John Huston, 1951
After Germans burn down the village where she lives and indirectly kill her brother, missionary Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn) convinces scruffy riverboat captain Charlie Allnutt (Humphrey Bogart) to take her on a suicide mission down a dangerous river to destroy a German warship.Certainly not the great classic it is made out to be, The African Queen is still a solid adventure movie, filled with beautiful photography (despite some dodgy process work) and exciting setpieces and hamstrung by a clunky romance that just kind of happens. Bogart is terrific - it's not the most naturalistic performance I've ever seen, but extremely watchable and fun. Hepburn has more trouble trying to display the humanity hidden behind her fairly obnoxious and unsympathetic character, but pulls it off in the end, which was quite a bit more clever and satisfying than I expected, even though it leaned heavily on that generally ineffective romance.
7/10
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