Hatari! (1962)

Directed by Howard Hawks. With John Wayne, Elsa Martinelli, Hardy Krüger, Red Buttons. A group of men trap wild animals in Africa and sell them to zoos before the arrival of a female wildlife photographer threatens to change their ways.

Hatari! (pronounced [hɑtɑri], Swahili for "Danger!") is a 1962 American action/adventure romantic comedy film directed by Howard Hawks and starring John Wayne.

Hatari! is Swahili for "danger"—and also the word for action, adventure and broad comedy in this two-fisted Howard Hawks effort. John Wayne stars as the head...

Hatari! is Swahili for

The arrival of a woman upsets a team of hunters capturing animals for the world's zoos.

In "Hatari!" (Which means danger in Swahili), Howard Hawks again shows his penchant for strong characterization at the expense of conventional narrative.

DESPITE the newspaper ads, "Hatari!," which crashed into the DeMille Theatre yesterday, needs no exhaustive definition.

Howard Hawks’s African adventure, from 1962, starts out with a trapper being gored by a rhinoceros, but his big-game hunters’ main—and most dangerous—prey is the opposite sex. The sprawling, rowdy story concerns a motley international troupe of freelance adventurers (and their boss, a young woman) led by a hot-tempered Irishman, Sean Mercer (John Wayne), who are thrown into emotional disarray when a woman photographer (Elsa Martinelli) shows up. Though the roughhousing young actors Gérard Blain and Hardy Krüger serve up a comic allegory of Franco-German reconciliation, politics take a back seat to sex, served up in a dazzling wealth of innuendo. Hawks sets the tone when Krüger, pressed close behind the French actress Michèle Girardon while zipping up her dress, says he’s “afraid of ripping something.” There’s plenty of drinking, joshing, fighting, and intimate maneuvering, along with exciting scenes of animal trapping, which were filmed on location with the stars involved. A woman-hunting elephant provides a Freudian jolt, set to Henry Mancini’s jaunty music, and Red Buttons is moving as a Brooklyn cabdriver in exile whose heart does a U-turn.

Marked by the relaxed pace and tone of Hawks' later work, this could easily be seen as Only Angels Have Wings transferred from the Andes to the African bush. Th