The African Queen (1951)
Missionary Rose Sayer and steamboat captain Charlie Allnut cruise down an African river to blow up a German warship.
What an easy pitch: “hey, how about we take two huge movie stars and have them sail down a scenic African river in dazzling Technicolor?” Yep, sign me up.
Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) is a prim British missionary in German East Africa. When World War I breaks out and German troops burn down her village, Rose flees on the African Queen, the steamboat of the resourceful but crude Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart). Rose convinces Charlie that they should sail down the Ulanga river to sink the Königin Luise, a German gunboat controlling an important lake. It’s obviously a suicide mission but Rose is cute so Charlie agrees.
Their voyage is filled with trials: they brave rapids, a German fort patrolling the river, swarms of insects, and Rose throwing away all of Charlie’s gin. When they reach the Königin Luise, they steam towards her with their homemade torpedoes but capsize in a storm. Both Rose and Charlie are captured and sentenced to death. They request to be married before their hanging (they obviously fell in love while sailing together) and the Germans oblige them; then, right as they’re about to be strung up, BANG, deus ex machina, the Königin Luise hits the African Queen’s submerged torpedoes and sinks. Rose and Charlie swim out of German East Africa and to a happy ending.
Rating: 7/10, would cruise with Bogart and Hepburn any day.
Cast and Crew
There are three huge names in this one. The first is director John Huston. John Huston is the son of Walter Huston and father of Anjelica Huston; he’s one of two answers to the trivia question asking for the families in which three generations have won Oscars.1 Huston’s first directing assignment was 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, based on the Dashiell Hammett story and starring Humphrey Bogart as detective Sam Spade. Huston’s post-WWII, pre-African Queen oeuvre has a few more interesting flicks in it:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), also with Bogart. John won two Oscars for it (Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay) while his father won a Best Supporting Actor statue.
Key Largo (1948), where Bogie and Lauren Bacall battle mobster Edward G. Robinson in a hotel during a hurricane.
Red Badge of Courage (1951), starring real-life WWII flying hero Audie Murphy. Murphy was famed for his autobiography and film To Hell and Back.
We’ll see the Hustons again in this column.
Humphrey Bogart. Called the greatest male star of classic cinema, nothing less. His films with Huston are career highlights, but he got his start in the 1930s as a B-movie gangster, often as the rival or underling to guys like James Cagney or Edward G. Robinson (for example, the 1938 Cagney-lead Angels with Dirty Faces). Once his career got going, though, he made the stone-cold classics Casablanca (1942; for trivia you’re responsible for every single thing about it) and The Big Sleep (1946, playing author Raymond Chandler’s private eye Philip Marlowe2). He fell in love with and married Lauren Bacall while filming To Have and Have Not3 (1944) and then made three other movies with her. We’ll catch Bogie again in 1954.
Katharine Hepburn. Called the greatest female star of classic cinema, nothing less. She has the most Oscar acting wins ever (four), starting with 1933’s Morning Glory. We’ve touched on her earlier roles and 28-year affair with Spencer Tracy, but we should also mention the films Bringing Up Baby (a Howard Hawks 1938 picture where Hepburn owns a leopard and Cary Grant doesn’t like it) and The Philadelphia Story (1940, Hepburn can’t figure out which classic Hollywood leading man to love). By 1950, we’re in the back nine of Hepburn’s career, but if anything, it’s greater than the front. Instead of watching the roles disappear, she used her stardom to tell stories about mature, independent, sometimes unmarried women. Her career stretches out into the 1990s (!) so we’ll happily be seeing more of her.
The African Queen is based on a work by C. S. Forester, who wrote the Horatio Hornblower novels about a Royal Navy officer during the Napoleonic Wars. These are the dad-est dad books of all time—well, this side of Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander” novels. Be careful, though! E. M. Forster, who wrote “A Passage to India,” “A Room with A View,” and “Howards End” (no apostrophe—it’s about a house, not about the end of a guy named Howard), is a different person whose name is both spelled and pronounced differently.
The screenplay for The African Queen was adapted by James Agee, and if you do crosswords, you’ll certainly recognize his name. He’s the author of “A Death in the Family” (1957), for which he won a posthumous Pulitzer.4 He also co-wrote “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” with Walker Evans, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration.5
The Trivia
In the mid-1800s, Germany was just a collection of states. It was Otto von Bismarck, who became Minister-President of Prussia in 1862, who moved to unify Germany under Prussian rule. After unification, Bismarck was pressured by elites to go colony-hunting, since colonies provide colonizers raw materials and create markets for the colonizer’s goods. This philosophy was summed up in Germany as Weltpolitik: the imperialist drive for global political, strategic, and economic prominence.6
The Berlin Conference of 1884 is often accepted as the beginning of the Scramble for Africa, where the European powers sliced and diced the continent for themselves. Before the Scramble, only 10% of Africa was controlled by European powers7; by the eve of World War I, 90% was controlled, with only Ethiopia and Liberia remaining independent.
Germany took African possessions in the west (modern Togo and Cameroon), the southwest (modern Namibia), and the east (modern Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi), all shown in green on the map below.
German East Africa was created by Bismarck in 1885. Immediately, the Sultan of Zanzibar claimed he ruled not just the island of Zanzibar but the mainland as well, which included parts of Germany’s new colony. Bismarck sent warships to clear up that misunderstanding.8
When Germany lost WWI, the Treaty of Versailles divvied up German East Africa among the Allies. Rwanda and Burundi went to Belgium, the Kionga Triangle in modern-day Mozambique went to Portugal, and the rest went to Great Britain, where it was renamed Tanganyika.
Odds and Ends
Rose and her brother were Methodists; Methodism, started by John Wesley, got its name from “the methodical way in which they carried out their Christian faith”….Charlie Allnut came to Africa to construct the Zambezi Bridge; that bridge, now called the Victoria Falls Bridge, opened in 1905 and connects modern-day Zambia and Zimbabwe over the Zambezi River just below Victoria Falls…Victoria Falls is nicknamed “the smoke that thunders”…The filming of The African Queen took its toll on the cast and crew9 and the semi-fictional book “White Hunter, Black Heart”10 was written about the experience of making the film.
The other is the Coppolas. One could argue that Farrows / Previns / Allens are another correct answer to the question, though this implies that Woody Allen is the 3rd generation…as Mia Farrow’s son-in-law. Barf.
Yep, Bogie played both Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, so no wonder those two hard-boiled detectives are so easy to mix up.
To Have and Have Not is the answer to the odd trivia question, “what is only movie to have two Nobel Literature laureates work on it?” The movie was based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel and William Faulkner contributed to the screenplay.
You’ll often see Agee paired with Faulkner for the “accomplishment” of winning a posthumous Pulitzer, though it turns out many people have done that.
The FSA today is best remembered for its photography program. Two more noteworthy FSA photographers are Gordon Parks, whose “Washington D.C. Government Charwoman (American Gothic)” is super cool, and Dorothea Lange, whose “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California” is super cool.
Contrast this with Bismarck’s Realpolitik, which was a philosophy of using pragmatism and diplomacy to advance state interests.
The most important possessions at that point were Angola and Mozambique (held by Portugal), the Cape Colony (Great Britain), and Algeria (France).
This wasn’t Zanzibar’s only humiliating experience with colonizers. The Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, which lasted 38 minutes, was the shortest war in history.
Except Bogart and John Huston, who were fine. They credited their good health to only drinking salubrious whisky while on location.
Later turned into a 1990 film directed by and starring Clint Eastwood.
Excellent as always.
Corrections:
The author is Raymond Chandler, the character is Philip Marlowe
The German colony of Kamerun was divided into two League of Nations mandates the larger of these was administered by France (not Britain). The split mandate is the reason the modern Republic of Cameroon has both French and English speaking regions.