Slow Boat to Africa

I recently made time for another classic film, the Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn romantic adventure, The African Queen. The movie is now almost 60 years old, but was recently remastered for Blu-ray, and looks pretty fantastic. It probably didn't look this good when it was brand new.

It's easy to see why this movie is held in such high esteem by so many critics and filmmakers -- it is a clear progenitor of more films than I could possibly count. The "romance kindles during a brutal adventure in the wild" has probably been done at least once in a major film every year since this movie was released. Particular versions of it I remember from the 80s include Crocodile Dundee, Romancing the Stone... even the Indiana Jones films.

An important difference of this film that so many of those later films change -- for the worse -- is that here, the two characters in the couple are on essentially even footing from the start. The modern version of this formula inevitably has the woman as a helpless, spoiled city creature that complains and condescends to the brutish man until some mid-film conversion where she learns to love him despite his boorishness. Blech.

In The African Queen, Hepburn's character is living with her brother in 1910s Africa, trying to bring Western religion to the natives. She has already been living in this environment for some time and is quite capable. When Germans invade as part of World War I, and she and Bogart's character make their escape, she doesn't complain. In fact, she's initially the more motivated of the characters. She doesn't know anything about navigating a river on a steam ship, but she brings plenty to the partnership nonetheless.

So my hat's off to The African Queen for not only establishing a formula, but crafting it frankly better than most of the films that followed it. That a movie made in 1951 could be more progressive and less sexist than many movies made today is nothing short of extraordinary.

That being said, I admired that achievement without being particularly entertained by the film itself. The pacing is slow. The story progresses like a shopping list, giving us every sort of danger or complication you could imagine in such a setting, and presenting them in so orderly a way that you're too aware of how meticulously it all unfolds. Bogart and Hepburn play off each other well, and yet it seems a stretch to say that either is really "acting" much -- neither becomes a character so much as their characters become them, the personality that each is famously known for.

Overall, I'd rate the movie a C+. Honestly, I want to like it more. I'd probably even recommend it to more than a few people. But at the same time, I can't see ever really wanting to watch it again myself, and I think that means I can't really rate it any better.