I Pronounce You Man and Wife. Proceed With the Execution.

My next film is one that I had seen as a child, and decided to give another change: The African Queen.  This movie was made in 1951, and stars Katharine Hepburn (need I say more?) and Humphrey Bogart (probably best known for his role in Casablanca.  The film was directed by John Huston (who also directed Annie and The Maltese Falcon).

The African Queen takes place in 1914, in German East Africa.  A missionary, Samuel Sayer (Robert Morely), and his sister, Rose (Hepburn), live with and preach to a small village of Africans.  Once World War I begins, German soldiers come to the village, set fire to the huts, and round up the Africans, taking them away to be soldiers.  Samuel and Rose are not hurt at all, and their house is not disturbed, but the church is burned to the ground.  Samuel goes mad because of the chaos, and dies quickly.  Rose is alone in the village.

Charlie Allnut (Bogart), a riverboat captain and supplies dealer, comes by the village to check on them the day Samuel dies.  Finding Rose alone, he takes her with him to his riverboat - the African Queen.  Rose suggests that they go down the river to the lake, in order to get out of the area.   Charlie informs her that the lake is held by a German warship called the Louisa.  Rose figures out a way to torpedo the Louisa, using the African Queen, and convinces Charlie to go with the plan.  They travel down the river, encounter great hardships, and fall in love.  At the end, they are captured by the Germans before they can blow up the Louisa, but ask the ship captain to marry them before they are hung.  He does, and just before they are killed, the formerly submerged African Queen surfaces and blows up the Louisa.  Charlie and Rose dive off the ship, and presumably swim to safety.

There were many things about The African Queen that frustrated me.  The opening credits of this movie are awful - two minutes of floating under branches, looking up at the sky, and hearing monkeys.  It almost made me want to turn off the movie in disgust.  The next three minutes are also purely painful - out of tune, no word singing of a hymn.  In fact, almost the entire movie seems campy, predictable, and unrealistic.

For some reason, I have never been fond of Humphrey Bogart.  I suppose I don't see him as the best of leading men.  He is neither handsome, nor charismatic - he doesn't even have a sexy voice, or even an accent!  In this, I am no more impressed.  Hepburn, however, disappointed me in this movie.  For the first half of the film, her character is bland and stark.  Her attire - though appropriate for the time period they are depicting - is high collared and must have been stifling to her.  Her fire and pizzaz don't really shine through until two different scenes.  One is when she pours all of Charlie's gin overboard after an argument (sort of reminded me of Elizabeth Swann burning all of Jack Sparrow's rum in Pirates of the Caribbean).  The other is the scene after they have successfully traversed the rapids.  She says, "I never dreamed that any mere physical experience could be so stimulating!"

I did like a couple of details about the film.  I happened to notice that the missionary church was a Methodist one, which explained in and of itself Rose's obvious distaste for alcohol.  I thought that was quite true to form, and enjoyed that little tidbit.  In addition, I liked the comment after the ship captain married them - see the quote in the title for that.

I do not recommend this film.  It is such an average plot, and the actors do not rise above the story to make it more intriguing.  The film seemed endless and quite dull for the most part.  Pick a different Hepburn movie!  Then again, maybe I should give "Bogey" another chance someday...