Hatari! (1962)

Produced and directed by Howard Hawks with a screenplay by Leigh Brackett that was based on a story by Harry Kurnitz (What Next Corporal Hargrove? (1945)) this adventure comedy drama set in Africa is notable for Russell Harlan’s Color Cinematography which was Oscar nominated (his third of six unrewarded Academy Award nominations in this category) and Henri Mancini’s original song “Baby Elephant Walk”. The film’s title which means danger in Swahili refers to the work that Sean Mercer (John Wayne) Kurt Muller (Hardy Krüger) and Pockets (Red Buttons) among others do in the African plains (and National Parks of Tanzania) where they fulfill various zoo orders from around the world by capturing the animals in the wild. The movie features several sequences of these dangerous procedures so many that the film runs more than 2 ½ hours as the crew (which included the actors!) captures a giraffe a zebra wildebeest some monkeys and a rhinoceros. The plot around the action involves: a love triangle come quadrangle between driver and rifleman Muller a new crew member and sharpshooter – Frenchman ‘Chips’ Maurey (Gérard Blain) and Michele Girardon as Brandy de la Court; Pockets eventually prevails; and a romance for lead Wayne with a free spirited French photographer Anna Maria D’Allesandro nicknamed ‘Dallas’ and played by Elsa Martinelli. Bruce Cabot plays Little Wolf aka The Indian whose injury in the first attempt to capture a rhinoceros leads to the Frenchman’s joining the company run by Mercer and Miss de la Court whose father had been killed by a rhino. Valentin de Vargas plays Luis Francisco Garcia Lopez another member of the crew and Eduard Franz plays Dr. Sanderson. The Duke plays this one fairly laid back and there’s some tough-in-cheek humor; no one takes this one too seriously outside of the perilous tasks at hand and Buttons is a cutup who teases his boss forever saying “Yes Bwana”.

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