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The template is Pommer's The Beachcomber, though the floating romantic allegory goes back to Keaton's The Navigator. The off-key organ at the "First Methodist Church of Kungdu" can't quite compete with the whistle of the titular vagabond ship, likewise the rumbling belly of the stubbly Canuck skipper (Humphrey Bogart) pierces the teatime silence of the proper British missionary (Katharine Hepburn). Her brother the preacher (Robert Morley) dies of shock after the Hun burns the village (it's 1914 in German East Africa), the captain aims to stay put in his barge, "not a bad place to sit out a war." She has different plans, there's plenty of ingredients for a torpedo and an enemy gunboat downstream. "All right, miss, you win, as the crocodiles will be glad to hear." Star personae as knowing vaudeville turns, river rat and prim equine as part of an affable John Huston menagerie. (Bogart is laidback enough to imitate a noisy hippo when struck by love.) The rudderless louse sees his supply of gin poured out while incapacitated by a hangover, the makeshift cabin door comes down like Capra's Walls of Jericho in the middle of a downpour. From "crazy, psalm-singin', skinny ol' maid" to "the living picture of a heroine," just Hepburn's comedy of an antiseptic lady getting acquainted with "physical experience." Rapids, snipers, mosquitoes and leeches dot the travelogue, the prayer answered is a vessel unstuck, "you at the tiller and me at the engine." Wedding vows before a noose, a Potemkin jest precipitates the happy ending. "Judge us not for our weakness, but for our love." The filming is closely studied by Polanski in Knife in the Water, and Huston has his own unofficial revision with Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison. Cinematography by Jack Cardiff. With Peter Bull, Theodore Bikel, and Walter Gotell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |