The African Queen is a 1951 adventure film adapted from the 1935 novel of the same name by C. S. Forester. The film tells the simple, human tale of an unlikely romance between British Methodist missionary Rose Sayer (Hepburn) and salty Canadian steamboat captain Charlie Allnut (Bogart) after they meet in the Congo during World War I.
The two sail down the tortuous straits of the Ulanga-Bora river to escape the Germans and resolve to turn his rickety old barge, the African Queen, into a giant, makeshift torpedo packed with gelatine explosives with which to blow up a German gunboat, the Louisa, which is dominating a strategically-important lake nearby and hindering British military progress in the region.
The film was partially financed by John and James Woolf of Romulus Films, a British company. The cast and crew assembled in Africa in December 1950 and much of the film was shot in Lake Albert, Uganda, and in the Belgian Congo in Africa.
This was rather novel for the time, especially for a Technicolor picture that used large, cumbersome "Three-Strip" cameras. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff worried that her skin would look green in Technicolor.
The production was an independent joint venture between super-producer Sam Spiegel’s Horizon Films and Romulus Films, a British company run by financiers John and Joshua Woolf. The brothers had been warned off the project by their mentor, Alexander Korda, with the famous last words: “Two old people going up and down an African river… who’s going to be interested in that? You’ll go bankrupt!”
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Korda’s lack of foresight was uncharacteristic: as a charming middle-aged romance, The African Queen anticipated today’s demand for cinema that appeals to older “grey pound” audiences.
Sydney Pollack on Hepburn and Bogart in THE AFRICAN QUEEN
This type of location shoot was considered an exceptionally risky proposition at the time and no Hollywood studio would have commissioned a production that placed its prize assets in such danger.
Sperber and Eric Lax outlined it: “The local hazards included poisonous snakes, crocodiles, scorpions, invading soldier ants, leprosy, dysentery, and a particularly nasty malady called bilhazia that comes from contact with tainted river water and involves worms working their way under one’s skin.”
Katharine Hepburn's Fearlessness
Katharine Hepburn rose to fame in the Depression years - delighting audiences in Howard Hawks’ madcap screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby (1938) with Cary Grant - and carried on working solidly for another half-century, taking home her third Best Actress Oscar for On Golden Pond in 1981 at the grand old age of 74.
Throughout her long career, Hepburn was a fiercely independent spirit who was not always popular with audiences or the studios but fought tirelessly for better roles, refusing to serve as mere set dressing and setting an example for generations of actresses to follow.
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She was prepared to go to considerable lengths for the right part and was never afraid to take risks. But perhaps the clearest example of her fearlessness came in 1951, when she signed on with John Huston to make The African Queen, an adaptation of C.S. Forester’s 1935 novel that would require a location shoot in the jungles of East Africa, the story of which remains an industry legend to this day.
Unhappy with the direction her career was taking in 1938, for example, Hepburn simply bought out her contract with RKO, hit Broadway in Philip Barry’s new play The Philadelphia Story, acquired the rights, then convinced her friend George Cukor to direct the screen version. The result was one of the finest comedies of the Hollywood Golden Age, a self-realised comeback she made look effortlessly easy. Not bad for a star once branded “box office poison.”
Hepburn’s book, The Making of the African Queen, showed up under the tree last Christmas morning-the original hardcover first edition, for that matter-and I basically inhaled it over the next couple of days. It’s an easy read. Those familiar with Kate’s distinctive voice and the cadence of her signature Transatlantic accent will start to hear her pronouncing each syllable of the text in your head as you go along.
Katharine Hepburn on location in Africa for the filming of The African Queen, 1951.
Challenges and Triumphs on Location
As it turned out, Bacall’s husband was no more at home in the jungle than Spiegel. Bogart, the famous tough guy, hated every minute of the experience, quickly tiring of doing battle with mosquitoes and the oppressive heat, living in bamboo huts and bathing in ominous rust-red water.
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By contrast, Hepburn was delighted by the lush landscapes of the Congo and Uganda, busily decorating her base camp bungalow with native spears and darting about the set demanding to know the Latin names of all the exotic flora and fauna she encountered. “What divine morning glories!” she exclaimed, like an overgrown girl scout. Having her very own private portable toilet no doubt also improved her mood, although it was no fun for the crew members tasked with ferrying it down river from one location to the next, the luxury earning Hepburn the nickname “the queen of thrones.”
Still, almost everyone-including Kate-fell terribly ill at least some of the time with dysentery and a variety of other jungle maladies. At one point Hepburn was vomiting between takes into a bucket placed off-screen.
Unusual for its time, bulky Technicolor cameras were transported to on-location shoots in Uganda and Congo, nations today that then were still under colonial rule. The heat was oppressive, and danger seemed to lurk everywhere, but fears of lions and crocodiles were trumped by smaller but fiercer army ants and mosquitoes, a host of water-borne pathogens, as well as an existential horror of leeches.
Huston went to Africa hoping to “out-Hemingway” Hemingway in big game hunting, but his safari chasing herds of elephants turned into a lone antelope instead. He seemed to do better with Kate. The book does not openly admit to an affair, but the intimacy between them leaps off the page.
Huston, looking on and much amused by all of this, saw an opportunity in the diametrically opposed attitudes of his stars. The script, originally by critic James Agee, had since undergone major revisions by Peter Viertel and it remained uncertain quite how the resulting action-adventure narrative should be approached by the actors. Huston wisely decided to play it for laughs.
The director himself was the cause of no-little concern among the group, ignoring a prop boy’s warning that the African Queen was sinking until too late and showing a far greater preoccupation with taking time off to go hunting than he did with completing the film.
Happily, Huston turned out to be a poor shot, but his enthusiasm was infectious to Hepburn, who said his example encouraged her to court adventure in everything she did thereafter.
Like her character, who cruelly pours away Allnut’s treasured stash of Gordon’s gin (a scene outrageously lifted for Pirates of the Caribbean, 2003), Hepburn adopted an attitude of prim disapproval and made a great show of drinking water at meal times while Huston and Bogart drank nothing but bourbon.
Inevitably, everybody on the crew except those two eventually became ill, Hepburn herself struck down with malaria for three days and having to vomit into a carefully positioned bucket between takes while filming the opening chapel scene. “Those two undisciplined weaklings had so lined their insides with alcohol that no bug could live in the atmosphere… a very good joke on me,” she later chuckled.
Set photographer Eliot Eliofson’s pictures record many more light-hearted details, such as Hepburn washing her hair in a barrel with help from a production assistant, the cast and crew being woken for a 6am start by a tribal drummer and members of the team taking siestas or going fishing during downtime.
And Hepburn’s game sense of fun is there to see in the finished film. Huston presents her wading through leach-infested swampland hacking away at tall reeds with a machete, working underwater to help fix the African Queen’s broken propeller and standing on Bogie’s shoulders in her stockings to hang a homemade Union Jack from the mast in preparation for the attack on the Louisa.
Lauren Bacall makes sandwiches while surrounded by her husband and the crew during a lunch break on location for The African Queen.
Reception and Legacy
The African Queen opened on December 26, 1951, at the Fox Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills in time to qualify for the 24th Academy Awards. Contemporary critical reviews were mostly positive. The Monthly Film Bulletin was also negative, writing: "Huston seems to have been aiming at a measured, quiet, almost digressive tempo, but the material does not support it, and would have benefited by the incisiveness his previous films have shown.
Hepburn received a Best Actress Oscar nomination - her fifth - while Bogart’s utterly engaging performance as the cynical drunkard with a heart of gold earned him the only Academy Award of his storied career.
The African Queen remains a wonderful entertainment and a magnificent achievement, a maverick location shoot that argued for greater cinematic realism and paved the way for the likes of David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai (1956) and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).
It is also one of the high points of Hepburn’s brilliant career, although sadly she didn’t receive the recognition her efforts deserved. Paid roughly half the salary of her male co-star - Bogart took home $125,000 plus 30% of the film’s net profit, she $65,000 and 10% - Hepburn was also overlooked at the Academy Awards while Bogart was handed his first and last Best Actor statuette. Given that The African Queen is such a two-hander, equally reliant on the appeal of both leads, these are lamentable if unsurprising injustices.
However, such setbacks were hardly enough to knock the indomitable Hepburn off her stride. “The Great Kate”, who lived to be 96, went on to make many more acclaimed films like Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) and The Lion in Winter (1968) and once said: “I don’t fear death. It must be wonderful, like a long sleep”.
Key Differences Between the Book and the Film
In 1935, when the novella The African Queen by C. S. Forester was published, many British people believed that World War I was a grievous mistake that could have been avoided.
The film presented the efforts of Charlie and Rose in a more favorable light as their struggle to bring The African Queen to the lake causes the sinking of the Königin Luise, and the Royal Navy gunboat does not appear in the film.
Both the book and the film treat Africa as a place where it is possible to find happiness in a way that would be impossible in Europe. In both the book and the film, Rose is a prim, proper missionary from a middle class English family who is dominated by her bossy older brother Samuel, and it is during the voyage of the African Queen that she finds romance and happiness with Charlie along with the courage to assert herself.
The film changes Charlie into a Canadian, but has the same message that a working class man is able to marry a middle class woman that he would be unlikely to marry in a place other than Africa.
The vessel used to portray the German gunboat Königin Luise was the steam tug Buganda
The African Queen's Enduring Influence
One of my favorite small venues for an intimate, unique concert experience is The Kate-short for The Katharine Hepburn Cultural Arts Center-in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, a 285-seat theater with outstanding acoustics that hosts multi-genre entertainment in a historic building dating back to 1911 that once served as both theater and Town Hall.
One of the eye-catching attractions in the museum includes an exhibit behind glass showcasing Hepburn’s performance with co-star Humphrey Bogart in the celebrated 1951 film, The African Queen, that features a copy of the 1987 memoir credited to her whimsically entitled The Making of the African Queen: Or How I went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and almost lost my mind.
The African Queen was adapted as a one-hour Lux Radio Theater play on December 15, 1952. A 1977 television film continued the adventures of Charlie and Rose, with Warren Oates and Mariette Hartley in the lead roles. Though intended as the pilot for a series, it was not picked up.
The African Queen partially inspired the Jungle Cruise attraction at Disneyland.
Cast and Crew
Here is information about the cast and crew of the movie:
| Role | Person |
|---|---|
| Directed by | John Huston |
| Screenplay by | James Agee |
| Based on | The African Queen 1935 novel by C. S. Forester |
| Starring | Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart |
| Music by | Allan Gray |
