"The African Queen" and John Huston's Filmmaking

Abstract

Trapped in the stifling maze of a tropical delta, Charlie Allnutt (Humphrey Bogart) and Rose Sayre (Katharine Hepburn) confront the end of their attempt to run the Ulanga River, reach the lake into which it flows, and sink the Louisa, a German battleship that controls access to Central Africa at the beginning of World War I. More important from the point of view of the audience, they also face the end of their lives and their brief time together as lovers. We're finished, Charlie declares. know it, answers Rose. A few moments later, the sequence ends when a downward-looking camera cranes up and pans from the boat to reveal the goal of their journey, the lake, no more than fifty yards away. From the perspective of the protagonists, however, it is out of sight and out of reach; the camera's revelation thus appears to the viewer as sadly ironic rather than hopeful. The exhausted voyagers lie down on the deck of the boat and the shot fades out. But in John Huston's films water is more likely to be associated with life than death. Although nature is not uniformly regenerative in The African Queen (1951), its water imagery is symbolically congruent with that of most other Huston films. The next shot fades in on gathering clouds. Thunder rumbles. A shower patters on lilies, then swells into a deluge that seems to drench all Africa. It pours on the river and the jungle, on flamingos, ducks, giraffes, hippos, lions, and a herd of startled antelope. The river becomes a foaming cataract carrying whole trees. Like an aquatic deus ex machina, it lifts the grounded boat across the mud and reeds onto the nearby lake. This heavenly boost allows the intrepid travelers both to sink the Louisa and, still more improbably, to marry. The film thereby concludes with the wildly unlikely success of its two main actions. These sequences of despair and renewed hope exemplify much of what I wish to discuss about The African Queen: its concentration of Hustonian shots, themes, and dialogue; the Hustonian rhythms of its editing and action; and its construction as a fantastic adventure, the kind of traditional narrative known as romance. The last is atypical of Huston's body of work. Indeed, as an adventure and love story, The African Queen is almost uniquely uncomplicated among its director's films. (I ask the reader to accept the possibility-frequently deniedthat Huston may usefully be looked at through an auteurist lens; the rest of this