The Hawksian group dynamic at play in Hatari!—featuring a crew of game catchers working in Tanzania—is a familiar one, with macho gamesmanship, romantic entanglements, and personality clashes all occurring as each individual excels at their professional role, while also relying on the expertise of those around him or her. Yet, more so than any other Howard Hawks film, Hatari! plays not only like a new spin on the director’s pet themes and motifs, but also as a deliberate fusion of reconfigured moments and gestures from his greatest works.
There’s a mano-a-mano shooting competition between Kurt (Hardy Krüger) and Chips (Gérard Blain) that recalls the famous Red River sequence between Monty Clift and John Ireland, while the piano sing-along scene is much like the one in Only Angels Have Wings. The crew’s leader, Sean (John Wayne), who’s constantly flustered by the sophisticated Dallas (Elsa Martinelli), is reminiscent of Cary Grant’s character from His Girl Friday, while the leisurely pacing and hangout vibes bring to mind Rio Bravo, which, like Hatari!, was also penned by Leigh Brackett. If these references aren’t obvious enough, there’s even a pet leopard, Sylvia, to remind one of Bringing Up Baby’s titular feline.
One could dismiss the film as a late-career victory lap were it not such a vibrant portrait of another typically Hawksian ragtag team of workers. While the collision of so many deliberately familiar beats and gags could have been hollowly nostalgic, it’s exciting in Hawks’s hands, as he and his collaborators inject new life into them with subtle shifts in their presentation.
Hatari!’s scenes are allowed to breathe but to such a degree that the stakes of the characters’ endeavor are diminished. While there’s certainly a palpable sense of danger whenever they drive across the Serengeti trying to catch animals, particularly the fierce rhinos, much of Hatari! is about observing various members of the group during their downtime or involved in humorous, low-stakes activities like caring for baby elephants or wrangling ostriches that got loose. Despite its title, which means “danger,” and its similarities to Only Angels Have Wings, there’s no “Who’s Joe?” moment to lend emotional gravitas or existential weight to the film.
Indeed, Hatari! is almost single-minded in its desire to entertain, counterbalancing even the brief brushes with danger with a levity that assures us that everything will be okay. It makes for a far less weighty experience than many of Hawks’s earlier dramas, but this change in tempo and mood presents the Hawksian archetypes in new lights, rendering them compelling in ways that are enhanced by the international cast’s varying degrees of sophistication.
Rarely will you see one of Hawks’s female leads be as flummoxed and frustrated by her male counterpart as Dallas is here. Nor will you see John Wayne as delightfully understated, despite exhibiting both a vulnerability and professionalism befitting his character. Meanwhile, the playful repartee, with an undercurrent of potential violence, between Kurt and Chips is unlike anything in any other Hawks film, in large part because of the characters’ German and French heritage. All this is to say that for all of Hatari!’s built-in references to so many of Hawks’s films, it’s ultimately quite unlike anything else he ever made.
Image/Sound
Hatari! has had a somewhat problematic history on home video, with previous DVD and Blu-ray transfers of the film suffering from overly digitized looks, bland color palettes, and a lack of detail and texture. Kino Lorber’s 4K transfer may not be perfect, but the level of detail in the image is spectacular; there’s far greater depth to it than was evident in previous transfers of the film, preventing the characters from looking like cardboard cutouts. The HDR Dolby Vision presentation isn’t quite as eye-popping as one might hope, given the film’s gorgeous exterior cinematography, but the color balancing is more naturalistic than in previous transfers, and additional shades of color make this, quite easily, the best transfer of the film to date.
Extras
The lone extra is a new audio commentary by film historian Julie Kirgo and writer and filmmaker Peter Hankoff, who go into great detail about what makes a film “Hawksian.” It’s a lively conversation, and the pair’s love of Hatari!, and Howard Hawks in general, makes it a pleasurable and informative listen. Their analysis of the film is quite strong, bolstered by their references to Robin Woods’s book on Hawks and insights into the ways this film fits into the director’s oeuvre. They also fill out the hefty runtime with some interesting asides, including a particularly interesting one about how they see 1962 as a key crossover period between Old Hollywood and the new generation of great filmmakers outside of the U.S.
Overall
One of Howard Hawks’s most self-reflexive and entertaining outings finally gets the beautiful home video transfer it deserves, along with a solid new audio commentary.
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