SOURCE: Fultz, James R. “A Classic Case of Collaboration: The African Queen.” Literature Film Quarterly 10, no. 1 (1982): 13-24.

In the following essay, Fultz discusses the collaboration between James Agee and John Huston on the film version of The African Queen and also delineates differences between the film and Forester's novel.

After John Huston abandoned plans to film James Agee's adaptation of “The Blue Hotel,” he asked Agee to write a script of The African Queen. This was in 1950, a year in which Agee's life was pretty much taken over by the director whose dazzling cinematic sense he had admired in The Battle of San Pietro and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The two men became friends early in that year when Agee wrote an article entitled “Undirectable Director.” He wrote that, while most films were stillborn in the scripting stage, Huston's work had “a unique tension and vitality...