Hatari means danger!

Over the decades there have been a number of big budget Hollywood films about the white man's adventures in Africa. Many involve the "great white hunter" and include the fashion dummy retro look of Out of Africa, White Hunter/Black Heart, Mogambo and The Ghost and the Darkness. Howard Hawks' Hatari(1962) is in a similar world, but is about animal catchers, groups of men and women who capture wild animals for zoos and circuses all over the globe.

Hatari focuses on the typical close knit insular "Hawksian" world of skilled professionals, people who risk life and limb for money, adventure and the freedom it provides. There is a powerful economic component to the pursuit of capturing all manner of wild animals for the businesses that demand them. And if you want to join this group you have to have a skill set they need or you are rejected without a moment's notice. In Hatari hesitation means injury or death.

So when the film opens with an exciting and dangerous chase after a rhino and ends with the rhino escaping after it gores Indian (Bruce Cabot) because his jeep's driver was not anticipating the rhino's attack, we immediately see how close the hunters have to come to their quarry to capture them and how furiously the large animals react in their own defense. Indian nearly dies but is rescued by a stranger (Gerard Blain) who wants to join the group, but first has to donate his rare AB negative blood, and then prove he can replace Indian who is the group's top rifle shot. Only after he passes both tests is he immediately folded into the group and participates in all further actions as if he had been with these people for years.

The group's leader Sean Mercer (John Wayne) continually scans a large board filled with neatly laid out rows of all the animals requested for delivery in this particular year. As the rainy season approaches the pressure to capture all the promised animals increases. The danger and adventures behind capturing these animals is the primary concern of the film. Hawks was determined to minimize the use of stunt doubles and once Wayne was willing to put himself in considerable danger to enhance the excitement of the actual captures all the other actors fell into line and joined in the action. Audiences were then engaged in over an hour of screen time devoted to the attempts to chase, rope and subdue wildebeests, antelope, giraffes, cape buffalo and rhinos from open doored jeeps and open bed trucks.

Unlike many of the other Hollywood African epics already mentioned, Hatari is unconcerned with killing, though in one sequence is crocodile is supposedly shot to save Kurt (Hardy Kruger) from attack while he is in a river trying to winch a jeep out of the water. Hatari seems to say that real adventure means no guns. You want a buffalo? Go out and capture it with your bare hands.

When a young elephant calf has been orphaned and is about to be shot by the game warden, it is rescued by the group's newest member Dallas (Elsa Martinelli) an Italian magazine photojournalist, who demands to be given the opportunity to keep the calf alive. The group tries to dissuade her, but when she demands loyalty they immediately drop everything, pool their meager money to purchase a goat herd from local farmers, learn to milk them, while she finally develops a formula that saves and nourishes the elephant. By film's end Dallas has saved three young orphaned elephants and they follow her around like ducks that have imprinted on her as their mother. These elephants provide much of the comedy for the film's ending making sure Dallas and Sean become a couple both professionally and romantically.

It is this amiable comic quality that separates Hatari from most adventure epics. The captures are always serious affairs, jeeps overturn and people are injured, but amid the serious tone, is the moral universe of Hawks where people are only judged by their abilities and nothing more, and most of the time their actions are comic and ludicrous in turns. Men and women are reduced to foolish animals when their sexual drives overcome their good sense. The only way to control those impulses is through serious work. This small group functions as a smooth unit willing to face death in order to fufill its contracts. Back at their home base they relax with card games, drink, banter and mild sexual jealousies, which are always settled in the friendliest of fashions. It is an idealized world that never has to challenge the results of the work that they do.

But it is this work that fills the zoos and circuses of the world with animals that were once free and living without disturbance in their own space. Hatari takes great pains to represent the enormous beauty of Tanganyika (now Tanzania), its great plains, rivers and forests all full of life. The intrusion of the capture group is contrasted with the power and grace of the free roaming animals. Now that these animals have become commodified for their value to be displayed in artificial envrionments, their capture is portrayed as being merciful. At least they won't be shot by some rich industrialist on safari trying to impress his mistress or his faithless wife. But since Hatari's crew never questions their work, we never question our own needs for such entertainment. Without us as an audience animal captures would never exist.