Here was the pitch. It's a romantic comedy. It stars 44 year old Catherine Hepburn as a chased Methodist

spinster and 52 year old Humphrey Bogart as a filthy Canadian Riverman. They're thrown together in a

rattle-trap steamboat, drenched in perspiration and arguing constantly in the tropical

heat with nothing but the increasingly tattered clothes on their backs.

They hate each other until the moment they fall passionately in love,

at which point they elect to pursue an ill-advised suicide mission

to destroy a German patrol boat hundreds of miles down an unnavigable. a gorge to avoid disinterring. It was, as they say, sold in the room. At first, Equatorial Africa seems an unusual

setting for a World War I film, but competition between European nations in the 19th century to exploit Africa was a major

precipitating factor leading up to the war. The action here takes place in Tanzania

which had only just been partially colonized by the Germans in the preceding two decades,

in direct competition with Britain, Belgium, and Portugal.

And while the African Queen is pushing the definition of war film even more than Red Dawn 2, it provides considerable

insight into how the Great War qualified as an actual World War, the first of its kind.

Our protagonists are not soldiers,

and they're halfway around the world

from the primary theater of war,

but they're motivated by a very personal sort of nationalism,

the kind where one British missionary could feel like no matter where in the world

she stood, there was England.

Hepburn's character, Rhodes, is a zealot, steeped in the Godin country rationale that Empire was bringing something

to Africa rather than just taking from it.

At the time this film was made, those convictions had yet to be subjected to widespread scrutiny.

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