The African Queen: Then and Now

The African Queen: Then and Now:

Next Thursday night (September 27) hundreds of Cinemark Theatres in the USA are going to be showing John Huston's classic film, "The African Queen" (1951), on the big screen in a one day only showing starting at 2 and  7pm.
http://www.cinemark.com/cinemark-classic-series
 The film is in the American Film Institute Top  100 list and has recently undergone a major restoration.  The new version was shown last year in several theaters  around Great Britain.
People familiar with older films know this one has  a special appeal.  It was the only on-screen teaming of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn for starters, and much of the film simply an action tour de force by these characters as they try to make down a nasty stretch of jungle river to escape the German colonial army which has invaded British East Africa (the film is set at the beginnings of World War I).

It was shot on location by John Huston and his company in Uganda and the Belgian Congo.  The more difficult sequences involving seedy boat captain Charlie Allnut  (Bogart) and starchy Methodist missionary Rose Sawyer (Hepburn) were photographed at the Isleton Studios outside London.
Jeremy Arnold writes of some of the problems making the film on the Turner Classic Movies website entry of "The African Queen.
Most of the cast and crew of the film came down with dysentery while shooting in central Africa. Bogart managed to serious illness reputedly by consuming copious amounts of alcohol between shooting dates.  Hepburn later wrote a small and engaging book about her experiences on the shoot, the title of which gives you an idea just what she went through. It was released in 1987 and called "The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and almost Lost My Mind."     At one point Huston talked Hepburn into joining him on a pre-production elephant hunt andshe was almost killed along with the director and his guides when they found themselves in the middle of a stampede of wild animals!  She also recounts the heat, humidity, poisonous insects, snakes, crocodiles and scorpions that made the movie quite realistic buy also perilous for those involved.
Thinking about seeing this film again got me to wondering what was the fate of the boat "African Queen" itself.  Turns out if was saved by a couple in Key Largo, Florida and is still seaworthy.   The boat was originally made in England in 1912 and has survived to become a tourist attraction.
"The African  Queen" is one of the great romantic adventure films of all time, and one of my personal favorites.  I'm glad it's getting some special attention this month, and hope film fans who've never seen it or haven't watched it in a while will look it up at a screening at a Cinemark location or rent the DVD.

Casablanca (1943)- Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Henreid and "La Marseillaise"

This one should be familiar to some of you; one of the great Hollywood Studio Era films, period.

Most Hollywood films of the World War II era that both entertain audiences and boost morale seem rather dated and shallow today. There are a handful of exceptions to that rule and here is an important scene from one of them.

Conceived as "just another movie" among dozens of features made in 1942 at Warner Brothers studios in Los Angeles, the film was conceived early in that year, with the future course of the war very much in doubt. By the time it was in general release (January 1943), the Russians had pushed the Nazis back form Stalingrad and the Western Allies had landed in North Africa. Churchill and Roosevelt were "nice enough" to have a summit conference in the real Casablanca the week the film opened across North America. Casablanca went on to be more than "just another movie", winning the Best Picture Oscar the following year.

Of the many extras and bit players in the scenes at "Rick's Cafe American" in Casablanca, French Morocco, many of them were genuine refugees from Hitler's Germany and other parts of Europe. The actor playing the anti-Nazi underground leader Victor Lazlo opposite Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine was Paul Henreid. He was a real-life refugee from Austria whose politics would have put him in a concentration camp. The number of German, Austrian and French refugees from Hitler's mad march across Europe had the effect of making Hollywood a shaky refuge in a new and strange land for many continental Europeans.

It's fitting then that Aljean Hermatz reports that there were actual tears on the set when "La Marseillaise" is sung.

For all the skepticism and doubt and anxiety of modern life, this film reminds me that there are times in history when such feelings need to be tabled and the fight joined if there can even be freedom to doubt and dissent the imperfect authorities we elect and struggle to wrest power from in a peaceful manner.

And, if you must join a fight against evil, what better way to do it than in a swank nightclub with booze, gambling tables, good-looking people and great lighting.

"My Name is Marlowe..." part two "The Big Sleep (1945-46)

No couple was bigger in Hollywood than the real-life marrieds Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in 1945.  "The Big Sleep" was made in late 1944 and early '45 and sent overseas to be seen by the armed forces troops and sailors.  It was held up for release in the States and elsewhere until 1946.  This was a big break for the movie, and particularly Lauren Bacall. She gave a less than knock-out impression opposite Charles Boyer in an adaptation of Graham Greene's "The Confidential Agent" (1945).  The earliest version of "The Big Sleep"  left Bacall and Bogart shy some of smouldering scenes that had highlighted their first film together, "To Have and Have Not".

 Bacall's agent and others convinced Warner Bros chief Jack Warner to allow Howard Hawks, the director, to reshoot and rewrite several scenes with Bogart to spice up their original chemistry.  Although the new scenes meant cuts in the film that marred the narrative, "The Big Sleep" is almost universally acknowledged as one of the best films of its  era.  To me, its one of my favorite American films, period.

  Here is a scene that is among the reasons why I like it so much, with Bogart and a young Dorothy Malone. Note the sexual subtlety (by modern standards) and Max Steiner's great incidental music.

And here is a clip of one of the new scenes, shot in 1946.  Although this dialouge is not in Chandler's book, much of the great flavor of the film comes from the novel's smart and snappy dialouge, something that director Hawks insisted should only be changed sparingly.

Apologies for the colorization.  I could find no original b/w version of this scene.