Word: africanization
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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FACING the question of what Huston was trying to do, rejecting melodrama, The African Queen can be seen as a weird-sort-of-pastoral. Allnut and Rose fall in love early in the film and spend most of it being sentimental and affectionate. Allnut shaves, his coarseness quite obliterated by romance, and Rose's up-tightness vanishes after the first clinch; the boat becomes a house in suburbia and Allnut views the tropical wilderness as a New England landscape, saying, "I'd like to come back 'ere some day." Increasingly, they address each other in blissful euphemisms: 'Dear, what...
Small and intriguing tales like these surround the geneses of most of America's great films: think of all those people who told Selznick that Gone With The Wind would never sell. Unfortunately, The African Queen falls far short of greatness, selling short its colorful background, despite the efforts of its talented creators (add to the list a fine short story writer, John Collier, whose contribution to the script equalled that of Huston and Agee, and photographer Jack Cardiff, then Carol Reed's right-hand man and cameraman on Hitchcock's magnificent Under Capricorn...
...odyssey of cockney mechanic Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and missionary Rose (Katharine Hepburn) down uncharted African waters suggests tense comedy-melodrama: they must, after all, evade rifle fire, skirt rapids, fix boilers, swat flies, brave swamps, remove leeches, blow up German cruisers, and fall in love. Regardless, Huston injects the action with mechanical uncaring: Allnut and Rose talk genially in medium close shot, one of them looks off-screen, says "Look!", and Huston cuts to what they see; he resorts to this lethargic montage in introducing enemy troops, the fort, all rapids, and the boat Louisa. The repetition of dramatic technique...
With all sense of obstacle removed, The African Queen evokes all the tension of a journey from Harvard Square to Park Street; only once does Huston create a moving conflict, when Allnut, effectively de-leeched, realizes he must go back into the leech-infested swamp in order to extricate the boat from the muddy canal...
...Huston simply fails to give either Bogart or Hepburn enough to do in The African Queen. The romance pastoral is established, but only at the expense of character development: Huston piles close-ups of Bogart and Hepburn on top of one another, all impeccably framed by Cardiff, all suggesting nothing more than bovine contentment. Ultimately, the comic timing of Huston and his actors save The African Queen from tedium: Hepburn's superb reactions to Bogart's gin-swilling equal Bogart's own anguish at watching her dispose of it, bottle by bottle. Lines in the printed script easily passed...