BW - EP140—010: Humphrey Bogart On The Air—The African Queen And The Academy Award

In 1951 Humphrey Bogart once again partnered with John Huston on an adaptation of C. S. Forester’s 1935 novel The African Queen. Bogart plays the rough-and-ready Canadian mechanic Charlie Allnut, whose coarse behavior is barely tolerated by Katharine Hepburn’s Rose Sayer and her brother, Robert Morley’s Reverend Samuel Sayer. The film takes place in German East Africa in August 1914 as Charlie is hired to take the Sayers and their goods to be delivered on his small steamboat, The African Queen. When Charlie warns the Sayers that war has broken out between Germany and Britain, they choose to remain in Kungdu, only to witness German colonial troops burn down the village and press villagers into service. When Samuel protests, he’s struck by a soldier and soon becomes delirious with fever, dying shortly afterward. Charlie helps Rose bury her brother and escape in the African Queen. Much of the film was shot on location in Uganda and the Congo in Africa. This was unusual for the time. The cast and crew endured sickness from the food, water, and hot conditions. Bogart later joked that he and Huston were the only members of the cast and crew who escaped illness, which he credited to having drunk whiskey on location rather than the water. The African Queen premiered on December 26th, 1951 at the Fox Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills the day after Christmas and the day after Bogart’s fifty-first birthday. The African Queen debuted just in time to qualify for the 1952 Academy Awards, which turned out to be of utmost significance for Humphrey Bogart. Promising friends that if he won his speech would break the convention of thanking everyone in sight, he was instead modest and subdued. The kid from Manhattan that disappointed his parents and never took an acting lesson in his life was, at that moment, the best lead actor of the year. Bogart himself considered his role in The African Queen his finest performance.