The African Queen (1951) on Netflix
PG19511h 45mAdventureDramaRomance
German East Africa, 1914. Methodist missionary Rose Sayer and Charlie Allnut, a Canadian riverboat captain, are thrown together on his boat after German troops burn her village.
- Netflix4.1/5
- IMDb7.7/1088,172 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes96%
Trailer
Plot summary
Samuel Sayer and his sister Rose are Methodist missionaries from England, living at Kungdu in German East Africa in 1914. Their mail and supplies come up the river aboard a small steamboat, the African Queen, run by Charlie Allnut, a Canadian mechanic whose rough manners and heavy drinking the Sayers barely tolerate. Charlie is the one who brings them word that Britain and Germany are at war. German colonial troops burn the village and take the villagers away to be pressed into German service; Charlie carries Rose off on the boat. He tells her that a German gunboat, the Königin Luise, patrols the big lake downriver and keeps the British from attacking. Rose proposes arming the boat with torpedoes and sinking the gunboat, and Charlie, after objecting, goes along.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The African Queen (1951)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Humphrey Bogart's character Charlie was written with a thick Cockney dialect in the original screenplay, but the script had to be completely rewritten because Bogart was unwilling to attempt the accent, and the rewrite made the character Canadian.
- Michael Balcon, an advisor to the National Film Finance Corporation, advised it to refuse the Woolfs a loan unless the film starred his former Ealing Studios actors John McCallum and Googie Withers rather than Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn; the Woolfs persuaded NFFC chairman Lord Reith to overrule Balcon.
- In the early scene where Rose plays an organ in the church, a bucket was placed off-camera for Hepburn to vomit into between takes because she was sick; Bogart later bragged that he and Huston were the only members of the cast and crew who escaped illness, crediting whiskey rather than the local water.
- The German gunboat Konigin Luise was inspired by the World War I vessel Graf Goetzen, which operated on Lake Tanganyika until she was scuttled in 1916; the British refloated her in 1924 and put her into service as a passenger ferry in 1927, and she is still operating.
- A persistent rumor holds that London's population of feral ring-necked parakeets originated from birds that escaped or were released during the filming of The African Queen.
- The small steamboat used to depict the African Queen was built in 1912 in Britain for service in Africa; it was at one time owned by actor Fess Parker, and after being restored in April 2012 it is on display as a tourist attraction in Key Largo, Florida.
- The boat's boiler, a heavy copper replica, was not secured to the deck because it had to be moved to accommodate the camera, which proved hazardous on one occasion when it almost fell on Hepburn.
- Humphrey Bogart won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The African Queen, the only Oscar of his career, and in 1994 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
