Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Up until this weekend, the number of major motion pictures about a man, a woman, and a boat navigating dangerous waters of rivers and lakes in a fierce jungle setting while facing menacing animals and dangerous Germans during World War I amounted to one. That is doubled now by Jungle Cruise, in which characters played by Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt quest through wet and dark in the Amazon in search of something called the Tree of Life, which is apparently completely unrelated to that Terrence Malick movie. (Instead, it sheds healing drops called the Tears of the Moon, not yet a movie title.)
The first, and for a long time the one and only, was the 1951 The African Queen, starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn and directed by John Huston. The source material was a novel by C.S. Forester, a writer who for much of the 20th century was the biggest spinner of sea-faring tales. (He was eventually supplanted by Patrick O’Brian.) Forester invented the noble 19th century naval hero Horatio Hornblower and also wrote The Good Shepherd, the World War II story that was made into the movie Greyhound by Tom Hanks in 2020.
In The African Queen, a socially awkward boat pilot Charlie Allnutt (British in the book; Canadian in the movie, so Bogart wouldn’t have to attempt an accent but could still play a character loyal to the Crown) and socially awkward Christian missionary Rose Sayer (Hepburn) hatch, in the wake of a German invasion that destroyed Rose’s home and more or less killed her brother, an impromptu plan to sink a German warship upriver. Why? They think there’s nothing better to do. The outbreak of World War I has ignited hostilities in the colonial areas. Rose’s missionary, a modest village, was raided so the Germans could round up native Africans and essentially enslave them in their armed forces, to harass (that is, kill) the British forces in the vicinity.
Charlie initially proposes waiting out the war in his beloved boat, which gives the movie its title. (Obviously he’s not anticipating the war lasting as long as it does.) Rose shames him into taking up her patriotic plan, which is to rig the boat’s explosives and ram it, torpedo style, into the gunboat called the Königin Luise. And of course, during their journey the two misfits fall in love.
Missionaries? Colonies? Do we have another “Problematic” on our hands? Not so much. The situation described in both the novel’s scenario and shown in the movie is pretty much historically accurate. Native Africans are only seen in the movie’s opening scenes, the relatively placid village that serves as the British mission. Boatman Charlie is acquainted with Rose and her somewhat pompous brother (Robert Morley) because he’s their mailman. As he motors down river to make his delivery, he’s seen chatting amiably with some native children. His manner is not unlike that of Walter Huston’s, when his character is relaxing in an indigenous Mexican village in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the 1940s Huston/Bogart classic. By contrast, the native sitting through the hymns Morley plays on the organ in the hut that serves as a church look dutiful but bored. Huston’s directorial eye isn’t condescending. There’s one closeup of a native with some tribal facial scarification. This movie was shot on location and its extras were local; Huston insisted on realistic detail throughout. But there’s no implication that the brother-sister missionaries are superior to their presumed charges.
But once the Germans round the natives up, it’s game over for them as far as the movie is concerned. “They plan to make soldiers of the natives, and take over all of Africa,” Charlie says to Rose, with some incredulity. (About the savagery of the Germans, that is.)
We don’t see any other people, really, save for Charlie and Rose, for another hour or so. By contrast, in Jungle Cruise there’s a bit wherein Dwayne Johnson’s character says, “We’re heading into headhunter company, which is a terrible place to be headed.” Egregious wordplay aside, the insistent othering of indigenous peoples in the Disney project is more, um, problematic than anything the sweet-natured The African Queen, arguably Huston’s least cynical major movie, has to offer.
Huston’s movie also has more authenticity, so to speak. No CGI here. It didn’t even exist in 1951. But even if it had, Huston likely would not have used it. There’s a scene in which Charlie comes out of some river water covered in leeches. Bogart, rather sensibly, suggested that makeup staff festoon him with fake rubber leeches. Nuh-uh, said his longtime buddy Huston. He got a box of the real ones shipped down (the river itself not a wholly reliable source, apparently) and latched them on to the actor. That’s not to say that the movie did not avail itself of what was then state-of-the-art special effects. The flying insects that besiege Rose and Charlie before the leech business is a competent but very evident optical effect, superimposing what looks like microscopic bacterial footage over the actors miming mosquito attack.
The on-location shoot of The African Queen is a source of nearly endless movie lore. Katharine Hepburn herself got a whole book out of it, which she titled The Making of ‘The African Queen,’ or How I Went to Africa with Bogie, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind. Cinematographer Jack Cardiff devotes a hefty chunk of his excellent memoir Magic Hour to the shoot, recounting in detail how he and other crew members were brought down by dysentery. As if lugging giant Technicolor cameras through the jungle and keeping them working at high temperatures wasn’t bad enough. At a certain point, he writes “it was now clear why Huston and Bogart were the only ones to stay fit and well throughout the location. They never drank water. Only neat, germ-proof whisky.”
Bogart himself copped to this, revealing a secret diet of baked beans, canned asparagus, and Scotch (the mixture of which propelled him to his first and only Oscar win, the 1952 Academy Award for Best Actor). Hepburn was so afflicted that a bucket was kept off-camera during her organ-playing scene. But she got through. Oddly enough, while shooting the 1955 David Lean film Summertime in the distinctly more cosmopolitan locale of Venice, Italy, she sustained an eye infection that was to persist for the rest of her life. This was after, no doubt emboldened by her time on African Queen, she insisted on falling backward into one of Venice’s canals herself rather than leave it to a stunt person.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.
