Rent The African Queen (1951)

A classic - Romantic Adventure Film Masterpiece - The African Queen review by GI

The classic romantic adventure film with two of Hollywood's biggest stars whose onscreen chemistry is so magical and forms the centre of the film. It's essentially a journey of peril narrative set in Africa in 1914 just after the start of the First World War when the sister of a missionary, the very devout Rose (Katherine Hepburn) is left alone when her brother dies and is faced with the Germans interring all foreign nationals. She is offered a chance of escape by gin swilling Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) on his grimy tramp steamer 'The African Queen'. But the journey up river is a hazardous one and the continuous danger from the river and trying to avoid detection eventually pushes Rose and Charlie together. This is a marvellous film, shot in glorious technicolour and on location. Bogart and Hepburn are flawless here (Bogart won his only Oscar for his performance) and John Huston's direction is spot on. This is one of those films that makes you fall in love with cinema. It's exciting, touching and has a great climactic confrontation with a German gunboat. If you've never seen this it's a must see and recently released in a new restored BluRay & DVD. A masterpiece.

Implausible - The African Queen review by Swambi

There seems to have been a lot of progress in film making since 1951! If you are nostalgic for a by-gone era of film making you may well enjoy this, and there are some good shots of jungle wildlife, but then if you are interested in wildlife, there are far better films.

By modern standards the acting, plot, effects and directing just don't stack up, to the point that most of the film is unintentionally ludicrous. The initial acting by the missionaries is very wooden, Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn just unconvincing, and whilst there was some fairly funny contrast between Rose and Charlie initially, this changed to excessive infatuation with unconvincing speed. The practicalities of the boat operating down massive rapids and surviving intensive gunfire, and then through a reed marsh, let alone the final scene are so completely unconvincing that I found it impossible to enjoy.