Trailer
Plot summary
In Tanganyika, the Momella Game Company catches animals for zoos and circuses, driving them with jeeps and trucks into cages. Sean Mercer runs the capture expeditions, alongside retired race driver Kurt Müller, bullfighter Luis Francisco García López, sharpshooter Little Wolf, and Pockets, a former cab driver who fears animals. Brandy de la Court owns the outfit. When a rhinoceros gores Little Wolf's leg, the crew takes him to the Arusha hospital, where Charles "Chips" Maurey asks for his job; Kurt punches him, then Chips gives the transfusion that saves Little Wolf, and Sean hires him. Back at the compound, the crew finds Anna Maria "Dallas" D'Alessandro, an Italian photographer sent by the Basel zoo. They expected a man. Sean lets her join a giraffe capture, and the crew votes to keep her.
Cast
- Jon Chevronas Joseph (uncredited)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hatari! (1962)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- According to director Howard Hawks, all of the animal captures in the film were performed by the actors themselves, not by stuntmen or animal handlers; during filming the rhino really did escape and the actors had to recapture it, which Hawks kept in the finished film for its realism.
- Much of the audio in the capture sequences had to be redubbed because of John Wayne's cursing while wrestling with the animals; one evening a leopard came out of the bush towards Wayne and Buttons as they played cards outside, and Wayne reportedly simply said, "See what he wants."
- Howard Hawks said he had originally planned to star both Clark Gable, who had just played a rough-and-ready wild horse catcher who did his own stunts in The Misfits, and Wayne, until Gable's death ruled that out.
- Howard Hawks studied the work of South African conservationist Dr. Ian Player, who invented his rhino-catching technique to relocate and save the white rhinos after South Africa's killing of large wild animals in 1952 left only 300 of them alive; Player's project was called Operation Rhino.
- Another source of inspiration for Hawks was the famous animal photographer Ylla, and the character of Dallas was added to the script because of her; Hawks said, "We took that part of the story from a real character, a German girl. She was the best animal photographer in the world."
