This is how an RKO script reader dismissed "The African Queen", which later (after much wrangling on the part of John Huston to find financing) became one of the most beloved films of all time - and the only one to win Humphrey Bogart a Best Actor (or any other) Oscar. Sorry, RKO!

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Early in the filming, director John Huston felt that Katharine Hepburn hadn't quite grasped Rose's character - she was too contemptuous of Charlie - and asked her to play the part more as a great lady putting on her society smile. When Hepburn pressed him to be more specific, he suggested she play Rose like Eleanor Roosevelt. According to both Huston and Hepburn, the advice made all the difference to her performance, and both star and director earned Academy Award nominations for their work. [Reel Classics]

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John Huston recalled: "Bogie didn't particularly care for the Charlie Alnutt role when he started, but I slowly got him into it, showing him by expression and gesture what I thought Alnutt should be like. He first imitated me, then all at once he got under the skin of that wretched, sleazy, absurd, brave little man. He realized he was on to something new and good. He said to me, 'John, don't let me lose it.'"

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The movie was filmed mostly on location in Africa, where almost all the cast and crew suffered from malaria and dysentery—except director John Huston and Bogart, neither of whom ever drank any water. (Bogart explained: "I built a solid wall of Scotch between me and the bugs. If a mosquito bit me, he'd fall over dead drunk.") Hepburn, ever the urologist's daughter, disapproved of the two men's drinking and piously drank gallons of water each day to spite them. She wound up so sick with dysentery that, even months after she returned home, the famously vigorous actress was still ill. The trip and the movie made such an impact on her that later in life she wrote a book about filming the movie: "The Making of The African Queen: Or, How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind", which made her a best-selling author at the age of 77.

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In an interview in "Playboy", Huston spoke of how on their days off, he and Bogart would go hunting for big game, and how one day Hepburn asked to go along. He described her as a "Diana of the Hunt", utterly fearless, and able to shoot with the best of them. [Wikipedia ]

Katharine Hepburn played The African Queen's memorable missionary Miss Rose Sayer in 1951, at the age of 44, and was insulted by Bogart's Charlie Alnutt character as a "crazy, psalm-singing, skinny old maid"; it was the first of a cluster of "spinster roles" to follow for Hepburn, which also included the films "Summertime" (1955), "The Rainmaker" (1956), and "Suddenly Last Summer" (1959). Ah, Hollywood. You're such a bitch.

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Here's a video trailer for the film, with a great, funny line from Kate-as-Rose at the end.


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The "African Queen" was the S/L Livingstone, a 1912 steam launch owned by the British East Africa Railroad Co. in Uganda. It is now on display at Holiday Inn Key Largo, in Key Largo Florida. Pix in Fla.. One day during The African Queen shoot, the eponymous boat even sank. Lauren Bacall (who accompanied Bogie on the shoot) recalled: "The natives had been told to watch it and they did; they watched it sink."

How funny to think that anyone could see her as unattractive or spinsterish in this movie when it's obvious that she was still so totally gorgeous.

I love the RKO script reader's review.

These pics and movie stills are great. Now I want to see the movie again. Jeez, it's been 20 years or more since I saw it last.

I forgot to work in there somewhere that this was one of the first films shot almost entirely "on location", I think (Rose Sayer's doomed brother, played by Robert Morley, acted his role from England and it was interwoven into the other scenes, and the shots with Hepburn and Bogey in the water were also shot in England, for safety concerns) - and definitely one of the first shot on location, where the location was somewhere so difficult, so distant, and so dangerous. At any rate, as far as Hollywood films goes (Hollywood cast and director, at least, if not financing), it was something of a novelty in that sense. (It was also Bogart's first technicolor film, btw.)

Some accounts have Huston as the driving force behind the African location, while this site called Film Notes identifies Hepburn as the one who insisted the setting be authentic.

At any rate, I've read in several places, including here, that Huston and a pilot travelled over 25,000 miles by plane in Africa looking for the "perfect river" before he found Ruiki River in the Belgian Congo, so it seems more likely to me that he was the one who was obsessed with location.

Awesome stuff, taz! I can't believe I've still never seen this movie. (And I was on a Kate Hepburn kick not too long ago.) I'll definitely pick this one up the next time I go to the video store.

Hackneyed reviews, Mr. Allnut, are what we are put in this world to rise above.

Love, love, love that movie! I saw it first at about age 12 with my mother at a museum's outdoor screening and it began my life long love affair with Humphrey Bogart. Damn time space continuum, anyway - just because he died before I was born shouldn't mean that our love could never be.

and doesn't it sound like the screen reader's pronouncement could have been written by a MeFite?

I could so see a comment like this in a thread about, say, an online site of submitted screenplays looking for angels. :)

Oh! And another thing I didn't manage to shoehorn in there is the wonderful 50-year friendship that developed between Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn after meeting during this filming, a relationship that survived long after the respective deaths of each woman's great true love - Bogart, for Bacall, and Spencer Tracy for Hepburn (as far as we know, and the conventional wisdom on their love lives).

After Kate's death, Lauren said, "She unknowingly made me aware of ways to live and to behave that were new to me. So although there is a large, empty space in my life without her, there is all that past to remember."

Love this movie. I often think of this one shot, near the end. Charlie and Rose are mired in the muck, covered with leeches and at the end of their endurance. They think they're about to die. Then the camera pulls back and you see what they can't - that just ahead of them is a clear channel, that they are THIS CLOSE to escaping the mud, and that if only they could see that, they'd summon the will to press on just a bit more.

Wouldn't it be great if you could do that in real life, when times are tough ... take a peek at what's just ahead. Then again, if it isn't smooth sailing, maybe that wouldn't be so good.

We're always this close from escaping the mud and leeches, lovely Kangaroo - even it isn't smooth sailing. Even if it's somebody else's idea of direst hell, and only amounts to mud without leeches, or leeches without so much mud.

I think we're always a mere step away from "better" which is always a step away from "better yet", and so on.

and it must be deep and true, because it was posted at 13:13. Either that, or Beelzebuttafuco.

I do love this movie! All this background is great, taz, so thank you so much!