The African Queen

John Huston's "The African Queen" remains a masterwork of adventure cinema, though its cultural moment was 1952, which is to say it carries all the baggage of that particular historical juncture with no self-awareness whatsoever. The film is set in Africa during the First World War, a setting that functioned primarily as exotic backdrop rather than as a place with its own complexity or dignity. Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn carry the narrative as two very white people navigating a landscape populated by Africans who exist largely as incidental scenery. The film's perspective is entirely colonial in its assumptions, presenting the African setting as a neutral stage for European drama.

What the film does possess, almost accidentally, is Katharine Hepburn as a missionary woman of considerable agency and determination. She is not a passive figure, though the film's ultimate trajectory remains thoroughly conventional. She persuades, she acts, she demonstrates physical and moral courage. Yet this representation emerges from the conventions of 1950s cinema rather than from any deliberate commitment to depicting women as complex protagonists. By contemporary standards, she is a strong character; by contemporary standards for what such representation might mean, she is merely a woman doing things.

The film contains no material addressing climate, economic systems, disability, LGBTQ identity, or revisionist history. Its racial consciousness is entirely absent, which is to say it is unconscious of race itself except as a matter of visual exoticism. There is no lecture energy because there is no awareness that a lecture might be necessary. This is a film that does not know what the modern conception of social consciousness means, which grants it a certain innocence but also ensures it sits comfortably at the very bottom of any contemporary scale.