and weeds, is set afloat by torrential rains.⁵ This scene appears in the published script,⁶ but is truncated and changed in the film. Along with the other scenes, it will be discussed in a later section on additions, deletions, and modifications from novel to script to film.

Certainly the first half of the published script is much more detailed than the second half in its description of character, setting, light, sound, and movement. Two parallel scenes, one occurring in the first half, the other in the second, suggest the difference in the working methods of Agee and Huston. The earlier scene, a trial run through river rapids, is not in Forester's novel; clearly it is Agee's creation. At this early stage of their journey downstream, Charlie Allnutt, the captain of the thirty-foot mail-boat The African Queen, hopes to dissuade Rose Sayer (who has thrown in with him since the Germans burned the village and caused the death of her missionary brother) from continuing the journey against impossible odds. He thinks that after she gets her first taste of rapid-shooting she will see the folly of her plan to get to the Germans. Agee takes almost four hundred words to describe a scene that will last “about thirty seconds” on film (p. 146). In the delicate registering of mental states and in the complex interplay of characters with each other and with their rapidly shifting environment, Agee shows the visual imagination of a novelist or of a director-on-paper who is in absolute control of every finely-shaded detail even in the recording of violent action. The later scene of rapid-shooting, written by Huston, merely shows The African Queen “bucking like a bronco” and “plunging down a narrow ribbon of water between vertical faces of rock” (p. 218). Although it is climactic, this scene is much less sharply detailed than the earlier one; it is generalized poetry. In fact, Huston has copied more or less verbatim from Forester's novel; even the figures of speech are borrowed.⁷ While Agee's scene is more fully realized in the reading than in the filming, Huston's lines serve merely to indicate the stage of action. The director knows that in the actual shooting of this scene he will only roughly follow the script.

The script and film mainly follow C. S. Forester's continuity. Agee and Huston even retain Forester's mythical geography. In the novel, the river, called the Ulanga at its north end and the Bora at its south, runs into a lake, presumably Lake Victoria. (In fact, the rivers of East Africa do not run north-south into the great lakes but away from them into the sea.) The script-writers do foreshorten the second half of the novel; that half takes up only the last third of the script. They combine the events described by Forester in three chapters (pp. 95-135) into one scene of continuously rising climaxes (pp. 209-211). In his rough-draft notes, Agee indicates a causal link between Rose and Charlie's sailing around the German fortress Shona, under fire; their descending the roaring cataract; and their going into a sexual embrace after mooring at a natural pier close in to the cataract. In Agee's view, they are literally impelled into each other's arms, exhilarated as they are by fearful external physical forces; their lovemaking comes unexpectedly but necessarily as a release of tension, for the film audience as well as for them. He believes the scene should be “one steady wave of movement, always intensifying, bringing us through from Shona to the clinch” (MS, p. 35). The scene, in the script and on film, mainly follows Agee's design, but Huston, drawing upon Forester (p. 220), and that pause somewhat dissipates or at least changes the quality of the tension before the fade-out clinch.

In his rough draft, Agee notes that these “purely physical climaxes” occur mid-way in the story, and that the problem is “to make each episode thereafter step above these climaxes, rather than fall away from them” (MS, p. 139). The script-writers solve the problem by foreshortening another, still later, part of the novel. In this part, Rose and Charlie suffer hardships in trying to steer through a forest of reeds, a treacherous lily pool, and a mangrove swamp, in that order (pp. 170-232). These are three further stages in their journey. But since Forester deliberately obscures the features of this nightmarish place, the obstacles to navigation seem repetitious, and the recurrent efforts and frustrations of the protagonists seem endless. So the scriptwriters sharpen the contours of the novel by placing the major crisis among the reeds (pp. 238-243), and not in the mangrove swamp, as in the novel (pp. 225-229). In developing this crisis, they draw a few details from the subsequent lily-pool and mangrove scenes, and throw out the rest. When rains free the African Queen from its trap in the reeds, it floats directly onto the lake patrolled by the enemy ship, and the final crisis is a clear prospect.

The 1935 novel ends with the sinking of the African Queen and the apparent drowning of Rose and Charlie on the stormy night they sail out to torpedo the Louisa. But in the second edition, published in 1940 by Random House, Forester restored the ending he had intended originally; it had been lopped off by his first editors at Little, Brown, and Company.⁸ Up to a point, Agee and Huston follow the ending of the 1940 edition, in which Rose and Charlie survive the sinking of the African Queen to be taken prisoners by German officers aboard the Louisa. Past that point, the film-makers offer their own highly romantic ending, which will be discussed below in the section on additions from novel to script to film.

The most important additions, clearly Agee's, are the first three scenes. Following the script, the film gets down much of his description of a barely converted native flock at worship. The “tight-featured and tight-haired” Rose pounds on a reedy organ as her “rock-featured” and balding brother, a missionary, just as emphatically leads a cacophonous choir. Appearing at the church door, the indolent, guileless, rather seedy mailboatman, Charlie Allnutt, is a picture in contrast, an unwitting harbinger of destruction and dispersal. He brings news of a war that will destroy Brother, and Rose's way of life as well; and the lighted cigar he carelessly tosses into the churchyard disperses some members of Brother's congregation, just as later the lighted torches of the German soldiers will disperse them for good. (All the same, there is comical irony in the timing of Charlie's appearance, just as the choir sings stridently, “Death of death, and hell's destruction, land me safe on Canaan's side”—pp. 151-155.) And, ironically, Rose's “deliverer,” in the unlikely person of Charlie Allnutt, is already on the scene, as he is not at the beginning of Forester's novel.

The celebrated scene that follows shows the so-called natural (and rather graceless) man bothered by a growling stomach at tea, but no more bothered than his hosts, those very British upholders of the social proprieties. Allnutt's stomach-rumblings keep punctuating the reverend's pompous chitchat about ecclesiastical promotions and dear old England (p. 159). The scene sets whatever is natural and vital and unseemly because spontaneous and alive against whatever is artificial and merely conventional and essentially dead; it establishes thematic oppositions which run throughout the film and, indeed, throughout Forester's novel. For once, Huston is intent on filming every detail as written—every evasive glance, ambiguous noise, and anticipatory covering action in a comedy of social errors. The third scene, the German raid, ends at the point Forester's novel begins, with the village devastated, Brother's life work ruined, his heart broken and death imminent. Because Brother's presence is stronger in the script and film than it is in the novel, Rose's motive in avenging his death and striking a blow for England is given greater emotional resonance.

Agee's additions show vividly Rose's special class and situation as a rather dry spinster of some refinement; her subservience and deference to her brother, and their correct but somewhat patronizing attitude toward Allnutt, who is lower on the social scale. Much of this background information or exposition is scattered throughout the novel, in the form of Rose's thoughts or author's narration. Although Huston follows Agee's lines closely, these early scenes are still very much their director's. For example, the camera angles, showing Rose in the position of consort, reveal her subjection to her lordly brother as well as or better than any dialogue. The tight framing of the three at the tea table, and the perfect balance in their placement, suggest the bourgeois rigidity and closedness of brother and sister, and also Charlie Allnutt's social discomfort and sense of suffocation. The raid on the village is choreographed in simple, purposeful circular movements. Brother's higher purpose is paralyzed; he watches, a still center. Huston's composition of these shots is eloquent.

The film contains quite a bit of dialogue that does not appear in the published script. One important addition, probably Huston's, is Rose's prayer when the African Queen is stuck in the reeds. Their hope and energy spent, Rose and Charlie seem doomed to die like trapped animals. Photographed from a high angle, she kneels to pray: “Dear Lord, we've come to the end of our journey. In a little while we'll stand before you. I pray for you to be merciful. Judge us not for our weakness but for our love, and open the doors of Heaven for Charlie and me.” Then the camera rises higher still to show the lake just beyond; a view unavailable to them in the reeds. In such ways, the omniscient camera points up a kind of cosmic irony. During the night, the rains come to set the boat afloat, as if in answer to Rose's prayer. Agee's rough draft shows that he had a hand in this scene. At length, he describes the lovers prostrate and possibly dead on the deck, and the progress of the rain. He instructs the camera to pan up the swollen river; the suggestion is that all of nature is collaborating to free the African Queen (MS, p. 3). Agee's elaborate scene appears in the published script (pp. 239-243), but not much of it is used in the film. Huston's insertion of Rose's prayer suggests the role of Providence more pointedly, if not more cinematically.

Other dialogue added to the film carries an element of comedy not in the novel or the script. According to Huston, this comedy grew out of the teaming of Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart, who “were just funny together.”⁹ At first, Hepburn, prim and controlled, sounds like Mrs. Roosevelt (Huston had instructed her to act like the former First Lady).¹⁰ She sips a cup of tea on the African Queen as if she were in some Victorian parlor. Bogart as the garrulous Charlie is respectful, but at the same time is tempted to “pull her leg.” Later, after love has “loosened” her considerably, she laughs uproariously as Charlie mimics the monkeys and hippopotamuses on the shore. Huston adds some conventional romantic stuff. Before the first kiss, Rose and Charlie act as love-struck as teenagers: she daydreams while working the pump, he daydreams while fueling the furnace. In a quiet moment, Charlie says, “Here we are going down the river like Antony and Cleopatra on their barge.” At one point, the actors sound as if they were satirizing, ever so slightly, the characters at their core. This occurs when Charlie, now Rose's slave, says he would like to return someday to the scene of their first lovemaking. “Not that I ain't for going on down the river. The sooner we blow up the Louisa, the better,” he adds, singing a new song.

ROSE:
Then you think we can do it.
CHARLIE:
Of course we can do it.
ROSE:
I've had misgivings. I was beginning to think a while back that I was mistaken. I had a moment of weakness.
CHARLIE:
Oh, if you're feelin' weak a day or two here won't make any difference.
ROSE:
(Sighing). We'll go on. Thank heaven for your strength.
CHARLIE:
How's that, Miss—I mean, Rosie. (Laughing).

Forester's Rose never had a moment of misgivings. No doubt such single-minded earnestness is difficult to play straight on the screen. At this point, the stars give a faintly tongue-in-cheek tone that does not help film-goers to forget that they are seeing Hepburn and Bogart instead of Rose and Charlie. Both were cast against type, but they could go only so far in violating their public's expectations of them. Hepburn had specialized in tongue-in-cheek comedy, and Bogart could not be seen too seriously as weak and vacillating. The modifications in characterization from novel to script to film will be considered later on. The point is that Agee, in this his most commercial script, collaborated with both the director, himself an auteur, and the star performers, who brought to it their own requirements.

It is hard to know who should be credited, or blamed, for the added plot twists at the end of the film; the reviewers called them wildly implausible. The German officers' interrogation of Rose and Charlie is, in part, created by Agee (pp. 256-258) from a few paragraphs of narration in Forester's 1940 edition (p. 283). From this point on, the script and film part ways with the novel. Forester has the German captain release Rose and Charlie because he secretly admires their navigational feat and does not wish to hang two such unimportant people, both of them ill, and one of them a woman besides. In a parley, he hands them over to English officers, who have just arrived on the lake in speedy, armed motorboats with the intention of sinking the Louisa (they will do so next day—pp. 281-292). The German officers in the script are more one-dimensional, less civil. They prepare to hang Rose and Charlie, but first the captain marries them, at Charlie's request. This sop to popular sentiment is not in the published script; it was probably Huston's, or Peter Viertel's, idea. Just as they are ready to “proceed with the execution,” the Louisa is rammed by the wreckage of the African Queen, now a floating mine. Freed by the explosion, and swimming for shore at the end, bride and groom realize that they have quite unexpectedly accomplished their mission (p. 259). The novel (1940 edition) ends on a more forlorn note. The English officers who receive Rose and Charlie do not know what to do with them, either. Rather than billet two such inconsequential people, the commander arranges for Charlie to enlist in a South African unit and for Rose to sail back to England. But, rather than leave Charlie, who has become like an old shoe to her, Rose proposes marriage and accompanies him to South Africa, presumably to be an Army wife. “Whether or not they lived happily ever after is not easily decided,” Forester writes (p. 308).

Except in the structural changes in the second half, noted above, the deletions involved in adapting the novel to film are not substantial. Agee and Huston use much of Forester's dialogue. The novel is pleasant but sometimes pedestrian in its authorial intrusions and interior monologues, especially in its recurrent statement that Rose is fully alive for the first time. This can simply be shown on the screen.

Most interesting, and not generally known, are the scenes which appear in Agee's rough draft but not in the published script or film. In seeing the journey down the river as symbolic of the act of love (MS, p. 31), Agee showed a literary kind of thinking that Huston had little patience with.¹¹ In one note, Agee writes, “The water in this story is very Victorian-novel, very sympathetic to the people, and productive of and mirroring of their actions, moods, and development.” He also thought that the sound of water, varied but never broken, should be the “binder of sequences, more than anything visual” (MS, pp. 31-32). But this thinking, for all its lovely possibilities, does not take form, or make itself felt, in the film. Among Agee-like scenes not used is one in which Rose is bitten by a snake and bandaged by Charlie, a scene that gives a vivid sense of her nausea, and another in which she secretly sacrifices her share of quinine to Charlie during their malaria attacks (MS, pp. 74-75). (It is odd that both published script and film ignore their malaria.)

Most striking are Agee's anti-war scenes, not an echo of which got past the rough-draft stage. When Rose first spots the Louisa, Agee has her say, “We can't sink her! So tiny and pretty and white. She's like a toy” (MS, p. 81). After they are captured by the Germans, Agee arranges a few moments between them on ship's deck. Rose is miserable and perplexed because God brought them so close to the fulfillment of their mission. Charlie shows a new side as guardian and comforter:

ALLNUTT:
Now Rosie. I know it's a puzzle, but He must know what He's done better'n we do.
ROSE:
He must. But I wish I knew why. (Passionately) If only they weren't so kind to us.
ALLNUTT:
Well, no more you oughta! [The sense is unclear.]
ROSE:
But they're enemies.
ALLNUTT:
Sure they are. But they're people too, Rosie. … Hate the war, Rosie, an' fight yer best, I'd say, but don't never go hatin' people—neither side.
ROSE:
But that's pacificism.
ALLNUTT:
That's what it is?
ROSE:
How could anyone ever kill, who felt that way?
ALLNUTT:
I don't see how but I know how. (Rose silently questioning.) 'Cause war's kill or be killed. That's how. To save yourself, or those on your side, or your country, or somethin' you believe in.
ROSE:
But that's very terrible.
ALLNUTT:
Sure it is but there's one thing worse: foolin' yourself into hatin' people so's you'll feel alright killn' 'em.
ROSE:
You think more clearly than I do, but. …

(MS, pp. 98, 100).

In such rough shape, this preaching is at the cartoon-strip level, but it does show the very different direction Agee thought of taking at the end.

Following this conversation, Rose and Charlie spot the torpedo-laden piece of the African Queen floating directly toward the Louisa. Both are awed into silence; both know what is up. In notes, Agee stresses Charlie's moral uncertainty as to whether to permit the blow-up; he defers that decision to Rose, who is essentially his “conscience.” Rose feels

incredulity, recognition, awe, thankfulness; all her faith in God recrystallizes with a rush: but now she is morally richer and more complex than at any time before: she's beyond the innocence of simple hatred, and must take on the full responsibility and awareness of making war or repairing from it. … There is a story element here, too, of this feeling: I will allow the boat to be blown up because God obviously wants it and also I know it must be done (for all the good reasons people who hate war nevertheless wage it); but in that case I'm not so sure I want to live and even if I do, I think I owe my life.

Agee shows her frozen to the rail, mesmerized by the sight of the ever-nearer torpedoes. For the first time, Charlie takes complete control and wrenches her away. The explosion and sea-dunking follow. On the fade-out, Rose and Charlie ride the cork life-ring from the African Queen. She saves the life of a German officer (MS, pp. 105-109). In this rough draft, Agee presents moral ambiguities that are not in the film.

The most important modifications from novel to script to film are in characterization. Charlie Allnutt is changed from a Cockney to a Canadian by the film-makers, who probably thought the Cockney dialect would be tiresome and unintelligible to mass audiences. Looking unkempt, Humphrey Bogart is still more prepossessing than Forester's shrimp of a man. In the novel, Rose Sayer is a big-breasted, buxom woman with a horse face; hardly the same physical type as Katharine Hepburn. To the end, she is formidable and fanatical in her attempt to “strike a blow for England.” Even her love for Charlie, which is real enough, is so inextricably bound up with her patriotism that her feelings for him are dead for awhile after their, but mainly her, defeat by the Germans. In all versions, love gives a softer dimension to the woman, and a stronger one to the man, who, for her, acts heroically in spite of himself. The novel differs from the film version to the degree it is edged with Rose's consciousness of a sexual superiority that requires her to protect the ego of her man. In love, she rationalizes Charlie's weakness. Then, more unconsciously, she gets him to do her will by crediting him with the strength of her will. She is the captain of more than just his ship. As Forester writes, “That uxorious individual had no will of his own left now” (p. 186).

Some of this gets into the film, but there they seem more nearly equal as partners in a perilous adventure. Early in the script, Agee makes Rose (at the tiller) aware that Charlie is “as important to navigation as she is” when Charlie says, “If you steer wrong we're goners; if I let the engine die, we're goners too.” Rose nods and takes on “a sense of interdependence” (p. 184). The novel makes no special point of this. In the script, Charlie is masterful when he teaches Rose how to steer; Agee devotes three pages of dialogue (pp. 181-183) to the lesson which Forester passes over in a few lines of narration (p. 45). Charlie is still more forceful in the film, especially when he comes to Rose's rescue in steering the rapids. Bogart plays a less dominant, less assured sort than usual, but, as a leading man with an established image, he is not asked to whimper like a puppy caught in the cold rain or pray through chattering teeth at the first sight of Shona or do such sniveling things as Charlie does in the novel (pp. 61, 114). For his part, Agee tries to give Forester's characters greater complexity, as suggested above in the description of Rose's spiritual confusion and ambivalence toward the Germans. But in the novel and the film, Rose rarely experiences a moment of self-doubt, and never religious doubt. On film, the characters are simpler than Agee might have wished. Bogart and Hepburn give brilliantly detailed portrayals, but mainly of the surfaces and not of the depths of characters whose implausible actions seem to require a light touch.

Agee understood that some situations which are acceptable in a romantic adventure novel can seem laughably implausible on the screen, and therefore must be played as comedy. In his rough draft, he notes that the sailing past Shona under heavy gunfire “should be handled as very dangerous farce” (MS, p. 39). Several months before the filming, he wrote in a letter to his friend Father Flye that he was treating the work “fundamentally as high comedy with deeply ribald undertones, and trying to blend extraordinary things—poetry, mysticism, realism, romance, tragedy—with the comedy. …”¹²

When The African Queen was released by United Artists early in 1952, most of the reviewers accepted the implausibilities of the plot because the film was well-written, directed, and acted in a spirit of fun. Bosley Crowther called it a “well-disguised spoof.” He added, “Considering the nature of the yarn, it is hard to conceive its presentation in any other way—that is in the realistic channels of the motion-picture screen.”¹³ Philip T. Hartung wrote, “You don't have to believe all the hardships through which they go. But you do have to believe in Charlie and Rose.” He did.¹⁴

So did film-goers who lined up at the box office. So did the industry, which voted Bogart an Academy Award for Best Actor. Agee and Huston were nominated for Best Screenplay. The African Queen was Agee's first feature-length fiction script to be produced. From now until the end of his life, his major energies would be devoted to film work.

Notes

1. James Agee, “Undirectable Director,” Life (September 18, 1950); rep. Agee On Film, Volume One, Reviews and Comments by James Agee (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969), pp. 320-331.

2. Mia Agee and Gerald Locklin, “Faint Lines in a Drawing of Jim,” Remembering James Agee, ed. David Madden (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974), p. 160.

3. William F. Nolan, John Huston, King Rebel (Los Angeles: Sherbourne Press, 1965), p. 100; Pauline Kael, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1965), p. 229.

4. Letter to David Bradley, June 26, 1953, quoted in Alfred T. Barson, A Way of Seeing, A Critical Study of James Agee (Cambridge: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), p. 170.

5. James Agee, The African Queen, Autograph Manuscript/Working Draft/Notes, December, 1950, Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, pp. 15-17, 20, 71, 72, 76-78. Page numbers of subsequent references to this source, indicated as “MS,” will appear in parentheses in the body of the text.

6. James Agee, The African Queen in Agee On Film, Volume Two, Five Film Scripts by James Agee (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1969), pp. 238-243. Page numbers of subsequent references to this source will appear in parentheses in the text.

7. C. S. Forester, The African Queen, 2nd ed. with a New Foreword by the Author (New York: Random House, 1940), p. 116. Page numbers of subsequent references to this source will appear in parentheses in the text.

8. Forester's Foreword to the 1940 edition, n.p.

9. John Huston, “The African Queen,” Theatre Arts (February 1952), 92.

10. Eric Sherman, Directing the Film, Film Directors on their Art (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1976), pp. 166-167.

11. Lillian Ross, Picture (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1952), pp. 146-147. In regard to this river journey-sexual intercourse symbolism, Ross reports a conversation between Huston and Agee. Huston said, “Oh, Christ, Jim. Tell me something I can understand. This isn't like a novel. This is a screenplay. You've got to demonstrate everything, Jim. People on the screen are gods and goddesses. We know all about them. Their habits. Their caprices. But we can't touch them. They're not real. They stand for something, rather than being something. They're symbols. You can't have symbolism within symbolism, Jim.”

12. Letter to Father Flye, early December, 1950, in Letters of James Agee to Father Flye, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 185.

13. Bosley Crowther, rev. The New York Times, February 21, 1952, p. 24.

14. Phillip T. Hartung, “Long Live the Queen,” The Commonweal 55 (March 14, 1952), 566.