With Hawks in Brightest Africa

Hatari, the Swahili word for “danger,” is used in the film only once. The title sums up the theme of the film, while the fact that it is scarcely mentioned sums up the film’s uniquely relaxed, unreproachful, calmly professional point of view. The subject of Hatari! is the wild animals of Tanganyika and the men who catch them for zoos. The animals appear as themselves— “only man, not the tiger, can be less than himself,” said Ortega—and the men, as men, not as units in a behavioral-science fantasy. It is a story about men who are not likely to be less than themselves, anyway; and as such it will confound anyone who goes to it looking for the Macomber twist, the Mau-Mau slant, the Memsahib bit, or the moralizing Misfits pitch (“But they’re free! What right have we?”).

The script is credited to “Leigh Brackett, from a story by Harry Kurnitz,” but one cannot imagine its existing on paper. The story line reduces to a frayed thread, and at the fadeout, after merely 159 minutes of deliberate structural and dramatic vacancy, one half expects the director, Howard Hawks, to appear and write across the screen in white crayon, “That’s all, Folks!” Having thrown away, before he began, every film that was ever made about Africa, Hawks now throws away his own. The gesture by any other name director is inconceivable. But it is Hawks’ own style and, since it is style, past all self-indulgence.

AC

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Arlene Croce

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Hatari, the Swahili word for “danger,” is used in the film only once. The title sums up the theme of the film, while the fact that it is scarcely mentioned sums up the film’s uniquely relaxed, unreproachful, calmly professional point of view. The subject of Hatari! is the wild animals of Tanganyika and the men who catch them for zoos. The animals appear as themselves— “only man, not the tiger, can be less than himself,” said Ortega—and the men, as men, not as units in a behavioral-science fantasy. It is a story about men who are not likely to be less than themselves, anyway; and as such it will confound anyone who goes to it looking for the Macomber twist, the Mau-Mau slant, the Memsahib bit, or the moralizing Misfits pitch (“But they’re free! What right have we?”).

The script is credited to “Leigh Brackett, from a story by Harry Kurnitz,” but one cannot imagine its existing on paper. The story line reduces to a frayed thread, and at the fadeout, after merely 159 minutes of deliberate structural and dramatic vacancy, one half expects the director, Howard Hawks, to appear and write across the screen in white crayon, “That’s all, Folks!” Having thrown away, before he began, every film that was ever made about Africa, Hawks now throws away his own. The gesture by any other name director is inconceivable. But it is Hawks’ own style and, since it is style, past all self-indulgence.