The African Queen

Generally speaking, a movie based on a book is inferior to the book, but Hollywood sure used to be better at it than they are now.  And sometimes they hit it out of the ballpark.

The African Queen (1951), starring Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn, is definitely one of those times.  Even if it had done nothing else better, the beginning alone is ten times better than the book’s.

The movie starts with Rose and her brother hard at it missionarying in a little African village.  Allnut arrives.  Who he is is explained and the siblings’ attitude towards him illustrated by an awkward tea time.  He departs and the Germans sweep in and wreck everything.  The setting, characters, and their relationships are all established in a swift sequence.

The book by C. S. Forester, instead, begins with the brother already on the edge of death, the setting and the actions of the Germans reduced to an info dump.  Allnut enters the story without prior introduction.  The movie shows and the book tells and not in the best way for telling either.

The book is actually one of those which is almost perfect for the abridgment necessary to translate to film.  Both the trip through the gorge (the rapids) and through the delta are easily shortened without anything measurable about the plot being lost.

There’s tweaks here and there to the plot but for most of the story nothing major.  Changing Allnut from cockney to Canadian was undoubtedly mostly just so they could cast Bogart but in the book the way his accent is written out gets obnoxious rather quickly so one wishes he were Canadian there also.

At the end, however, the movie takes a hard turn away from the source and it’s a good thing it does.  The end of the book is both unromantic and anti-climatic.  It’s a dud.  Which is a real shame because I rather liked it up til then.  The ruination of the romance is made even worse on the last page by dropping the information that Allnut is already married to some girl back in England and therefore is off to commit bigamy with Rose.  Not that they were going to be happy anyway.