Trivia for
The African Queen (1951)

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• 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.
  
  
• Originally offered to Bette Davis in 1938, the film would have co-starred David Niven as Charlie. It was offered to Bette Davis again in 1947, this time to co-star James Mason, but she had to pull out of the project due to pregnancy. In 1949, Bette Davis tried again to make the film, but by that time plans were under way for Katharine Hepburn to star.
  
  

• This is the role that won Humphrey Bogart the only Oscar of his career.
  
  
• Known as the "LS Livingston", the "Queen of Africa" was a working steam boat for 40 years prior to it being "cast" in the movie.
  
  
• The boat is now docked next to the Holiday Inn just off US Highway 1, in Key Largo, Florida.
  
  
• 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.
  
  
• Katharine Hepburn, in her written account of the film's production titled "The Making of "The African Queen," or How I Went to Africa with Bogie, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind", described the first day of shooting, which required five cars and trucks to take the cast, crew and equipment three and a half miles from Biondo to the Ruiki river, at which point they loaded everything onto boats and sailed another two and a half miles to the shooting location. Press materials and contemporary articles detail the various perils of shooting on location in Africa, including dysentery, malaria, bacteria-filled 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 declared that 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 while that duo instead made Vessel of Wrath (1938), which was same story but became 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, which included a bar, a restaurant and several one-room bungalows.
  
  
• Because the African Queen 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 the footage of him preaching, which was then edited together with shots of the natives praying, that had been filmed in Africa.
  
  
• During the writing of the screenplay, James Agee suffered a serious heart attack, and uncredited writer Peter Viertel wrote the film's final scenes with John Huston.
  
  
• C.S. Forester had written two different final scenes for his book, one of which was published in England and 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 . Another final scenes were, the African Queen hits the Louisa and destroys it, after which Rose and Charlie walk down the beach to inform the British Army that their way is now clear. In a modern interview, Peter Viertel stated that since he and John Huston wanted Rose and Charlie to be together at the final scene, they anticipated possible censorship problems by inventing a way for the couple to be married on the German ship.
  
  
• 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 the book White Hunter, Black Heart , a thinly fictionalized account of his experience writing the script for The African Queen (1951) with John Huston. The book follows the exploits of 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 and starred Eastwood and Jeff Fahey.
  
  
• Katharine Hepburn's 1987 book 'The Making of the African Queen' details 'John Huston' 's obsession with hunting. One day he even convinced Hepburn to join him, and he inadvertently led her into the middle of a herd of wild animals from which they were lucky to escape alive.
  
  
• Sources claimed that everyone in the cast and crew got sick - except for Humphrey Bogart and John Huston, which they attributed to the fact that they basically lived 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."
  
  
• The scene in which Humphrey Bogart finds his body entirely covered with leeches (This was actually shot in the studio in London), Bogart insisted on using rubber leeches. John Huston refused, and brought a leech-breeder to the studio with a tank full of them. This 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.
  
  
• In Katharine Hepburn autobiography, John Huston had been dissatisfied with Hepburn's performance, finding it too serious-minded. He came calling at her hut one day and suggested that she model her performance on Eleanor Roosevelt - to put on her "society smile" in the face of all adversity. Huston left the hut, and Hepburn sat for a moment before deciding, "That is the best piece of direction I have ever heard."
  
  
• The leeches were first modeled in Plasticine before moulds were made and the leeches Humphrey Bogart pulls off were made of rubber.
  
  
• Katharine Hepburn's first color film.
  
  
• Debut of Theodore Bikel.
  
  
• Lauren Bacall famously ventured along for the filming in Africa to be with husband Bogart. She played den mother during the trip, making camp and cooking. This also marked the beginning of her life-long friendship with Hepburn.
  
  
• In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #65 Greatest Movie of All Time.
  
  

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