs that makes a film interesting. It’s also short by today’s standards, barely 90 minutes. But it remains very watchable. The love story was played by two older actors—both Bogart and Hepburn were considered “past their prime” for this film, and it’s nice to see that older characters sometimes get to fall in love, too.

Charlie is a grouchy slob, but he helps Rosie to escape, because that’s what decent people do in perilous times. Charlie may be rough around the edges, but he is a decent man and he takes pride in that decency. This movie was made back in the days when decency mattered. It was even considered virtuous.

At first, Charlie endured Rosie with her proper ways and big stupid British hat. Then he begrudgingly acknowledged her. The character arc finally bent (but did not break) when he found in her a kindred spirit, a person who despite her fancy manners and missionary airs shared the same fundamental ideas he did. It is pretty clear that Charlie never met a woman like Rosie before and Rosie never knew a man like Charlie. As they risked life and limb at first to escape the Germans and later to attack them, their true natures emerged. Rosie was tougher and more calculating than she looked, and Charlie was more vulnerable.

I guess that’s about a good a love story as you can get. It isn’t sappy. We never see any explicit bits of affection beyond a hand on a shoulder or a celebratory peck when they survive yet another disaster. The intimacy that is finally achieved between Charlie and Rosie mostly happens when they do things together, like plunge unexpectedly into a death spiral of white water or try to build a bomb out of homemade materials. What some movies would play as classic romantic high points, this movie plays for humor, like a marriage proposal on the gallows.

The actors play most of their scenes looking dirty and stinky. It seems almost like they got thinner and thinner as the journey went on. This was not the sort of role a diva would want to play, but both Bogart and Hepburn seemed to relish these rough roles. I sometimes think my grandmother could relate to characters who got dirty and didn’t have lots of clothes. She didn’t want to watch debonair men and glamour girls dance their way through her movies, she wanted to watch real people tussling out a messy life.

And now for a spoiler alert: the good guys win. And everybody likes that.