Movie Review: The African Queen (1951)

The African Queen

Note: This is #27 in my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009. Halfway through!

Oooh, the first color movie in this little escapade! Humphry Bogart and Katherine Hepburn play what I consider to be a fairly unlikely couple in this 1951 drama/adventure film. When the prim and proper Rose Sayer (Hepburn) sees her church destroyed and her missionary brother killed by Germans invading East Africa during World War I, she flees with the rough but good natured riverboat Captain Charlie Allnut (Bogart). On their way down river the two fall in love and hatch a plan to use Charlie’s boat, The African Queen, to attack the Germans. Well, Rose devises the plan. Then she forces it on Charlie.

As an adventure story, this works fairly well. We get to see the two refugees turned guerrilla fighters navigate the perils of the river and African wildlife. Rose, who was already out of her element to begin with, is thrown headfirst into something completely opposite her nature, with a companion to match. So there’s some interesting dynamics there.

What really seemed to fall apart for me, though, was the inevitable but still inexplicable romance between the two leads. These two people are not only completely different and apparently incompatible, but they’re only with each other for a few days before the fall madly and deeply in love. It’s not believable and smacks of something that was crammed in there just because that’s the sort of thing that’s supposed to happen in the movies. I would have appreciated the movie more if the relationship between the two characters were more nuanced and the movie ended with the hint that they could grow into more over time.

Still, the performances by Bogart and Hepburn are good as to be expected, and a lot of the cinematography with the boat scenes was head and shoulders above what I’ve seen in earlier movies. The African Queen sits in the middle of the pack in terms of how much I liked it, but it’s definitely not bad.

Trailer below.

Published by

One thought on “Movie Review: The African Queen (1951)

Comments are closed.