The African Queen | Kisangani and the Ruiki River — the camp that nearly ended the picture

About half of The African Queen was shot in what was then the Belgian Congo, and the way in was Stanleyville — Kisangani since 1966 — the river town at the head of navigation, where the Congo stops being a highway and becomes the Boyoma Falls.

From there the unit went into the forest. The base camp was built at Biondo, a village on the Ruiki, a tributary narrow enough that the canopy closed overhead; the funeral sequence was filmed on a hillside a couple of miles upriver from it. Model work on the boat was done at the falls above Ponthierville, now Ubundu, further up the Lualaba.

It went badly. The river rose and took part of the camp. Nearly everyone went down with dysentery. Hepburn later wrote an entire book about those weeks and did not make them sound like an adventure.

Kisangani today is a city of a million people that the world has largely stopped thinking about. At the edge of town the Wagenya still set conical fish traps in the rapids, balancing on scaffolds of poles in white water. Watch them work for ten minutes and Huston's decision to bring two middle-aged film stars up this river looks less like nerve than like something harder to name.

Photo: Kisangani, via Wikimedia Commons.