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We're a list society. From Casey Kasem and the American Top 40 to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die to BOP's very own Best Horror Films (one of our most popular features ever), people love to talk about lists. They love to debate the merits of the "winners" and bemoan the exclusions, and start the whole process again when a new list captures pop culture fancy.

Perhaps one of the best-known, most widely discussed lists is the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies. A non-profit organization known for its efforts at film restoration and screen education, the AFI list of the 100 best American movies was chosen by 1,500 leaders in the movie industry and announced in its first version in 1998. Since then, the 100 Years... 100 Movies list has proven to be so popular that the AFI came forth with a 10th anniversary edition in 2007, along with other series such as 100 Heroes and Villains, 100 Musicals, 100 Laughs and 100 Thrills.

In addition to talking about which films are deserving of being on the list and bitterly shaking our fists because a beloved film was left out, we also love to brag about the number of movies we've seen. As I was looking over the 100 Years... 100 Movies list recently, I realized that I've seen 47 - less than half. As a lover of film and writer/editor for a movie site, this seemed like a wrong that needed to remedied. And so an idea was born. I would watch all 100 movies on the 2007 10th Anniversary list - some of them for the first time in as much as 20 or more years - and ponder their relevance, worthiness and influence on today's film industry. With luck, I'll even discover a few new favorites along the way.

#65: The African Queen

Before I get into the high points of The African Queen, I feel like I should fully disclose the fact that the film's star, Humphrey Bogart, is my favorite actor. Ever. I've seen almost every one of his movies, some of them multiple times. I own several biographies of the man and have read them cover to cover. And where young women in their late teens and 20s are currently obsessing over Twilight's Edward, buying merchandise with his mug and putting stand-up cutouts of the character in their bedroom, I was doing the same thing with Bogie. I still have my standup of him in gangster garb, along with a variety of posters and old VHS copies of his films. Simply put, I'm a (big) fan. (I'm not alone, either. In 1997, Entertainment Weekly named him the number one movie legend of all-time. The AFI followed in 1999 by ranking him as the Greatest Male Star of All-Time.)

Because of that extreme bias, I've had some trepidation about writing about any of the four Bogart films (Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen) that appear on the AFI 100 Years... 100 Movies list. It's very difficult for me to view his films with fresh eyes and look at them without bias. I accept this going in, and will try to temper my enthusiasm with a measured, objective response.

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