A Film Canon

The African Queen intensifies The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre's idiosyncratic fusion of adventure film and chamber drama - both quantitatively, by reducing the players from three to two, and removing virtually all extras, and qualitatively, by replacing friendship with romance, and transforming femininity from a stock figure to a palpable charismatic presence; that is, by introducing a mild screwball tone, whose characteristic relationship between a poor suitor and 'madcap heiress' is deflected into the differences between African riverboat captain Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart) and Rose Sayer (Katharine Hepburn), the prim, proper missionary's daughter that he rescues from a decimated plantation, and whose typical recourse to a pastoral encounter as romantic catalyst is generalised to the entire African wilderness, as well as to the Nazi presence with which it becomes figuratively equivalent. In this way, the exotic gore endemic to the adventure film is presented in overwhelmingly natural, rather than anthropological, terms - as a series of predators, parasites and topographies, all centred on the river - allowing it to segue into a natural wonder that is encapsulated in the vivid Technicolour cinematography, and to jettison Nazism from any specific political or military agenda, until Rose's ambition to blow up a German gunship on a nearby lake seems as reflexive as swatting a particularly large mosquito; an elegant conflation of history and natural history, conversation as procreation.