Director Howard Hawks and John Wayne made five films together. Four of them were westerns. Two of them (Red River and Rio Bravo) count as some of the greatest westerns ever made. Another one, El Dorado, was basically a remake of Rio Bravo. It isn’t as good, but it is a lot of fun. Rio Lobo was the last film they made together and it plays around with similar themes they explored in Rio Bravo and El Dorado.
Buy Hatari! Blu-rayThat leaves us with Hatari!, which has more in common with Hawks’s screwball comedies than any western. Set in Africa, it follows a group of wild-game catchers in a plot structure that could only generously be called “loose.” Like a lot of Howard Hawks’s films, this is more of a hangout movie than anything, except here our heroes are hanging out with leopards, giraffes, rhinos, and monkeys.
Wayne plays Sean Mercer, the leader of the group who catches wild animals – not hunt them – to sell to zoos across the globe. The company is owned by Brandy de la Court (Michèle Girardon), a young woman who inherited the place when her parents died. She’s French, and the rest of the crew is an assortment of Americans and Europeans, including Pockets (Red Buttons), a former New York cabbie who is deathly afraid of all the animals.
Things are disrupted when one of the men is injured after a rhino gores his legs. Seizing the opportunity, a young man called Chips (Gérard Blain) asks for a job. Simultaneously, a photojournalist named Dallas (Elsa Martinelli) shows up to do a story on the gang. Naturally, all the men are suddenly very attentive to this pretty newcomer. But when it becomes clear that she’s only interested in Mercer, the others suddenly realize that Brandy is no longer a little girl, but a beautiful woman.
The film is so casual in its story that it barely takes notice of these romantic shenanigans. The men briefly vie for Brandy’s attention, but as soon as she chooses one of them, it drops the whole thing altogether. The losers move on, and other than a brief kiss on the cheek, the courtship barely exists once the whole thing is settled. The relationship between Mercer and Dallas is a little more filled out. He’s a bit gun-shy, having had his heart broken, and she’s just shy not knowing how to tell him how she feels.
Between all of this romantic nonsense are a lot of scenes of the gang catching (or attempting to catch) the wild animals. It was filmed on location in Tanzania and the cast did their own stunts. That really is John Wayne you see sitting in that little seat attached to the front of one of the trucks, zooming across the plains, net in hand, trying to catch a buffalo. Hawks clearly loved filming these chase scenes, and they are quite exciting to watch, but there are a lot of them. Too many of them if I’m being honest. With a runtime of 157 minutes, he could have easily cut a few of them. The best scene doesn’t even involve them chasing the animals but rather shooting a net attached to a rocket over a tree that allows them to grab a hundred or so monkeys.
What we’re left with is a kind of shambolic, rollicking little film that doesn’t have much to say, nor even much story to tell, but that is a lot of fun to watch nevertheless.
Kino Lorber presents Hatari! with a new 16bit 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative and it looks terrific. Extras include a commentary from Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff and the film’s trailer.
