Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While the script's vagueness could have been eliminated, perhaps the production's lack of technical proficiency was unavoidable. A house show cannot possibly have the financial resources necessary to supply all the special effects a science-fiction entertainment requires. Rarely do we find projects such as The Invention of Morel on any stage, partly at least because the cost of doing them right is prohibitive...
With Wood earning All-America honors, Harvard steamrollered its first seven opponents by a composite score of 149-26. Only the Yale game stood between Wood and an eastern championship. Only Yale and Albie Booth. For the Cambridge flash the script was wrong. Harvard got only one scoring opportunity, blew it and then had to watch in anguish as Booth clicked on a late field goal to snap Wood's string...
...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...
...establishment of middle-class British values on a boat in the jungle must have interested both Agee and Collier as script-writers; the published screenplay in Agee On Film lavishes detail on Cockney inflection and deliberately tortured syntax. Here, Huston's casting defeats the intent: however much Bogart accentuates his buck teeth, he is largely out of place as a Cockney mechanic; his best moments are asides and wisecracks reminiscent of the two Hawks films, The Big Sleep and To Have And Have Not, and he must rely heavily on a stylized comedy technique borrowed wholesale from vintage Cary Grant...
...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-by become audience-stoppers: Bogart's apology for his growling stomach ("There ain't a thing I can do about it.") or his shivering disgust of leeches ("Anythin' I hate in this world it's leeches! Filthy devils...