The African Queen

CALLING himself S. P. Eagle and operating some-what nefariously out of a yacht anchored several miles off the French Riviera, producer Sam Spiegel decided to film The African Queen with a script by James Agee and direction by John Huston. Legend has it that Spiegel signed the two by assuring each that the other was committed to the project, then obtaining bank financing by claiming that both were signed. Everyone fell for the bait and Spiegel made the deal. Regardless of the percentage of actual fact in this story, Hollywood attributes to Spiegel a pretty fair job of wheeler-dealing in launching The African Queen toward production.

Small and intriguing tales like these surround the geneses of most of America's great films: think of all those people who told Selznick that Gone With The Wind would never sell. Unfortunately, The African Queen falls far short of greatness, selling short its colorful background, despite the efforts of its talented creators (add to the list a fine short story writer, John Collier, whose contribution to the script equalled that of Huston and Agee, and photographer Jack Cardiff, then Carol Reed's right-hand man and cameraman on Hitchcock's magnificent Under Capricorn).

The odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique promotes an episodic quality that defeats a build-up of suspense or tension; there is no attempt to vary action and the middle third of The African Queen concentrates solely on rapids: a small rapid, a big rapid, and--out of the blue--a great big surprise rapid, spaced neatly at five minute intervals.

With all sense of obstacle removed, The African Queen evokes all the tension of a journey from Harvard Square to Park Street; only once does Huston create a moving conflict, when Allnut, effectively de-leeched, realizes he must go back into the leech-infested swamp in order to extricate the boat from the muddy canal.

FACING the question of what Huston was trying to do, rejecting melodrama, The African Queen can be seen as a weird-sort-of-pastoral. Allnut and Rose fall in love early in the film and spend most of it being sentimental and affectionate. Allnut shaves, his coarseness quite obliterated by romance, and Rose's up-tightness vanishes after the first clinch; the boat becomes a house in suburbia and Allnut views the tropical wilderness as a New England landscape, saying, "I'd like to come back 'ere some day." Increasingly, they address each other in blissful euphemisms: 'Dear, what's your first name?" asks Allnut, later calling her Rosie and "sweet-heart" with a devotion approaching mania.

The establishment of middle-class British values on a boat in the jungle must have interested both Agee and Collier as script-writers; the published screenplay in Agee On Film lavishes detail on Cockney inflection and deliberately tortured syntax. Here, Huston's casting defeats the intent: however much Bogart accentuates his buck teeth, he is largely out of place as a Cockney mechanic; his best moments are asides and wisecracks reminiscent of the two Hawks films, The Big Sleep and To Have And Have Not, and he must rely heavily on a stylized comedy technique borrowed wholesale from vintage Cary Grant. Overpraised for his character acting in this and Huston's earlier Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, Bogart was greatest in the romantic Hawks-Hammett-Hemingway world of the individual pitting personal morality against an inherently corrupt society, the ultimate success being the maintenance of personal self-respect.

But Huston simply fails to give either Bogart or Hepburn enough to do in The African Queen. The romance pastoral is established, but only at the expense of character development: Huston piles close-ups of Bogart and Hepburn on top of one another, all impeccably framed by Cardiff, all suggesting nothing more than bovine contentment. Ultimately, the comic timing of Huston and his actors save The African Queen from tedium: Hepburn's superb reactions to Bogart's gin-swilling equal Bogart's own anguish at watching her dispose of it, bottle by bottle. Lines in the printed script easily passed-by become audience-stoppers: Bogart's apology for his growling stomach ("There ain't a thing I can do about it.") or his shivering disgust of leeches ("Anythin' I hate in this world it's leeches! Filthy devils!").

Huston's problem as a director has always been indecision. His laconic humor and bent for undisciplined improvisation invariably takes precedence over careful development of theme through characterization and narrative. In The African Queen, the pretentions of melodrama cancel-out the element of romance, providing only an irritating absence of clarity of purpose. Considering its creators, The African Queen represents a sad, if entertaining, meeting of people whose careers were moving downhill. Bogart and Hepburn had made by far their best films, she for Cukor and Bogart for Hawks; Huston's reputation as a director grew deservedly tarnished, and the best of his later films (Moby Dick, The Misfits) were critical failures; only Agee, in writing The Night of the Hunter, managed to put on screen the American romance gothic that fascinated him. He died less than two years later.