The Greatest Little Steamboat in the World

It does not get much better than this ... for classic films fans.

The African Queen, the dingy, rundown hooting and smoke-spouting little boat from the 1951 classic starring Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn has been refurbished and put back on the water -- where it belongs. One wonders who the audience will be ... or not so much. After all, Suzanne and Lance Holmquist, the couple who found and refurbished the boat do live in Florida, a location likely to attract an older, more appreciative crowd for what is surely an iconic piece of film history and Americana. Found in a Florida marina (see this news story), the boat looks better than ever and hopefully has a few more memories left to make... 

See also my review of the film.

The Hepburn Dichotomy

A friend of mine recently reminded me of a well-known theory involving two classic film stars.

At the time, we were discussing Sabrina and Audrey Hepburn’s penchant for playing the same sort of girl in film after film (flighty and glamorous). I observed that while it is great fun to spend a couple of hours basking in Audrey’s immaculate glibness, I am pretty well satiated with her by the time her film’s end. In fact, I am not certain how many more minutes I could stand of her.

This provoked my aforementioned friend to remind me that when it comes to Hepburn, some guys prefer Audrey – others Katharine. When it comes to dating women, “guys want one or the other,” she said.

Audrey...

I confess I had totally forgotten this dichotomy and reveled in being reacquainted with it. And although reducing an entire gender to a rather stark choice between two starlets is fraught with difficulty, I am nonetheless forced to admit there is truth in what my friend said.

The Hepburn Dichotomy breaks down in the following ways…

Audrey is fun, unserious and delightfully fashionable. She always wears perfect clothes, continually smiles at just the right moments and is forever ready to giggle at the absurdity of life. Her ability to be so unserious is bolstered by the fact that bad things do not happen to her on-screen – indeed, the entire notion of bad things even existing seems impossible in her cinematic world (Wait Until Dark aside). Everyone she meets is kind and willing to either wait on her or indulge whatever dreams her character conjures up for plot points.

As far as looks go, Audrey is elfin and girlish in the cute and innocent way that causes males to crumble. She is made-up almost entirely of limbs; hence her ability to look “fabulous” in just about whatever she is wearing. Women, who all secretly wish they could dress like her and pull it off half as well, typically describe her as a kind of “gorgeous” icon, worthy of the same high fashionista status as Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe. Men describe her as “pretty” and steer well clear of pointing out the obvious fact that part of her physical charm rests in her aforementioned girlishness. The word “sexy” never really comes into the conversation...

Always up for fun...

In contrast, Katharine is far more stoic, far more serious. She could be elegant, but nobody would describe her as fashionable, and for most of her career, she had a reputation – partly of her own making – for being something of a tomboy. She generally had to strive in her films to succeed and the world was not always pitch-perfect. Whenever she spoke she sounded serious and got right to the point, usually without batting her eyelashes or giggling.

Patrician beauty...

Put simply, there is nothing girlish about her. She is one of those women whose beauty looked “mature” – for lack of a better word – even when she was girlish and very young. She is made of more statuesque stuff than Audrey, and in the end, much of Katharine's charm comes down to appreciating her character.

As to whether guys want one or the other?

Well, without venturing too far into pop psychology, I think guys want both.

Every male dated an Audrey at some point in school – or really wanted to. Audrey is fun and carefree (and as my friend noted, “she doesn’t talk back”). She would make a wonderful date for a cocktail party and the perfect partner for a romantic weekend getaway – the latter of which is essentially the plot of Roman Holiday. But it is difficult to believe that after the fun and games are over that a lasting relationship could be built alongside Audrey’s screen persona. There just does not seem to be a lot of staying-power there...

I think this is because Audrey is forever playing the princess (both literally and figuratively), and attracting men to sweep her off her feet and take care of her. That is fine in the fantasia of movies, less so in real life. Katharine, on the other hand, is made of sterner, more independent stuff. Her relationships – such as the one in The African Queen – are largely built on mutual respect and cooperative achievement. She is old and withered in The Lion in Winter, and yet she still manages to hold the attention of King Henry precisely because she has as much guile and wit as he does – and he knows it.

In love with talking

Based on their film appearances, we can offer this further generalization: If a person dated Audrey, he could win her heart simply by showing her a good time; if a person dated Katharine, he would have to earn her love through a much deeper commitment (say an external cause, like blowing up a German warship).

As for where I come down on the two, I will simply recount a Humphrey Bogart story and leave things at that. The Hollywood stalwart got along famously with Katharine during the filming of The African Queen. He complained constantly about working with Audrey during the shooting of Sabrina. It was not just the difference in their ages, either. Remember, Bogey knew a thing or two about younger women (he was married to Lauren Bacall at the time he made Sabrina). For all her girlish charms, it seems he just could not abide Audrey’s flights of fancy for more than a few hours, either...

Definitive Hepburn films:

Katherine: The African Queen (reviewed here), Bringing up Baby, The Lion in Winter

Audrey: Sabrina, Roman Holiday (reviewed here), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (reviewed here)

Together, They are Better People

The African Queen is a perfect example of the sort of finely tuned moviemaking that seems to have virtually disappeared from Hollywood these days. Made with just the right amounts of romance, adventure and humor, the film manages not only to defy classification, but also please just about every conceivable demographic of viewers in the process.

Although it is well-regarded, what seems to have been missed in all the adulation the film attracts is the very mature way in which it depicts love as a kind of expert social partnering, in which the man and the woman rise to new heights because of the attributes and demands of the other. Without this, the film could almost be ordinary.

The whole of the 1951 picture stands much taller than its constituent parts thanks to timeless performances from screen legends Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. People who like to talk about inspired casting should watch this movie.

According to John Huston, the film’s director, the warm comedy we see on-screen was completely absent in both the C. S. Forester novel and the script derived from it. Rather, the humor radiated naturally from Bogart and Hepburn, who got along so famously they could not keep their playful banter in their trailers and off the film’s set. For this, we should thank them. Forester’s novel is a grim and rather straightforward enterprise, and like much of his work, it possesses a kind of juvenile flair that does not make a good foundation for portraying courtship in anything like believable terms.

Chemistry is a word often thrown at the feet of romantic duos in movies, but this is what it looks and feels like when it is present in a picture – and genuinely felt by the requisite actors – and not the paid creation of a studio publicist or the whimsical invention of a movie critic. Bogart, in particular, is worthy of praise.

His performance as gin-soaked riverboat captain who begins the proceedings with a nearly toxic combination of loose morals and low education is a host of delightful contradictions throughout. Allowed to play with a range of emotions unavailable to him in other films, he shrugs off his usual debonair self and deftly displays a pleasant mixture of strength and vulnerability, intelligence and naiveté, and stoicism and sweetness – sometimes even in the same scenes.

Hepburn is her usual intelligent and whippet-like self, gradually bending but not breaking to Bogart’s charms until just the right moment. I have always liked the way she draws out her sentences as if she is not sure what conclusion they will reach, and here it serves her character’s brazen – but ultimately forgivable – machinations toward her opposite.

The action of the film centers on the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the nascent threat the Germans could pose to British interests in Africa. When Hepburn, a British Methodist missionary intent on bringing Jesus to the Dark Continent, loses her brother to a German war party, her soul fills with righteous patriotism and singular purpose: She will exact her revenge by destroying the Louisa, a German steamer that controls a nearby lake. Unfortunately for her, to achieve her aim, she must convince Bogart, an agnostic and rather unpatriotic Canadian, to risk life and limb – not to mention his boat, the tiny African Queen -- for distant King and Country.

While these details are important, as an audience we are more invested in what is happening between Bogart and Hepburn and we follow their journey down the dangerous river and toward their inevitable confrontation with Germans because we want to see what happens to them as a couple much more than we want to see the Louisa sunk.

Love contains a great many things, but one of the most important is that the couple should augment each other in such a way that they bring out the best of the other. Films often fail to depict this facet of love, largely because writers and directors are more interested in exploring the power of attraction and the contrived drama that surrounds courtship. And while The African Queen certainly depicts attraction and courtship, it would fail to be a great film if it stopped there.

Bogart thaws the puritanical block of ice that is Hepburn’s missionary with his earnestness and worldly commonsense, while she civilizes his character’s coarseness and convinces him to believe in noble purposes and act selflessly. Separately, both begin the film on opposite poles of the human spectrum. Through their flirtation and courtship, they converge together in the middle, where both are happier and inherently more human. By the time they embrace as man and wife at the end, they are better people precisely because of their relationship with each other. This is ultimately what makes the film so charming: We witness the growth of two people into one better person.