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.

Classic Adventure. - The African Queen review by Steve

Romantic adventure featuring one of cinema's oddest couples, coming together to torpedo a German warship on Lake Victoria in WWI. It's a two-hander with Oscar winning Humphrey Bogart as a drunken, Canadian river-rat and Katherine Hepburn as a genteel, Methodist spinster travelling downstream on a ramshackle steamboat, the African Queen.

 Which makes for the grandest of entertainment as they fight each other before turning on the enemy. And during their implausible campaign they rather sweetly fall in love. Bogart is a variation on his reluctant heroes who come late to the cause. Hepburn plays the vinegary old maid to far greater effect than she ever did her screwball ingenues of the thirties. 

We see almost nothing of the experience of the Africans. There is the country and the wildlife, but little of the indigenous people caught up in a European war. It's a romance and a vehicle for its great American stars. Jack Cardiff's Technicolor location photography of the Congo is magnificent. The whole film represents an audacious triumph of logistics.

Credit is due to John Huston for driving the production way beyond the normal comfort zone of a film made in the 1950s. And there is something enchanting about watching the old couple drifting via their heart of darkness to a foolhardy assignation. And it's inspirational and moving. The film observes that the pity of life isn't that they suffer, but that the one they love should suffer too.

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.