The African Queen is a rather sappy story of a Canadian ship captain and a female English missionary who find themselves in German East Africa in 1914 at the opening of the First World War. She is living with her brother another Methodist missionary in the village and they are attempting to convert the native people. He has worked for many years at a Belgian mine in the region and has regularly been their mailman. After the Germans move in, they end up escaping together on his ship and try to find a plan to get out of the area dominated by German occupation.
The film has its ups and downs as far as wit goes, but it gets a 9 due to some stellar acting and some powerful scenes. First, I'll give the truest praise where it is due for Humphrey Bogart. Maybe my sampling of his films has hitherto been selective, but he seems to play her very much against type. Bogart in Casablanca, one of my personal favorites, and The Maltese Falcon plays a cool-headed and extremely likable and interesting hero. This could hardly be less what we get here. Here, Bogart plays an uncouth and even silly or simple blackguard named Charlie Allnut. There is really very little in his character to admire. In one of the first scenes, he is at tea with the missionaries, which they got him to with the question, which misled him I fear, of "Would you like something to drink?" After taking tea and some bread and butter, his stomach begins to make noises. He spends the rest of the scene laughing at the noises his stomach makes and being told to take more bread by Katharine Hepburn's character, Rose Sayer. She too plays against type here, as far as I can see. In most of her films, specifically I think of Adam's Rib and the like, she plays the Kate à la Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. She is in this movie a very traditional, even Puritan woman who acts in many ways very conventionally. They both do it very well, but Bogart's portrayal of the slack-jawed mechanic is nearly perfect.
A great scene also comes when the brother missionary is having a fever dream and confesses to his sister that he imagined when taking his final exams in Greek, etc. for hopes of placement in some domestic position in England, he simply gave up and decided that if God wanted him to pass he would. He also confesses a great deal of jealousy and that he wouldn't have taken his sister except that she was so plain that she probably wouldn't get married anyway.
There are also some lesser aspects and scenes that play corny and forced as they go down the river. For this reason, I couldn't raise it above a 9. It placed squarely with films like 12 Angry Men, 28 Days Later, or Arn: The Knight Templar.
That all considered, it's wisdom was above average. First, it is the love story between inequals and near-opposites that attracts me to it. These people who didn't really like each other too much, find themselves lovers after a grueling trek down a supposedly unnavigable river. That love-at-first-true-knowledge that defies both love-at-first-sight theorists and skeptics of true love is something I believe wholeheartedly in. That said, the overtones of British imperial nationalism in this WWI world did knock it down a bit. I am not a fan of nationalism and even less a fan of an idealized WWI.
Finally, the wonder here is a hard one. In 1951, the fact that this was shot largely on location in Africa was huge. That should not be forgotten and I am less interested in special effects with wisdom than pageantry. But I could not get past the scenes on the river. Also, the musical score left something to be desired. Thus the 9.
I would recommend this movie for the aforementioned reasons: beautiful love story, great acting, etc., but there may be better films to pass the day with.
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