Katharine Hepburn, The African Queen

Saturday, October 29, 2005

Pauline Kael

"In 1951 an inspired piece of casting brought Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn together in The African Queen. This is a comedy, a love story, and a tale of adventure, and it is one of the most charming and entertaining movies ever made. The director, John Huston, has written that the comedy was not present ... in the original screenplay..., but that it grew out of the relationship between Hepburn and Bogart, who were just naturally funny when they worked together. Hepburn has revealed that the comedy didn't just grow, it was planted--that the picture wasn't going well until Huston came up with the inspiration that her Rosie should be played as Mrs. Roosevelt. After that, Bogart and Hepburn played together with an ease and humor that makes their love affair--the mating of a forbidding, ironclad spinster and a tough, gin-soaked riverboat captain--seem not only inevitable, but perfect. The story ... is so convincingly acted that you may feel a bit jarred at the end.... [T]he conclusion presages [Huston's] later careless madness in Beat the Devil."

Pauline Kael
Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (1968), p. 281-82