That literally is it for main plot points, and they all happen in the first half hour of this 2 & ²/₃ hour show, which is filled with gorgeous photography, fun animals, pleasant Henry Mancini music, and the antics of John Wayne's happy bunch.

Savant doesn't believe in guilty pleasures. Who needs to feel guilty about liking what they like? Hatari! gets a little slow now and then, and Red Button's third-rate comic antics (gimme another Oscar nomination!) leave me cold, but in general the Hawks male-universe, relax-and-have-a-good-time atmosphere works for me. Wayne is likeable in the extreme in this go-about, the animal-grabbing scenes (lauded at the time as a righteous evolutionary step up from movies about hunting big game with guns) are pretty exciting, and Hawks aquits himself as professionally as ever, breaking from medium shots at shoulder level only very rarely, and lulling you into a sense of flow and continuity that in the best of situations, can make you forget you're watching a movie at all.

Politically it's still a movie of its time. Activists today dissaprove of disturbing in any way what remains of real indigenous wildlife. Everyone at Sean Mercer's camp looks like an Anglo on permanent vacation, while there are plenty of silent blacks around who seem to be doing their share of the real work while not qualifying for the inner circle of coolness around Mercer's ice chest full of beer. Modern films have neatly sidestepped political issues like these by existing in reality-free limbos ... like Mighty Joe Young.

Nowadays, Hawks is an acquired taste, and those who love him will defend him by talking about his other pictures and how they interrelate, much as I have just done above. Others will react by the genius semiologist student in Jim Kitses' 1973 UCLA class on Westerns, who stood up in the middle of a lecture and asked bluntly how anyone could Rio Bravo, El Dorado, or Rio Lobo is even a good movie by any standard. Even Kitses couldn't make a defense for a filmmaker whose entire worth is dependent on buying in to his personal universe. Savant has never quite sat through Lobo, although he laughed along with 1,000 other kiddies when he saw Rio Bravo at age seven and laughed too when our heroes blew up the bad guys with sticks of dynamite (sooo funny). Savant got all huffy at El Dorado in reissue ten years later; James Caan's sawed-off shotgun with its 'funny' BOOMY blast seemed an obscene lie next to the murderously lethal trench guns in The Wild Bunch.

Since Hatari! isn't about killing people, it has an advantage as a crossover date movie. My sister wanted to work in the zoo after seeing and hearing the 'Baby Elephant Walk.' Then she found out what real pachyderms smelled like!

Paramount Home Video's handsome DVD of Hatari! looks great, but isn't quite up to the standard of their previous drop-dead beautiful Donovan's Reef disc. Its a bit, just a bit grainier throughout, as if encoding all of this long picture just took up too much data space for a sufficient bit rate. This is only evident on a larger projection television, however .. the color and sharpness of the picture are excellent, and Savant noticed no real flaws.

Henry Mancini's score, one of his better, remains in mono. This reminds me of the old LP record album, which used that great (Reynold Brown?) original poster art, with its highballing truck and rhino charging the viewer in forced perspective. Although the big picture of Wayne on the keepcase will doubtless target the John Wayne fans who know this movie, Savant misses not seeing that cool poster again.

On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
Hatari rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements: None
Packaging: Amaray case
Reviewed: July 30, 2001