The African Queen (1951)

Meet Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart). Charlie's a happy man. He's got it all figured out. Charlie owns a small steam launch called the African Queen. Charlie and the Queen make a living ferrying passengers, freight and mail up and down the Ulanga River in German East Africa. Charlie is living the good life...or so he thinks. Then World War I breaks out and everything changes. Suddenly, all of the non-German residents are enemies. When the Germans raid a mission run by the Reverend Samuel Sayer (Robert Morely) and his sister Rose (Katherine Hepburn), Charlie comes to evacuate them. Unfortunately, he's too late to save the reverend, who dies of fever. When Charlie tries to take Rose back up river to safety, she comes up with a counter plan. She wants to sail downstream to Lake Tanganyika and destroy the Louisa, a German gunboat that plies the waters of the lake. Charlie tries to point out the impossibility of the trip: there's a German fort to get past; there are rapids; there's a dense swamp. Rose is adamant, though. They must do this for England. Reluctantly, Charlie agrees, and they argue their way down river. When Charlie gets drunk soon after they start out, Rose dumps all of his alcohol overboard. By the time they've made it past the fort and shot the rapids, both Charlie and Rose have changed. They begin to see each other in a new light. Yes, they fall in love. And the harder their journey becomes, the deeper in love they fall. By the time they finally - and miraculously - reach the lake, they are a committed pair. Charlie fashions crude torpedoes out of dynamite and oxygen cylinders, and they head out onto Lake Tanganyika to sink the Louisa. Unfortunately, a storm sinks the African Queen instead. Picked up by the Louisa, Charlie and Rose beg the ships captain to marry them before they are executed as spies. As the doomed couple say "I do," the Louisa strikes the half submerged hulk of the African Queen, detonating the torpedoes. The Louisa sinks, and Charlie and Rose swim off to safety.

Well, that - in a nut shell - is the story. It doesn't sound like much when you read it that way. You have to experience it. The African Queen is simply one of the finest movies ever made. Based on the novel by E. M. Forester, and directed by John Huston, it is the only movie for which Humphrey Bogart won an academy award during his long career. It is also a movie that nearly killed everyone involved in the making of it. The movie was shot largely on location in Africa, and dysentery, malaria, contaminated water and wild animals were a constant danger. The only members of the cast and crew who didn't get sick were Bogart and Huston who lived on a diet of baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whiskey. Bogart famously said, "Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead." Katherine Hepburn was so sick with dysentery during the filming that a bucket had to be kept just off camera for her to throw up in between takes. Now that's dedication. And that dedication brought forth a movie worth watching again and again. Bogart's portrayal of the lazy, drunken Allnut is one of the finest of his career, and his Oscar was well deserved. Hepburn is fantastic as the straight-laced Rose Sayer, who can't help but fall in love with her surly, pickled companion. It's fun to watch the relationship between the two characters grow and blossom into a deep abiding love. And the scenery and cinematography are amazing as well. It's just hard to imagine what Huston and his crew had to do in order to film this movie. They had to build a raft in order to float all of the camera equipment to get shots inside of the Queen when it was out on the water.

All in all, The African Queen is just a great visual feast, as well as being a whole lot of fun to watch. The movie is rated G, and it's filmed in Technicolor (it was, in fact, Katherine Hepburn's first color movie). Runtime is 105 minutes, and it's worth every second.

Hatari (1962)

I think I was five years old when I first saw Howard Hawks' Hatari!. It was seared into my brain. Can't help it. That's what happens when you view things during your "formative years." They become a part of the pattern of your life, part of the lens through which you see the entire world for the rest of your life. There's a fancy epistemological term for that, but I can't recall what it is right now, and you probably don't care anyway. But it's tough to be a fan of this movie, because it's so un-PC today. After all, you got a bunch of white men charging around Africa capturing animals and shipping them back to zoos in Europe and America. That rankles a lot of peoples' knickers. I can't tell you how many scathing reviews I've read of Hatari!, one of which used the words "disgusting" and "gross" so many times that I simply stopped counting after a while. And you know what? They were right. It is disgusting to see these people capturing these animals, almost - but not quite - as disgusting as if they'd been shooting them. And then there are those 1950's attitudes toward women, who were all meant to be brainless little housewives. And of course, there is the overriding spectre of colonialization. What are all these white folks doing there anyway? They own the place, that's what. Why do they own it? Because they took it away form it's previous owners. How did they do that? They had bigger guns, duh!

But none of this makes me hate this movie. I still love it. It still retains the same fascination it held for me as a small boy. Because, once you get through all of the that stuff I just mentioned above (not an easy task, I realize) Hatari! is a funny, romantic adventure film. The plot is rather loose. Sean Mercer (John Wayne) and an international group of adventurers spend their days running around the African bush capturing wild animals and selling them to zoos and circuses in Europe and America. At the start of the film, the Indian (Bruce Cabot - the man who rescued Fay Wray from King Kong) is gored by a rhino. At the hospital, a young man named Chips (Gerard Blaine) gives the Indian a blood transfusion and is later hired to replace the Indian while he recovers. Then a female photographer, Anna Maria "Dallas" d'Allasandro (Elsa Martinelli), shows up to photograph the animal captures for the zoo that's buying them. What follows is lots of high-speed chases across the Savannah, evenings spent socializing around the campfire or back at the ranch house, a couple of romances, three baby elephants and a rocket. More than that I won't say; you'll just have to see for yourself.

Hatari! was shot largely on location in: Arusha National Park in what was then Tanganyika (now Tanzania); on Ngongongare Farm, a hunting ranch owned by Hardy Kruger who plays Kurt Muller in the film; and in Nairobi, Kenya. Hawks didn't have a completed script when he began shooting, and it shows. There's not much of a coherent story line. There's the photographer whose there to document the captures; there's the push to collect all of the animals on their shopping list; there's the fear of catching rhinos; and there are a couple of love stories. But all of it just seems loosely joined together. Still it all fits given the setting, which is breathtaking to say the least. One interesting side note is that all of the scenes of the group chasing and capturing the animals were filmed using the real actors. No animal handlers were substitute. When the rhino escaped from them, it was real, and the actors had to recapture the rhino. Hawks felt it would be more realistic that way. Another piece of trivia is that all of the capture scenes had to be dubbed over, because John Wayne kept swearing. I'll just bet he did. All of this goes together, though, to make one fun movie. If you can drop your early 21st century proprieties for a while, you might find that you actually enjoy it.

Hatari! is rated G and is filmed in Technicolor.