In 1950, John Huston transported Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and his crew to the Congo to shoot The African Queen. Many in the movie industry considered it not simply impractical but folly.
This tale of a prim spinster (Hepburn) thrust into a wild riverboat journey with a scruffy, hard-drinking boat pilot (Bogart) could have been much more cheaply and easily shot on a studio backlot. However, the filmmakers chose to embrace the challenges of filming on location, resulting in a production that was as adventurous as the film itself.
The Arduous Production
The African Queen’s production was arduous, involving every hardship imaginable. Filming on location - especially with major Hollywood stars in a distant, dangerous place like the Belgian Congo - was a rarity in 1951. “The supply line was precarious,” Life wrote, “the heat was intense and disease lurked everywhere.
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.
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. 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.
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As Eliot Elisofon snapped hundreds of images of the stars, their director, and his company, Huston developed an affection for the photographer and his work. In his autobiography, An Open Book, Huston wrote: “Eliot Elisofon was a supreme egotist. He made no bones about it: he was the greatest photographer alive. With Eliot, you didn’t know where innocence left off and egotism began.
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. The cast and crew endured sickness and spartan living conditions during their time on location. In the early scene in which Rose (Hepburn) plays an organ in the church, a bucket was placed off-camera in which she could vomit between takes because she was sick.
About half of the film was shot in the UK. The scenes in which Bogart and Hepburn are seen in the water were all shot in studio tanks at Worton Hall Studios in Isleworth, near London. These scenes were considered too dangerous to shoot in Africa. All of the foreground plates for the process shots were also filmed in studio.
The sequence was shot on location in Africa and at the London studios. Scenes on the boat were filmed using a large raft with a mockup of the boat on top. Sections of the boat set could be removed to make room for the large Technicolor camera. This proved hazardous on one occasion when the boat's boiler, a heavy copper replica, almost fell on Hepburn. It was not secured to the deck because it also had to be moved to accommodate the camera.
The Stars' Experiences
“You have to fight the jungle all the time,” Bogart told the Daily Express about filming in Africa. “And that gets into your performance. Out here, you don’t need to have sweat sprayed on your forehead to show it’s hot.
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Bogart was the antithesis of Hollywood glamour in the best sense. Every shot of whiskey he ever drank and every cigarette he ever smoked served him well for the part of Allnut: The character-filled lines and creases on his face deeply enriched his lovably earthy performance, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Actor.
Hepburn was a little girl when she first stayed at her affluent family’s summer home in the tony Fenwick section of Old Saybrook, just a year after the opening of the then newly constructed Town Hall that today bears her name. She later dubbed the area “paradise,” returning frequently over the course of her long life and eventually retiring to her mansion in Fenwick overlooking the water, where she spent her final years until her death at 96 in 2003.
Katharine Hepburn had a long career in Hollywood marked by dramatic ebbs and flows. While she was nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and set a record for winning the Best Actress Oscar four times, more than once her star power waned, and at one point she was even widely considered “box office poison.”
Her offscreen persona was both unconventional and eccentric. She defied contemporary expectations of how a woman and a movie star should behave: shunning celebrity, sparring with the press, expressing unpopular political opinions, wearing trousers at a time that was unacceptable for ladies, fiercely guarding her privacy, and stubbornly clinging to an independent lifestyle. She was pilloried as boyish, and accused of lesbianism at a time when that was a vicious expletive, but she evolved into a twentieth century cultural icon.
Hepburn proves affable through every paragraph, although sometimes less than heroic. And while she is especially kind, almost to a fault, to every African recruited to serve her in various capacities, there is a patronizing tone in her recollections that can’t help but make us a bit uncomfortable today.
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Yet, warts and all-and these are certainly apparent-Kate comes off today, long after her passing, as likeable as she did to those who knew her in her times. And what times those must have been!
Those who watch the movie for the first time will be especially struck by the superlative performances of both Bogie and Hepburn, two middle-aged stars who not only complement one another beautifully but turn out an unexpected on-screen chemistry that has the audience emotionally involved, rooting for their romance and their cause. It is a tribute to their mutual talents that the two successfully communicated palpable on-screen passion to audiences of the time who must have been struck by the stark disparity between the movie posters depicting Bogie as a muscular he-man and Hepburn as a kind of Rita Hayworth twin-something neither the scrawny Bogart nor the aging Hepburn live up to in the Technicolor print.
The small steamboat used to depict the African Queen was built in 1912 in Britain for service in Africa. Because of the dangers involved with shooting the rapids scenes, a small-scale model was used in the studio tank in London. The vessel used to portray the German gunboat Königin Luise was the steam tug Buganda, owned and operated on Lake Victoria by the East African Railways and Harbours Corporation.
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.
Life Magazine's Perspective
Life magazine’s coverage regularly included unique and often exclusive perspectives on motion-picture production, and the curated and carefully researched 708-page collection Life.
Also included in the book are details on the contributing still photographers who were instrumental in making Life special and still memorable today. Unlike much of the film’s cast and crew, Eliot Elisofon, Life’s photographer covering the film on location, was no stranger to Africa. He had covered the war in North Africa and, in 1947, began making photographic pilgrimages throughout the continent.
As was so often the case in Life, few of Elisofon’s numerous photos saw print. The African Queen photo-essay, subtitled “Katie and Bogie Hit the Congo,” focused mainly on the ruggedness of the film’s remote shoot. Although Elisofon took many strong, straightforward portrait shots of Bogart and Hepburn, Life’s editors instead cleaved toward images of the film’s company adapting to life in their camp, which was rough-hewn from the jungle.
Elisofon’s working relationship with Huston continued beyond The African Queen. In his work, Elisofon used color filters intended for film production, so Huston hired him as a color consultant on Moulin Rouge, his biopic of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
Critical and Financial Success
Although many initially doubted the film, it became a major critical and financial success upon its release, and ever after.
Contemporary critical reviews were mostly positive. Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film "should impress for its novelty both in casting and scenically," and found the ending "rather contrived and even incredible, but melodramatic enough, with almost a western accent, to be popularly effective".
Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called the film "a slick job of movie hoodwinking with a thoroughly implausible romance, set in a frame of wild adventure that is as whopping as its tale of off-beat love ... This is not noted with disfavor." Crowther added that "Mr.
Variety called The African Queen "an engrossing motion picture ... Performance-wise, Bogart has never been seen to better advantage. Nor has he ever had a more knowing, talented film partner than Miss Hepburn."
John McCarten of The New Yorker declared that "Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart come up with a couple of remarkable performances, and it's fortunate that they do, for the movie concentrates on them so single-mindedly that any conspicuous uncertainty in their acting would have left the whole thing high and dry."
Richard L. Coe wrote in The Washington Post that "Huston has tried a risky trick and most of the time pulls it off in delicious style.
On review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes the film has a 96% rating based on 47 reviews, with an average rating of 8.8/10.
Differences Between the Book and 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.
In the novella, Charlie and Rose fail in their attempt to sink the Königin Luise as the message in the book is: "What appears to be an impossible mission for a private citizen is shown to be just that--it remains a job best left for the professionals". The Königin Luise is instead sunk in a lake battle by a Royal Navy gunboat as Rose and Charlie watch from the shore.
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.
In the book, Charlie is a coarse and somewhat disreputable working class Cockney who marries a middle class woman that he would be unlikely to marry in England. 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.
In the book, it is strongly implied that Rose and Charlie are engaged in a sexual relationship before marriage, an aspect of the book that was toned down in the film because of the Hays Code, which forbade any depiction of a pre-marital sexual relationship.
Legacy and Adaptations
The film was released on Region 2 DVD in the United Kingdom, Germany and Scandinavia. In 2009, Paramount Pictures (the current owner of the film's American rights) completed restoration work for Region 1, and a 4K digitally restored version from the original camera negative was issued on DVD and Blu-ray on March 23, 2010.
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.
Florida attorney and Humphrey Bogart enthusiast Jim Hendricks Sr. purchased the boat in 1982 in Key Largo, Florida. After falling into a state of disrepair following Hendricks' 2001 death, the ship was discovered rusting in a Florida marina in 2012 by Suzanne Holmquist and her engineer husband Lance.
One of the two boats used as the African Queen is actually the 35-foot (10 m) L.S. Livingston, which had been a working diesel boat for 40 years; the steam engine was a prop and the real diesel engine was hidden under stacked crates of gin and other cargo.
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.
Hepburn gets the byline but it’s clear pretty early on that the “narrative” is actually comprised of excerpts from interviews she sat for, strung together to give the appearance of a book-length chronicle. But no matter. 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.
This book is pure entertainment, with the added bonus of forty-five wonderful behind-the-scenes photographs that readers may linger upon far longer than the pages of text. For those who loved the film as I do, the candid moments that are captured of Bogie, Hepburn, and Huston are precious relics of classic Hollywood that stir the heart and the soul. If you are a fan, carve out the time and read The Making of the African Queen.
If you are a fan of behind-the-scenes stories,The African Queen - True WW1 Story Behind The Film
But more importantly, screen The African Queen again.
