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   The boat was originally made in England in 1912 and has survived to become a tourist attraction.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.

Book Review: "Sunnyside" (2009)

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Books
Genre:	Literature & Fiction
Author:	Glen David Gold

This 2009 book follows three major story-lines. It covers the growth of United States entertainment business, the raising of its armed forces and its cultural power through government propaganda and movies in the second decade of the 20th Century.

Gold's book is rather like E.L Doctorow's best-seller "Ragtime" from the 1970's in that he gives us real characters (like Charlie Chaplin, British general Edmund Ironside and US Treasury Secretary William McAdoo) interacting with other real-life and fictional characters.

The first story is centered around Charlie Chaplin, the first male film superstar, circa 1916. On a November day in that year, there is a sudden bout of mass hysteria: all over the USA there are hundreds of reported sightings of the former English Music Hall comedian turned universal "Tramp" character in small theaters from California to Maine.

This mass-sighting event really happened. Gold reportedly read 400 books and did years if research to get the stories in the novel right and it brims with time-appropriate details that make you feel right in the past, a past now dead to the living today with only glimpses of that time in pieces in films and photographs, and in the words of those who left a record in print.

Chaplin is a sudden and unparalleled success. Women all falling all over themselves after a little cockney kid who grew up half-starved most of his childhood and was once found begging on the streets of Lambeth for food by offering a paper hat he had made from a discarded newspaper. Now he's rich. He plans to build his own film studio and, with the help of his trusted business partner and brother Syd, can make any his film he wants and however he wants.

Only three things scare the 27-year old Chaplin: the English-language press calling him a "slacker" for not joining up to fight in the "Great War" either for Britain or soon, America; the prospect of his mentally ill mother, Hannah--whom he has said in earlier interviews was dead--coming over from England to make his life more complicated, and the withering personal and professional criticism of the other greatest star in Hollywood, Mary Pickford.

Mary is Chaplin's "bete noire" : the darling golden-locked sweetheart who has a canny mind and a sharp-honed tongue has also come up from poverty and she is a business woman to be reckoned with. Chaplin has little use for Pickford and the competition she represents but he does have longings for Mary's pretty scenario writer (Frances Marion, another real-life woman and one of the few women to wield power in the industry). There is also the sticky matter of a certain 15 year old high school girl and part-time actress named Mildred Harris, whom Charlie takes a liking to after meeting her at a memorable party scene in a Santa Monica mansion owned by early movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn. It is the first of several cases where Charlie's love life will shape the public perception of the man behind the "little fellow", a jack of all trades character to some, a clown to others like Pickford and a genius who cribs bits from great books to insert in casual party conversations so he can be taken seriously as a person and in his work.

The title "Sunnyside" refers to a 1918 movie Chaplin made, his first full-on attempt to make a movie with some "serious" messaging between the kicks, pratt-falls and stunts.


By 1917-18, the growth of the motion picture industry in the United States has exploded; a small-scale Los Anglees-based industry has become a world-wide center of capitalist industry, helped greatly by the literal collapse of the movie industry in Europe after 1914.

Powerful people in New York now want to take over the picture business and turn in-dependant film stars like Chaplin, Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks into contract players working in big studio factory set-ups. Oligarchic power and loss of control makes for one more thing Charlie has to worry about. He has no plan to stay free, but his nemesis "Little Mary" and his friend Doug Fairbanks may offer a solution. But Mary and Doug have their own personal problems--both want to divorce their mates and carry on with each other. Will their divorces or news of their affair become public and ruin their careers with a a still-puritanical portion of their adoring public?

Other powers in America eye the motion picture industry with covetous intent after 1917, specifically the Woodrow Wilson Administration and the Secretary of the Treasury, William McAdoo. McAdoo is impressed that people are willing to shell out money to see movie stars. He needs to raise money for "Liberty Loans" to shore up the expense of sending America into a major foreign war for the first time in its history.

(below a clip from the 1982 Thames documentary series , "Unknown Chaplin", narrated by James Mason.)



One of the book's best scenes is a Liberty Loan Drive in San Francisco. Chaplin, Pickford and the cowboy star William S. Hart are there having previously toured all over the country to raise money for fighting "The Hun". Millions are raised and Chaplin is off the hook for being a slacker. For the first time, the United States government is also making movies. Propaganda is being brought to new heights. War fever is hot in America but ordinary folks parting with money is another matter. Combine celebrity and parades and girl scouts collection pledges and peer pressure and suddenly McAdoo has a formula to save democracy or Big Banking or any other reason there might be to fight a war.

There are groups also ordinary propagandists called" The Four Minute Men" who go theaters that show films and sell the war in pithy poetry and bathos--between the changing of movie serials and newsreels. The speakers try and get people to shell out money to send their young men "Over the Top!" in a war that has already claimed millions of lives on two major fronts in three and one half long desperate years.

One of the young men who volunteer for the job is Leland Wheeler, the young, star-struck and illegitimate son of a Wild West show impresario and a lady lighthouse keeper. When his efforts backfire and he is sent to the Western Front as an aerial observer, we see a part of the last months of the war in graphic detail.

The final part of "Sunnyside" concerns a less well-known part of American entry into European warfare---the travails of the North Russia Allied Expeditionary Force, led by a British general, Edmund Ironside. The American who is the protagonist for this part of the story is a young Texas snob named Hugo Black. Thousands of US troops--mostly those considered "C" class forces not cut out to be much use in France against the Germans-- land in Archangel, Russia, three degrees above the Arctic Circle. Black meets a couple of destitute Russian princesses who have their eyes on him being their ticket out of the nightmare of Russia at war.

The coalition mission is to spread democracy and stop the Bolsheviks from taking full control of the region. The Americans call themselves the "Polar Bears" and most of the troops are from the frigid area around the Great Lakes region. But the Russian winters beat Detroit cold snaps all to hell. And the "Bolos" are fighting on their own turf, or tundra as it were.


Officially the so-called Slavic-British forces do some fighting and a good deal of freezing once winter sets in. The story has obvious parallels to today's bloody contests in Afghanistan and Iraq and the results are little better. This third story is based on solid truth, although as the author notes in an afterward, it is the sort of thing that should only have happened in fiction.

"Sunnyside" is a long book (550 pages) but a rewarding one. Characters known and unknown, real and partially-real, are all absorbing and have interesting inner lives, especially Chaplin and the other "hero" of the story Leland Wheeler, a young man who just wants to get into show business even if he has to do it by training a german shepherd orphan puppy to do tricks and just maybe become famous under the name of Rin Tin Tin.

Gold tells these three main stories without forcing them all together; they are connected to each other in small but tangible ways. All in all "Sunnyside" is a fine novel fro American and European history buffs and those who wonder how human beings can use a plastic medium to both laugh at others and also get prepared to kill them.

Ian's Site - Ian's Advent Calendar... Door 8

http://ianevans2.multiply.com/journal/item/342/Ians_Advent_Calendar..._Door_8?replies_read=2
Allow me to direct you to Ian's site, to hear one of the best anti-war songs of a past holiday season, Jona Lewie's "Stop the Calvary" from 1980.

It is worth it IMHO.

"The Petticoat Presidency": Was Edith Wilson America's First Woman President?

 In this photo from June 1920 (right) President Woodrow Wilson signs a bill into law.  The lady next to him is Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the First Lady. She is  steadying the paper he's signing to conceal the paralysis he was still suffering from a series of strokes the preceding November.    Many historians believe  Mrs. Wilson was the defacto President of the United States for much of the last year of her husband's term.   

By  March of 1919, President Woodrow Wilson returned from the Versailles Peace Conference in Paris.  The American President, who had only served one-term as governor of the state of New Jersey before his  ascension to the White House, had spent most of his adult life as a professor of history and politics at Princeton University. He is the only American President to date to have earned a regular and not an honorary doctorate from a major university.    

  As a scholar and the son of a Presbyterian minister, Wilson was a man of strong character and strong principles who was had written major books on the nature of how government works. But nothing could prepare him for the struggles he faced at Versailles, trying to convince Orlando of Italy, Clemenceau of France and Lloyd George of Britain of the need to be more lenient on Germany and other members of the Triple Alliance. These other statesmen had seen too much war and too many millions of dead and wounded men and their widows to be as lenient as Wilson.

 

 

But they also saw he couldn't be ignored. The USA was the major banking and industrial  power left in the world. Wilson was adamant on the idea of a transnational  solution to the nationalistic, colonial and commercial powers that had started the last war. So they agreed to the League of Nations as long as their countries could be permanent members.  

 

 

  Wilson returned to Washington as a man with a mission:

 

"I can predict with absolute certainty that within another generation there will be another world war if the nations of the world do not concert  the method by which to protect it."  

 

Wilson had been popular with many ordinary British, French, Italian and other   Europeans when he came across the Atlantic with a  "Fourteen Points" plan for keeping the peace.  He thought the politicians back home would be impressed enough by his work on the international stage to support his program.

 

He was wrong.

 

Heavy opposition to the League of Nations in the Senate, led by the powerful Massachusetts solon Henry Cabot Lodge, blocked the treaty from passage. Attempts to compromise on some issues were batted away by Wilson, who held the League to the main lynch-pin of his plan for international peace.  Wilson, a Democrat, had seen his party lose seats in Congress in the 1918 Elections.  But he was still personally popular.  Despite the fact that he was exhausted from his time as a wartime leader, his constant travels and sparring abroad and the sparring with domestic foes like Senator Lodge , he ignored his doctors and went went on a cross-country train campaign in the Summer of 1919 to promote the League and get public opinion more on his side.  

On October 19, after a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he suffered a minor stroke shortly after making a speech  and was rushed back to the White House. Within a few days he had a major stroke,  the second a crippling attack that left his left side paralyzed and his doctors fearing he could die at any time.  As a sick and bed-ridden man,  by rights he should have resigned his office and allowed the Vice President, Thomas Riley Marshall, a former governor of Indiana,  to assume his duties.

 

Edith Wilson felt initially that her husband should resign, But the President's his personal physician, Dr. F.X. Dercum,  was afraid that (a) Wilson was too weak to continue his duties without risking his death but that (b) by forcing him to resign his office he might lose the will to live and die from despair.

 

The solution was to have Edith Wilson become the guardian of her husband's near-total privacy. Wilson's second  wife, they had married in December of 1915, three months after they were introduced to each other and eighteen months after the death of his first wife.   

 

Edith Wilson, a Virginian like her husband, was fourteen years younger than her husband.  She had grown up in genteel poverty after her family had lost their fortune after the family plantation was burned to the ground by Union troops during the  Civil War.  The 7th of 9 children, most of her education came not from a school but from her father, a small-town judge and her grandfather.  She only had two years of formal education at a boarding school  but she had a keen intellect. 

 

Young Edith Bolling was brought up believing  herself  a descendant of the Indian Princess Pocahontas of the Jamestown Colony fame, and also as a  sort of displaced southern aristocrat. 

 

 She had a first childless marriage to a prominent jeweler in Washington, DC .  After he died, she ran the business herself with success. She became the guardian of a teen-aged girl who later married a White House doctor named Gary Grayson. The Greyson's introduced her to a female cousin of the President and, later,  to the widowed President himself.                  

 

It didn't take long for word of the President's real condition to reach Capitol Hill. Senator Albert Fall of New Mexico (who would later be indited for his role in the "Teapot Dome" oil leasing scandal  of the 1920's)   was in deep consternation over the inference that Mrs. Wilson put between her husband and any visitors from the legislature. "We have a petticoat government!  Mrs. Wilson is President," he once said, pounding the table at a closed Senate conference.  The newspapers also reported about the "regency presidency" that lasted through almost all of 1920.  

 

To counter this wave of suspicion, Edith Wilson brought in friendly journalists to cover for her husband's real condition.  One newspaper man claimed that Wilson was engaged in his duties while he held an interview with him. In truth Wilson could not get out of bed, and had an attention span of about sixty seconds. Later, when she published her memoirs in 1939, Edith Wilson answered her critics by stating: “I, myself, never made a single decision regarding the disposition of public affairs. The only decision that was mine was what was important and what was not.”

But as the only one regularly in the President's inner sanctum, history only has her word for that.

 

Not all "criticism" of Edith Wilson was negative.  The London Daily Mail called her a "perfectly capable President" and Dolly Gann, writer for a Republican newspaper, praised her for acting for the good of the country. 

  

 President Wilson slowly recovered through 1920. After many months, he returned to cabinet meetings late in 1920. His illness still limited his duties.

 

In all of the meantime, Vice -President Marshall had been urged to take up the duties of the President by some Congressmen and cabinet officials. He declined to do this, citing it becoming dangerous precedent to set.  Other critics of Marshall felt he simply didn't want to be President at such a contentious time in public affairs. In any case, Marshall had never enjoyed the confidence of Wilson or the First Lady before the crisis. Edith Wilson stuck to getting advice from a small cabal of loyalists like Col. Edward House, Wilson's closest male adviser.  

 

 Wilson in the following year and was strong enough to attend the Inaugural of his successor, Republican Warren G. Harding of Ohio.

 

A number of what-ifs surround this period. Some liberal minded historians believe that the USA might well have entered the League of Nations and strengthened it for the coming rise of fascism. But there is no evidence that Wilson himself would have compromised enough with the Republicans in the Senate to get the Paris treaty passed. 

 

What is clear is that the whole time Wilson was incapacitated, there was little more than an "ad hoc" arrangement by his wife and House and one or two doctors and chummy journalists to try and mask Wilson's real and detrimental physical condition. This was not in my view any way to run a country. 

 

Edith Wilson outlived her husband by 43 years.  She attended the Inaugural of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 and remained an active correspondence with top political figures from the comfortable home in Georgetown, near the capital, where she and her husband retired.  Ironically she died on the same day  in 1961 that she was to be the guest of honor at the dedication of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge across the Potomac River.  She was 89 years old. 

 

In 1965, two years after the assassination of John Kennedy, the 25th Amendment to the Constitution was passed. It made clear that in the event the Chief Executive suffers a serious incapacitation like a stroke or other event, the Vice-President automatically assumes the duties of the President.