Try to imagine how weird it would be if Herman Melville's Moby Dick was out of print or if the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's was only available on beat-up vinyl. That's pretty much where things have stood with John Huston's white-knuckle, white-water Technicolor masterpiece "The African Queen" -- until now.

Making its long-overdue DVD debut, the 1951 classic has honestly never looked better. So much so that watching the gorgeously restored new print, it's as if you're witnessing the film for the first time. And what a film it is. Rollicking, romantic, and funny, it's one of the last great triumphs of Hollywood's Golden Age thanks to its two leads. That would be Humphrey Bogart as the hilariously crusty, hard-drinking river rat Charlie Allnut and Katherine Hepburn as the prim and proper lock-jawed missionary Rose Sayer.

The two characters couldn't be more mismatched. But when German forces in East Africa move in, they're forced to team up and journey downriver together aboard Bogie's rickety steamer, the African Queen. Stuck together, they bicker and squabble, brave rapids and ultimately fall in love just when things seem bleakest. It's a wheezy cliché at this point, but they really don't make them like this anymore.

As part of "The African Queen" box set, there's also a terrific (and also out-of-print until now) copy of Hepburn's diary written on the far-flung set in the Belgian Congo: The Making of the African Queen: Or, How I Went to Africa With Bogie, Bacall and Huston and Almost Lost My Mind.

Like the film, it's a must-have for any serious movie-lover.

Now for a look at what else is new on DVD: in "Sherlock Holmes," Robert Downey Jr. reinvents the super sleuth as an action hero; in "An Education," Oscar nominee Carey Mulligan plays a London teen in the '60s who falls for a worldly older man; and in "Brothers," Tobey Maguire plays a soldier back from Afghanistan whose wife has become too close to his brother.