The African Queen

60th ANNIVERSARY! NEW 35mm RESTORATION! ► John Huston’s beloved 1951 classic brings together Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn for a memorable mix of comedy, battle-of-the-sexes romance and exotic African adventure. The result is pure Hollywood magic, and in this beautiful new restoration — “with deep, burnished browns and yellows and a level of detail that picks out every drop of sweat on Bogart’s brow” (Dave Kehr, New York Times) — the magic has never looked better. Bogart won his only Best Actor Oscar for his portrait of a gruff, gin-soaked (and Canadian!) riverboat captain plying his trade in German East Africa on the eve of World War I. Hepburn is a prim, spinsterish English missionary in need of rescue after hostilities break out between Germany and Britain. The two set out on the rickety African Queen for a perilous downriver journey that includes entanglements with dangerous rapids, leeches and a German gunboat. The film’s difficult location shoot, in the jungles of the Belgian Condo and Uganda, is the stuff of movie legend; the cinematography is by Technicolor wizard Jack Cardiff (subject of a Pacific Cinémathèque mini-retrospective earlier this year). The winning comic charm grew out of the very real chemistry between Bogart and Hepburn, and was not part of C. S. Forester’s original novel or James Agee’s script. “A film that has everything — adventure, humour, spectacular photography and superb performances ... The African Queen is Hollywood filmmaking of the highest order” (James Monaco). Colour, 35mm. 105 mins.

- - - - - - - - - -
ADDITIONAL SCREENINGS! The African Queen also screens June 10 - 13 + the evening of June 16, and for free at 2pm on Saturday, June 11 as part of Pacific Cinémathèque's 3rd Annual Open House.
- - - - - - - - - -