Waiting for new DVD titles is like playing the lottery. You pin your hopes on a favourite, and as the others pass by - who ordered Bride Wars, or Jekyll & Hyde … Together Again? - you pray your number will come up. Next Tuesday, two welcome films make their first appearance on North American discs.
The African Queen not only arrives but looks spectacular. The 1951 Technicolor classic with Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn has been painstakingly restored and, in Paramount's "commemorative box set," is joined by an hour-long retrospective, a radio version with Bogart and Greer Garson, and a copy of Hepburn's 1987 memoir about the film.
Hepburn was glad to have made the movie, but not glad while making it, given the ravages of snakes, hornets, dysentery and director John Huston, though she came to terms with his being "irresponsible and outrageous." It helped that he suggested she play her role like former U.S. first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, smiling even in adversity - "the goddamnest best piece of direction I have ever heard."
The setting is German East Africa in 1914, just after the outbreak of the First World War. The scruffy, carefree Charlie Allnut (Bogart) - who was British in C.S. Forester's 1935 novel but was changed to Canadian to spare viewers Bogart's Cockney accent - ferries supplies to isolated villages in his steamboat, the African Queen. He gives passage to Rose Sayer (Hepburn), the prim sister of a newly dead missionary (Robert Morley). She persuades Allnut to try to torpedo a formidable German gunboat on a lake they might just be able to reach. The trek begins, as do respect and fondness between the mismatched pair.
With one eye on opportunities to hunt game, Huston chose to film in a remote part of the Belgian Congo (now Zaire). A real boat alternated with a replica on a raft. The shoot continued on Lake Albert in Uganda, where Bogart and Huston drank whisky while everyone else drank supposedly filtered water. They were the only two not to become deathly ill. Scenes that involved actors entering the lake had to be shot later in London.
The chemistry between Bogart (who won an Oscar) and Hepburn makes any other pairing almost unimaginable. But if you're determined to play what-if, consider that earlier plans would have paired (at one point) Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester and (at another) Bette Davis and David Niven.
The second new title is The T.A.M.I. Show, a black-and-white California concert shot on high-resolution video, mixed live from four tracks to mono and transferred to 35-millimetre film for release in theatres in 1964. Producer Bill Sargent's plan was to film annual concerts with acts selected by fans, but nothing came of it. This movie, a forerunner of such concert films as Monterey Pop, was a one-shot.
But what a shot. Chuck Berry kicks off the tightly paced show with Johnny B. Goode, and Gerry and the Pacemakers play a creditable version of Berry's Maybelline, with go-go dancers (including Teri Garr) on risers in the background. The show continues with Marvin Gaye, Lesley Gore, the Beach Boys, the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and more. Director Steve Binder instructed the Rolling Stones to close the show, despite their misgivings about following James Brown. They were right to worry. Brown blows the roof off. The Stones are an anticlimax.
The Beach Boys insisted their songs be removed after the film's first run, but agreed to their restoration here. Small wonder. This is as much a classic among music films as The African Queen is among features.