#though the unmarketable comment does make one think

[simpingforcys]

I know some people have already said it, but I can’t help thinking about WIR message of self acceptance “no one I’d rather be, than me.” and, again how that is reflected in Turbo’s total lack of self acceptance. His self worth hinges on his fame and the validation of others.

Dude seems to have put so much of his self value on his popularity with gamers and “being the best” because he doesn’t really have anything else. He spent 15 years trying to be someone else, thought that a newer game with better graphics meant that no one would want him anymore, and in speedstorm he laments about how “unmarketable” he is as Turbo.

I know some have said Turbo is “trans coded”, but to me at least, his behaviour comes of more like a insecure narcissist who has become absolutely addicted to plastic surgery, constantly trying to achieve perfection, while becoming more and more twisted looking in body and mind…

.

[dweemeister]

The African Queen (1951)

Nobody in Hollywood seemed to want to adapt The African Queen in the late 1940s. The Hemingwayesque production, based on a novel by C.S. Forester, has elements considered unmarketable then and now: a slovenly male lead playing off a prim and proper female lead, middle-aged romance among two people who are not married nor know each other intimately, locales that might require on-location shooting in Africa. Warner Bros. carried the rights to a possible adaptation, looking for a buyer by 1947. Director John Huston – a year before directing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and fresh off his service directing films for the United States Army’s Signal Corps – and writer James Agee were fans of the novel, becoming acquainted after the latter wrote a glowing piece on Huston’s The Battle of San Pietro (1945), an Army documentary.

Agee and Huston convinced Sound Services, Inc., an audio equipment company loaning out equipment to film productions, to finance the project. In return, Huston and Agee promised to pay back the cost of the production and to exclusively use Sound Services’ material. United Artists would distribute The African Queen in the U.S., with most of the film to be shot on location in present-day Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then the Belgian Congo). The shoot demanded spartan living conditions and almost everyone became ill; you know that a production’s history is the stuff of legend when your principal actress writes a book entitled The Making of The African Queen or How I went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and almost lost my mind. I think you get the idea. For the interests of time, let’s get to the film.

In German East Africa (present-day Tanzania), two British Methodist missionaries are tending to their local flock. Rev. Samuel Sayer (Robert Morley) and sister Rose (Katharine Hepburn) are holding services when Canadian sailor-mechanic Charlie Allnut (Humphrey Bogart; whose character delivers supplies to riverside villages) brings his steamboat into town, warning that Germany and Britain are at war for reasons that are unclear to him. The Sayers dismiss Charlie’s warnings, but soon witness the Kaiser’s colonial troops burn the village and impress the locals to serve in the German military. Samuel is beaten by a German soldier, succumbing a few days later. Charlie returns, finding only Rose amid the charred wreckage. They must travel down the Ulanga River to a lake guarded by a gunboat, the Königin Luise, which is preventing any British advances. Charlie, prone to drinking more than anyone would prefer their savior in such a situation, is an able skipper. His conversations with Rose are filled with good humor and, despite their differences in temperament and character, they become much closer to each other.

Though filming in the middle of the Ugandan and Congolese wilderness may have infected the cast and crew with life-threatening diseases, The African Queen is never anything but a joy to watch – as long as the viewer notes that this film solely focuses on its two protagonists and their harrowing adventure to escape the clutches of faceless German soldiers with the shooting accuracy of SPECTRE henchpersons or Imperial stormtroopers (of the Star Wars type). Once Samuel dies in the opening minutes of the movie, the banter between Bogart and Hepburn becomes not the battle of the sexes one might expect from a 1930s screwball comedy, but a clash of deportment and sobriety. Bogart, adapting his rough-edged persona from Warner Bros.’ gangster and noir films for the African wilderness, plays off Hepburn – and her character’s behavioral rigidity, one that is perturbed by washing her bloomers in the presence of a man – splendidly (and vice versa).

What appears to be a simple adventure film partly becomes a comedy soon after they sail downriver in The African Queen (the name of Charlie’s boat). Not that The African Queen becomes farce, but its humorous lines are borne out of Charlie and Rose’s realization that to despair about their unlikely situation will not be of any help. They accept each other’s personal differences soon after setting sail, intuiting the absurdity of their predicament, and making wry observations of the other. This is where the film’s humor comes from: behavioral observations and their personal experiences – one borne from bottles and tins, the other from Bibles and psalm sheet music. The screenplay takes no sides and does not advocate for Charlie or Rose’s lifestyle over the other. It refuses to condemn Charlie for his drunkenness or the reasons for his perpetual inebriation; nor, too, does it make a mockery of Rose’s faith and uptightness. Credit screenwriters Peter Viertel (1942’s Saboteur, 1957’s The Sun Also Rises); John Collier (a short story writer for The New Yorker); Huston; and Agee for the balancing act they deftly navigate here.

Cinematographer Jack Cardiff (a regular of Powell and Pressburger’s, including 1947’s Black Narcissus and 1948’s The Red Shoes) is a lighting master, with his finest work emerging in the late 1940s and early ‘50s. The foliage-filled frames of The African Queen posed a difficult environment for Cardiff – who, like any mid-century cinematographer, was used to shooting in a soundstage. Now liberated by the stage-bound confines but hampered by the geography and biological density of his surroundings, Cardiff enlivens the jungle with his photography. The river – which Cardiff described in his memoir as, “incredibly black–like squid ink” – gurgles and laps against the banks, creasing into white water only when the ship sails faster than usual. The river in The African Queen can be narrow at times, and it is a wonder how Cardiff is able to fit so much into the frame (as well as demonstrating that it requires some skill to drive the boat).

The African Queen is technically a World War I film. The WWI films released in the early twentieth century are acclaimed for their depictions of a conflict defined by nonsensical destruction and the respective traumas that soldiers carried home with them, that civilians suffered while maintaining nationalistic, patriotic visages. The best WWI films almost always comment about the hideous losses incurred during that war, decrying the loss of lives by piling responsibility on those who decided to wage it – the recent release of Sam Mendes’ 1917 (2019) is a technical masterpiece of production design, cinematography, and invisible editing, but its near-absence of commentary prevents it from consideration when judging the best films about the Great War. Note when The African Queen is set. It is the opening days and weeks of World War I, and Charlie and Rose do not know anything about the particular of why war has been declared. It seems fair that, given the situation, The African Queen does not contain any such commentary often associated with World War I films.

When reading about World War I, we often learn about the Western and Eastern European fronts, as well as the Middle Eastern theater. What about Sub-Saharan Africa? The film, although not based on an actual event, seems to adhere to certain realities: Imperial Germany waged guerrilla warfare against British colonial troops with the intention of keeping them there, disallowing the British from redeploying those troops to other theaters of war. The Germans also forcibly conscripted thousands of locals as their civilian police or as irregular armed forces, but this probably was not a systematic program in the opening days of the war. The film does not dwell on the fate of these locals; I am not sure that doing so might serve any narrative benefit to The African Queen if it did.

Constant heat and humidity, as well as animals such as tsetse flies, crocodiles, scorpions, snakes, and biting black ants plagued the cast and crew. Washing dishes in unsanitary river water contributed to the dysentery. As mentioned previously, the near-death stories of anyone who flew out to present-day Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are too many to mention, but it appears that the principals – Huston, Bogart, and Hepburn – generally viewed their unusual adventures in the wilderness with some affection. The most recent print of The African Queen, released in 2010 by Paramount (the current holder of the film’s rights in the United States), is a marked improvement from the legally murky DVD release in the 2000s.

The African Queen is not going to have a film academic’s tongue wagging for any innovations or Grand Statements of Human Existence, but it is an entertaining, rollicking ride of an adventure movie. The dynamic of its two leads, stunning Technicolor cinematography, and incredible use of the on-location environs make it an effortless watch (I am not saying the film is mindless), and something that can be easily recommended.

My rating: 10/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. The African Queen is the one hundred and fifty-seventh feature-length or short film I have rated a ten on imdb.