Word: queene
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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CALLING himself S. P. Eagle and operating some-what nefariously out of a yacht anchored several miles off the French Riviera, producer Sam Spiegel decided to film The African Queen with a script by James Agee and direction by John Huston. Legend has it that Spiegel signed the two by assuring each that the other was committed to the project, then obtaining bank financing by claiming that both were signed. Everyone fell for the bait and Spiegel made the deal. Regardless of the percentage of actual fact in this story, Hollywood attributes to Spiegel a pretty fair job of wheeler...
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...
...guilt of the men, two of whom, James Dhlamini and Victor Mlambo, had murdered a white farmer in a Mau Mau-style ambush and the third of whom, Duly Shadrack, had axed a native chief to death in the bush. But by blatantly ignoring the mercy move of Queen Elizabeth, to whom they still claimed to profess fealty, the leaders of the runaway colony also applied the hangman's noose to the few fragile hopes that still remained for a reconciliation with Britain...
...role of judicial murderer, had refrained from carrying out the sentences. Then, two weeks ago, Rhodesia's high court ruled that the noose could be used, since the Smith regime was a de facto government. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Labor government thereupon asked the Queen to intercede, but her plea was rejected by the Rhodesian high court. "Her Majesty is quite powerless in this matter," said Rhodesian Chief Justice Sir Hugh Beadle, who had hitherto been known as a "Queen's man" for arguing that Rhodesia must maintain residual links with the Crown...
Fifty years later, the same nine men would return to the Thames and celebrate their feat. They would be given medals from the Queen. They would be bankers, lawyers, chemists, industrialists, and Saltonstall would be Governor and later Senator from Massachusetts...