Big Game Boxoffice Hunt

Paramount Pins Highest Hope On Hatari! (1962)

Five Shows Daily Make For Long Shifts at NYC's DeMille Theatre

There were three releases in waning days of the Studio Era that Paramount sales staff was high as a kite for: The Ten Commandments, Psycho, and Hatari!. For each they prepared a special insert for the pressbook called a “Care and Handling Manual,” which laid out four weeks of run-up to play dates with instructions on what to do each day. Hatari! had makings to be a massive hit. Some at Paramount thought it would approach The Ten Commandments for grossing. Had I been on promoting team prior to release, I might well have agreed based on remarkable footage of John Wayne and crew chasing exotic animals over African plains, such spectacle as was never caught by cameras before. The fact Hatari! did not make record-buster grade was attributed to several things, not least the fact of children being its most fascinated audience, but how many of them stayed still for 157 minutes the picture lasted? Length kept Hatari! to less showtimes in a day, another slap to revenue. Still, the best of it was the best movies could offer in 1962, a magical advance on action-staging to confirm Howard Hawks as ongoing leader in the field. What he did with still-conventional resource, operators doubting Hawks could bring off animal chase stuff, would give today’s CGI a race for conviction, difference being his effects were real and current tries are not.

Theatres brought wild animals to fronts and into lobbies. There were tie-ins with zoos and auto manufacturers that had supplied Hatari! with terrain vehicles. A strong soundtrack by Henry Mancini yielded instrumental hits to link with the film. Hawks saw new direction his music needed to head and so let go of Dimitri Tiomkin, whose peak had passed. The director approaching his mid-sixties kept an awareness of what a modern audience would want. His getting free reign to do Hatari! was reward for Rio Bravo going well in 1959. The project called Africa was a Hawks sort of story which became an entirely other sort of story by the time cameras turned. It would seem, in fact, that there was no story at all, only a basic situation, characters as Hawks envisioned them, and exotic action through which a plotline could later be threaded. The director-producer had conceived Africa for two strong leads, Clark Gable with John Wayne possibly, but events cancelled that out, as well perhaps, for Gable always seemed to me to represent a generation other than Wayne’s, even though they were only six years apart in age, and had begun in movies at roughly a same time. Wayne had to carry Hatari! as sole prominent personality amidst relative unknowns, most Euro-derived. We warm to them on repeated views of Hatari!, but my impression from a first watch was that JW carried a lot of dead weight here, unlike in Rio Bravo where others brought gravitas from past hit movies and especially television.

Hawks had studied enough TV to realize that viewers no longer needed, in fact had no want, for structured stories. They were too distracted in any case to follow three disciplined acts, home watch being anything but disciplined. Maybe Hawks noted how his own old films were TV-diced into unrelated scenes that left viewers to guess what a yarn was all about. In the end it didn’t matter, for as Hawks well knew, they had seen all the old tropes fourscore times, so why fret with detail? The director-producer would henceforth opt for scenes that would please within loosest framework of relationships among people he enjoyed, and hoped we would. This is how his films relax and reward time and again like no one else’s. You know the highlights and are each time there to see them again. Even if there was a strong narrative, any novelty to that would have dissipated long ago, in event you were back to watch again. This is how Hawks parts from other filmmakers for me. I can drift from one pleasurable scene to a next, the goodies never more than a few minutes apart. Length doesn't matter, for who’s in a hurry for any good thing to end?

The half-dozen Hawks made from Rio Bravo to a finish of Rio Lobo were admittedly set to neutral, which makes them ideal for comfort watching. To note also is easy listening Hawks applied to all six: Tiomkin at much reduced bombast for Rio Bravo, Mancini for Hatari! and Man’s Favorite Sport, Nelson Riddle making music fun with Redline 7000 and El Dorado, and finally by Jerry Goldsmith and Rio Lobo. These films didn’t need dynamism in scoring --- in fact, that might have deterred joy in watching. Film history records that Hawks was “discovered” in the early 60’s by an emerging auteurist establishment. They must not have had awareness of films sold on his name since at least the early 40’s, when Howard Hawks was shorthand for crowd-pleasing entertainment. Trailers for virtually anything by Hawks would emphasize his past achievements, as he was a major merchandising element for output at least from Sergeant York onward.

Director-Producer Howard Hawks with John Wayne

Hawks also had a possessive credit above titles on posters for virtually all output long before most noticed such things. This was less to honor him than to assure customers there was an outstanding show inside. The MOMA series for Hawks in May 1962, a first in the US, was recognition by elite latecomers who discovered HH long after mainstream viewers knew him as guarantor of good times. This director had no need of validation from a critical establishment. He had got that from a mass public that expressed their approval with admissions bought. Afterlife beyond initial disappointment for Hatari! came with reissues through the 60’s, a first with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, then an encore with Hud. ABC got Hatari! for primetime broadcast on Sunday, 1-14-68. Hawks’ estate presumably still gets revenue from Hatari!, as he owned half the negative. Old films used to gather coin by being somewhere on television most of the time --- now they stream anywhere, any hour day or night, each time a ticket punched. Wish I could peek in Paramount ledgers to see what Hatari! generates in daily, or hourly, hits. From pay-per-view acorns must mighty oaks grow. I bet we’d be amazed at what Hatari! and others like it have accumulated as of digital-driven 2018.