The classic movie Katharine Hepburn thought was doomed to fail: “What a mess”
Throughout history, various film productions have gone far from swimmingly, resulting in illness, injury, and sometimes even death.
Fitzcarraldo is one of the most infamous, full of endless difficulties that even involved a crew member amputating their own leg. What about Apocalypse Now? A typhoon occurred during filming and Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack; thank god the end result was a movie many class as one of the all-time greats.
One slightly less talked about, but still incredibly chaotic, is a certain Katharine Hepburn movie which had her vomiting into a bucket between takes. Sure, she was a Hollywood icon who you can’t imagine at such a low point, but clearly she wasn’t immune to embarrassment. The African Queen is regarded as one of her finest works, but it was on the set of the John Huston-directed film that she was convinced she was part of something doomed.
In fact, she thought it was doomed before she even began filming, finding the script far from exhilarating to read. Why she still decided to take on the project is a good question, but I guess when you’re being directed by Huston alongside Humphrey Bogart, you don’t complain.
While many films made back in the 1950s utilised sound stages, The African Queen was actually filmed in Africa. Well, only some of it, the rest of it was shot in England. Unfortunately for the cast and crew, it didn’t take long for most of them to get ill, which is said to be down to the consumption of water that hadn’t been properly sanitised. Poor Hepburn couldn’t stop throwing up, although she powered through and managed to cross the filming finish line.
Another dangerous instance involved a boat scene in which part of the boiler almost fell and crushed the actor. It wasn’t exactly a cursed production in the same way as Apocalypse Now, but it’s certainly an early example of a movie endangering its cast and crew for the sake of the right shots.
Hepburn could hardly think that the movie was going to succeed when she was puking throughout production, but these thoughts were only solidified when she took respite from the sun and truly poured over the pages of what she was filming.
“In the afternoons, when it was too hot to do anything but nap, I went up to my room and studied the script. I must say here that this terrible thing always happens to me when I’ve finally decided to do a particular play or movie. stare at it and stare at it and I begin to think that it is the most wildly boring piece of junk that I could possibly be tied up with,” she wrote in her memoir The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa With Bogart, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.
She soon came to wish that all the illness and potential disasters would actually halt production altogether, and perhaps she nearly accidentally manifested this into existence. “I hope something awful will happen and I won’t have to perform in it. Not different, The African Queen. Reading first a scene from the book and then one from the script. It seemed to me utterly dull and I kept falling asleep over it. What a mess,” she added.
No matter her internal protestations, and a telling title for her memoir, The African Queen was actually a hit, winning Bogart an Oscar and even helping to inspire the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. That’s when you know you’ve made your mark.
