Hatari! (4K UHD Review)

• Reviewed by: Stephen Bjork
• Review Date: Mar 06, 2025
• Format: 4K Ultra HD
• 

Director

Howard Hawks

Release Date(s)

1962 (December 31, 2024)

Studio(s)

Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)

• Film/Program Grade: B+
• Video Grade: A
• Audio Grade: B+
• Extras Grade: B-

Review

Clint Eastwood’s White Hunter, Black Heart was an adaption of the novel by Peter Viertel, which was itself loosely based on Viertel’s experiences working on location in Africa for John Huston while making The African Queen. Viertel’s conceit (partly derived from comments about Huston in Katherine Hepburn’s memoirs) was that “John Wilson,” a thinly-veiled stand-in for Huston, insisted on the location shoot because he had become obsessed with the idea of being able to hunt and kill an elephant. That was a work of fiction, inspired by a very real maverick filmmaker, and yet something similar had already happened very much for real when equally maverick filmmaker Howard Hawks traveled to Africa in 1961 in order to shoot Hatari!—only Hawks actually filmed his hunts, and no animals had to die in the process.

Yet there’s no escaping the fact that Hawks’ motivations in making Hatari! were still driven by the thrill of the hunt. Hawks freely admitted to Joseph McBride in Hawks on Hawks that “there wasn’t much story.” That’s significant, because storytelling was usually the primary focus for Hawks—it’s no accident that Gerald Mast titled his own book on the director Howard Hawks: Storyteller. When Hawks didn’t have a good story to begin with, his heart just wasn’t in the final results (and he was as critical of his own later work as anyone, for precisely that reason). The story for Hatari! is credited to Harry Kurnitz, but that was at best a loose template. Leigh Brackett worked on several drafts of the script before the crew left for Africa, but the footage that Hawks shot on location ended up driving her final draft(s), with studio work being used to fill in the gaps and tie everything else together.

And what footage! Hawks and his crew hunted and captured (not shot, thankfully) a variety of different animals like giraffes, wildebeest, and even rhinoceros. They used a total of 42 different jeeps and other vehicles, including picture cars as well as the camera cars and support vehicles, and cinematographer Russell Harlan employed 22 different cameras to record all of the action. Ever the showman, Hawks claimed that the actors did all of their own stunts, and Harlan backed him up on that in a 1961 article for American Cinematographer. While that’s clearly not true, it’s equally clear that the actors did indeed participate in the hunts, and there are some impressive shots of them dangling from the vehicles and interacting with the animals—including some very unhappy rhinos and wildebeest. While they may not have performed the majority of the stunts, they still put themselves at risk for the benefit of Harlan’s cameras (sometimes unintentionally so, like when Valentin de Vargas jumped off a truck to rope a rhino’s legs without realizing that it hadn’t been properly secured yet).

Here’s the funny thing, though: as spectacular as all of the safari footage may be, it’s not really that important to Hatari! as a whole. Coherent story or not, it’s actually the characters who drive the film, not the animal action. John Wayne plays Sean Mercer, the leader of the Momella Game Company owned by Brandy de la Court (Michèle Girardon). His crew consists of Kurt Müller (Hardy Krüger), The Indian (Bruce Cabot), Luis Francisco Garcia Lopez (Valentin de Vargas), Charles “Chips” Maurey (Gérard Blain), and Pockets (Red Buttons). Together, they capture wild game alive for zoos, circuses, and the like. Their world is turned upside-down when Italian photographer “Dallas” D’Alessandro (Elsa Martinelli) shows up to document their work, and while she’s a nuisance at first, eventually everyone comes around to accept her as a part of the group.

There’s really not much more to the story for Hatari! than that. Oh, there are twists and turns in the various relationships between all of these characters, but those are just interpersonal flourishes, not narrative ones. Hatari! is pure incident, living from moment to moment without any real concern for how those moments connect together (regardless of how hard that Leigh Brackett may have tried). And it’s an amazing group of characters. Joseph McBride told Hawks that “I can’t think of any movie with a group of people whose company I enjoy being in (more) than Hatari!,” and Hawks emphatically agreed. All of the actors have great chemistry together, especially in terms of the Wayne-Krüger-Buttons triumvirate, but even Martinelli, Girardon, Cabot, Vargas, and Blain acquit themselves admirably. They have an easygoing manner with each other, which is perfect for such an easygoing film.

Oh, and one would be remiss not to mention another important element that contributes to the easygoing nature of Hatari!: the wry music by Henri Mancini. Hawks claimed that he fired his longtime favorite composer Dmitri Tiomkin when he insisted that there be no strings in the score, but Tiomkin didn’t take him seriously. Mancini replaced Tiomkin and largely followed the mandate, but even he thought that he was going to get fired when he played The Baby Elephant Walk for Hawks, which did use a violin (although frankly, it’s barely noticeable under the brass, woodwinds, and calliope). But Hawks knew a good thing when he heard it, and the tune went on to become a hit single when re-recorded by Lawrence Welk and His Orchestra. As with everything else about Hatari!, it all worked out in the end.

All that, plus one of the single most off-color jokes ever to appear in a Howard Hawks film (watch Buttons’ reaction carefully after he finds out that he’s been milking the wrong goat). What more could anyone want in a comedy adventure film? Critics may not have entirely agreed (outside of Cahiers du Cinéma, anyway), but audiences ate it up, making Hatari! one of the top-ten grossing films of 1962, and it’s been a cult favorite ever since. It may have less story than other Howard Hawks classics, but it’s still more fun than a barrel of monkeys (or a net full of monkeys, as the case may be). What started out as lark driven by the whims of a maverick director ended up as pure, unadulterated entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Cinematographer Russell Harlan shot Hatari! on 35mm film using Mitchell and Arriflex cameras with spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. (Joseph Brun is listed in the opening credits as “associate photographer,” presumably with the second unit, and while Harlan was definitely on location shooting the safari action with the main actors, Brun must have shot enough footage of his own that he was given credit for it alongside Harlan). This version is based on a new 16-bit 4K scan of the original camera negative, and as anyone who has seen Paramount’s previous 1080p master can attest, it’s unquestionably a new scan. The old master was likely from the DVD era, heavily filtered and scrubbed of fine detail, and it was riddled with artifacts from the sharpening that was applied in order to compensate. Well, let’s just say that all of those home video sins are now forgiven.

Aside from the optical work during the opening title sequence, the rest of the film is as clean and sharp as can be, with all of the fine detail and grain intact. There isn’t a trace of digital processing this time around, and while the encode does struggle with the grain in a few spots, it won’t be noticeable without putting your nose right up to the screen. Interestingly enough, it really does appear that only the opening credits had to be derived from dupe materials. Nearly all of the fades and dissolves throughout rest of the film have been recreated digitally from the original negative, so there’s no image degradation from using later-generation optical dupes. Most Howard Hawks films from that era were single-strand printed, so the dupes were cut into the camera negative, and while it’s possible that this one was printed from A/B rolls instead, it looks like there’s at least one use of dupe elements for the dissolve at 85:50. So, best guess is that Hatari! was indeed single-strand printed, but Paramount was able to locate the original negative trims for everything but that one shot, and they went to the trouble of recreating the transitions digitally in order to maximize the image quality as much as possible. If so, honor is due.

The colors all seem to match Harlan’s intentions perfectly, with weatherbeaten flesh tones and an overall arid, dusty look to the landscapes. Harlan told American Cinematographer that dust was a constant problem on location, and so even the green grass looks appropriately brown and dusty in this new HDR grade (both Dolby Vision and HDR10 are included). Yet there are still splashes of vibrant color, most of them confined to Elsa Martinelli wardrobe, like her red blouse during the giraffe hunt or her green pantsuit the following evening—it’s a way of demonstrating visually how she doesn’t yet fit in with the rest of Wayne’s group, all of whom are as dusty and earthen-toned as the landscapes that they inhabit. Pocket’s rocket also offers a brilliant splash of color against the earthen backgrounds. While the overall color balance isn’t always perfectly consistent from shot to shot, that likely reflects the varied conditions under which Hatari! was filmed. In all other respects—the contrast, black levels, densities—pretty much everything else is as perfect as it can be. (Perfect enough that it’s now much easier to spot the stuntpeople in the hunting sequences.) It’s a massive, massive upgrade over the old Blu-ray. If you still have that one, bin it.

Audio is offered in English 2.0 mono and 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio, with optional English subtitles. The 5.1 just adds a bit of processing to the mono stems in order to create a synthesized stereo spread and a bit of ambience, and the results sound too diffuse. Stick with the mono, which may lack those spatial qualities, but it makes up for them by sounding more solid overall. In mono, everything sounds clear and balanced, and while some of the ADR still stands out, that’s just an unavoidable part of the original mix. Ironically enough, Henry Mancini’s score also sounds like it has more depth in mono that it does with the synthesized processing in 5.1, so there’s really nothing to be gained by straying from the original mix.

Kino Lorber’s 4K Ultra HD release of Hatari! is a two-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film, as well as a slipcover that duplicates the theatrical poster artwork on the insert. The following extras are included:

DISC ONE: UHD

• Audio Commentary by Julie Kirgo and Peter Hankoff

DISC TWO: BD

• Audio Commentary by Julike Kirgo and Peter Hankoff
• Trailer (SD – 3:01)
• The Shepherd of the Hills Trailer (SD – 2:19)
• Reap the Wild Wind Trailer (SD – 2:17)
• Legend of the Lost Trailer (SD – 3:43)
• Jet Pilot Trailer (HD – 2:51)
• The Horse Soldiers Trailer (HD – 2:39)
• Brannigan Trailer (SD – 2:22)
• Man’s Favorite Sport? Trailer (SD – 1:59)

The new commentary pairs writer and historian Julie Kirgo with filmmaker/author/reprobate (their term, not mine) Peter Hankoff. Kirgo is no stranger to the world of Howard Hawks since her father George wrote the screenplay for Red Line 7000. Together, they have a far-ranging conversation that covers the making of Hatari!; the cultural and political context that surrounded it; the filmographies of the cast and crew; and much more. In addition to the sources that I mentioned like Hawks on Hawks, they draw from other sources like Howard Hawks by Robin Wood and Henry Mancini’s autobiography Did They Mention the Music? Mancini’s version of the story about composing the music varies a bit from the Howard Hawks version that I mentioned above, but Kirgo and Hankoff acknowledge that Hawks was a teller of tales, and they admit that the story about the cast doing all of their own stunts probably wasn’t true. It’s an interesting commentary, although it’s definitely more of a freewheeling conversation than a scene-specific track, but there’s nothing wrong with that.

The addition of this new commentary track for Hatari! is more significant than you may think, because it’s never had any real extras on any previous releases in any format (even the LaserDisc was bare-bones). So, Kino Lorber’s 4K version is an upgrade in more ways than one. Still, there’s no getting around the fact that Paramount’s upgraded 4K master is the real selling point here—seriously, if you have Paramount’s old Blu-ray, toss it in the trash and never look back. If you’re a Howard Hawks fan, a John Wayne fan, or even a Henry Mancini fan (let alone a fan of entertaining adventure films), then you need this disc in your collection. Buy it.

-Stephen Bjork

(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).