Clint Eastwood's account of the nightmares undergone in trying to get director John Huston to make The African Queen in 1951 makes interesting, if hardly stimulating screen fare, shimmeringly shot on location in Zimbabwe. You can imagine that the Peter Viertel book on which it's based is rather more engrossing. Viertel, screenwriter on the film, is played as a narrator figure by the arrestingly good-looking Jeff Fahey as a cross between James Mason and Audie Murphy. Eastwood does a kind of Burt Lancaster impersonation as the Huston character, here called John Wilson: like Eastwood's direction of this one, it's on the stodgy side. Timothy Spall and Mel Martin make good supporting appearances as a bush pilot and a white bigot, and the impersonations of Bogart, Hepburn and Co are close enough to provoke a smile.


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