Trivia / The African Queen

• California Doubling: The movie was shot mostly on location in Africa, but the water scenes were shot in England - fearing it would be too dangerous to film those on location.
• Dueling-Stars Movie: Bogart and Hepburn, two of the greatest stars ever to hit Hollywood, in the only shared film of their careers. They play off each other beautifully and Bogie actually won an Academy Award for it (Hepburn was also nominated), but sadly they never worked together again.
• Enforced Method Acting: Subverted. John Huston wanted to put real leeches on Humphrey Bogart, but he refused. They compromised by using rubber leeches - with real ones on set with a breeder just to make him queasy. A shot using real leeches was filmed using a double.
• Executive Meddling: Several changes had to be made to appease the censors - including lessening any jokes about missionaries and the two leads cohabiting while they were unmarried. Rose and Charlie getting married in the end sequence had to be put in to allow them to be together.
• Fake Brit: Rose is a British Methodist played by the American Katharine Hepburn. She was famed for her Mid-Atlantic accent, however, which sounds convincingly English. Averted with Charlie, who was made Canadian, because there was no way Humphrey Bogart could do an English accent.
• Friendship on the Set: Lauren Bacall accompanied Humphrey Bogart to the African location and played den mother, cooking and making camp. It was here that she formed a lifelong friendship with Katharine Hepburn.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For the longest time, The African Queen was out of print in the United States because its rights were split between Paramount and ITV, and the negatives were hard to find. Paramount eventually released a DVD in 2010 due to overwhelming demand.
• Referenced by... :
  • The film comedy Road to Bali from the Bob Hope & Bing Crosby series of Road to ... films.
  • One story in Donald Duck Adventures by Don Rosa.
  • The Fraco-Belgian comic book Full Red of the XIII series.
  • One of the most iconic Tabletop RPG modules ever written in Poland, Yarra, River of Death is essentially The African Queen adjusted to fantasy setting. Pretty much all the set pieces, big and small, are recreated in it - even the guaranteed leeches in that specific moment.
• Troubled Production: Katharine Hepburn actually wrote a book about it, aptly titled The Making of The African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogie, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind:
  • She mentions that Humphrey Bogart and John Huston were the only two members of the crew who didn't come down with diarrhoea — they did this by consuming nothing but canned beans, canned asparagus, and Scotch whiskey for the course of the filming. Bogart, for his part, claimed any bug that bit him or Huston simply dropped dead.
  • They had to call frequent halts to filming so Hepburn could vomit into a bucket, especially during the opening organ scene. You can actually see the vomit bucket next to her in some shots.
  • In addition, the title boat sunk and had to be raised twice, the ship's boiler nearly fell on her, and army ants infested the set.
• Urban Legend: It has widely been believed that London's population of feral Ring-Necked Parakeets originated from birds who escaped the filming of this movie.
• Vacation, Dear Boy: John Huston opted to film in the Congo rather than Kenya. Why? Because game hunting was illegal in Kenya but not the Congo. (His exploits during the shooting's off-time inspired the Clint Eastwood film White Hunter, Black Heart.)
• What Could Have Been:
  • The first choices for the lead roles were John Mills and Bette Davis. An earlier Warner Bros. version considered in 1938 was to star Davis and David Niven. RKO later proposed doing it with Charles Laughton and his wife, Elsa Lanchester. It was offered to Bette Davis again in 1947, with James Mason, as Charlie, but she had to drop out due to pregnancy. By the time she tried out for the role again in 1949, plans were underway for Katharine Hepburn to star. Deborah Kerr was also a candidate, but she was turned down as she had just done King Solomon's Mines (also set in Africa).
  • Katharine Hepburn's original take on her character was far more serious-minded. John Huston one day suggested that she model her performance off Eleanor Roosevelt - putting on her "society smile" in the face of all adversity. Hepburn would later call this the best bit of direction she ever received.

---