The African Queen

‘I never dreamed that mere physical experience could be so stimulating!’ The speaker is the prim Christian missionary Miss Rose Sayer, played by Katharine Hepburn, having breathlessly piloted a rickety old boat through some rapids. John Huston’s film is a ripping, gripping yarn, a surprisingly erotic love story and, as it happens, a premonition of Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.

Humphrey Bogart plays the boozy riverboat captain in German east Africa who with the outbreak of war in 1914 grumpily agrees to help British national Miss Sayer escape the enemy. Just as their downriver journey starts to look like a metaphor for sexual initiation…it becomes an actual sexual initiation. The courage and lip-quivering vulnerability of Hepburn are tremendous.

– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

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