Trivia for
The African Queen (1951) More at IMDbPro »

• The first choices for the lead roles were John Mills and Bette Davis.
  
  
• The scenes in the reed-filled riverbank were filmed in Dalyan, Turkey.
  
  
• The female lead was originally offered to Bette Davis in 1938, with David Niven as Charlie. It was offered to Davis again in 1947, with James Mason, as Charlie, but she had to drop out due to pregnancy. By the time Davis tried out for the role again in 1949, plans were underway for Katharine Hepburn to star.
  
  
• This is the role that won Humphrey Bogart the only Oscar of his career.
  
  
• The Queen of Africa was played by the LS Livingston, which had been a working steamboat for 40 years. It is now docked next to the Holiday Inn in Key Largo, Florida, just off US Highway 1.
  
  
• Walt Disney used this film as the basis for the Disneyland's "Jungle Cruise" attraction.
  
  
• To show her disgust with the amount of alcohol that John Huston and Humphrey Bogart consumed during filming, Katharine Hepburn drank only water. As a result, she suffered a severe bout of dysentery.
  
  
• In "The Making of 'The African Queen,' or How I Went to Africa with Bogie, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind", Katharine Hepburn described the first day of shooting. Five cars and trucks were needed to take the cast, crew and equipment 3.5 miles from Biondo to the Ruiki river. There, they loaded everything onto boats and sailed another 2.5 miles to the shooting location. Press materials and contemporary articles detailed the perils of shooting on location in Africa, including dysentery, malaria, contaminated drinking water, and several close brushes with wild animals and poisonous snakes. Most of the cast and crew were sick for much of the filming. In a February 1952 New York Times article, John Huston said he hired local natives to help the crew, but many would not show up for fear that the filmmakers were cannibals.
  
  
• Columbia originally bought the novel as a vehicle for Charles Laughton and his wife Elsa Lanchester. Instead, they made Vessel of Wrath (1938), which was same story, but a box office failure. And at one point David Niven and Paul Henreid were each considered for the male lead.
  
  
• According to United Artists press materials and John Huston's autobiography, the director built a camp to house the cast and crew in Biondo, outside the town of Stanleyville. It included a bar, a restaurant and several one-room bungalows.
  
  
• Because the boat used in the film was too small to carry cameras and equipment, portions of the boat were reproduced on a large raft, in order to shoot close-ups of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. Interior and water-tank scenes were filmed in London, as were most of the scenes containing secondary characters. Robert Morley shot all of his scenes in London, including footage of him preaching, which was edited together with shots of the natives praying, which was filmed in Africa.
  
  
• James Agee suffered a serious heart attack during development of the screenplay. Uncredited writer Peter Viertel wrote the film's final scenes with John Huston.
  
  
• Shortly after filming was completed, Belgian fan magazine Cine-Revue published an article allegedly written by Lauren Bacall, who had accompanied her husband, Humphrey Bogart, on location, which included behind-the-scenes photographs. According to a Mar 1952 Daily Variety story, Romulus Films protested the publication of the photos, which they said "dispelled the film's illusion" by exposing private shooting information. Lauren Bacall denied having written the story.
  
  
• Berlin's film trade union requested that The African Queen (1951) be withdrawn from the Berlin Film Festival because of its "anti-German tendencies".
  
  
• In 1953, Peter Viertel published "White Hunter, Black Heart", a thinly fictionalized account of his experience writing the script for The African Queen (1951) with John Huston. The book is about a tyrannical director who stalls the production of his African-set film by obsessively hunting an elephant. It was made into a film in 1990 by Clint Eastwood, starring Eastwood and Jeff Fahey.
  
  
• In "The Making of the African Queen,"Katharine Hepburn' details John Huston's obsession with hunting. One day he convinced Hepburn to join him, and inadvertently led her into the middle of a herd of wild animals. They barely escaped.
  
  
• Sources claimed that everyone in the cast and crew got sick, except Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, who said they avoided illness by essentially living on imported Scotch. Bogart later said, "All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus, and Scotch whiskey. Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead."
  
  
• While filming the scene where Charlie finds his body covered with leeches, Humphrey Bogart insisted on using rubber leeches. John Huston refused, and brought a leech-breeder to the London studio with a tank full of them. It made Bogart queasy and nervous, qualities Huston wanted for his close-ups. Ultimately, rubber leeches were placed on Bogart, and a close-up of a real leech was shot on the breeder's chest.
  
  
• According to Katharine Hepburn's autobiography, John Huston initially found her performance too serious-minded. One day, he visited her hut and suggested that she model her performance on Eleanor Roosevelt; putting on her "society smile" in the face of all adversity. After Huston left, Hepburn sat for a moment before deciding, "That is the best piece of direction I have ever heard."
  
  
• Katharine Hepburn's first color film.
  
  
• Debut of Theodore Bikel.
  
  
• Lauren Bacall famously ventured along for the filming in Africa to be with husband Humphrey Bogart. She played den mother during the trip, making camp and cooking. This also marked the beginning of her life-long friendship with Katharine Hepburn.
  
  
• In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #65 Greatest Movie of All Time.
  
  
• According to cameraman Jack Cardiff, Katharine Hepburn was so sick with dysentery during shooting of the church scene that a bucket was placed off camera because she vomited constantly between takes. Cardiff called her "a real trouper." In "The Making of The African Queen" Hepburn said she rushed for the outhouse only to find a black mamba inside, then ran to the trees.
  
  
• The African Queen, built in England in 1912 was used by the British East Africa Company from 1912 to 1968 to shuttle passengers and cargo across Lake Albert (on the border between Uganda and Belgian Congo). It is now located in Key Largo.
  
  
• The African Queen sank and had to be raised twice during filming of the movie. Lauren Bacall quoted "The natives had been told to watch it and they did. They watched it sink."
  
  

• SPOILER:C.S. Forester wrote two different final scenes for his book; one was published in England, the other in America. In the more widely published American version, Rose Sayer and Charlie Allnut are turned over to British officers, who then blow up the Louisa. In the British version, the African Queen hits the Louisa and destroys it, after which Rose and Charlie walk down the beach to inform the British Army that the way is now clear. In a modern interview, Peter Viertel said that since he and John Huston wanted Rose and Charlie to be together at the final scene, and invented a way for them to be married on the German ship to avoid censorship.
  
  

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