7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 3.5 | |
Reviewer | 2.0 | |
Overall | 2.8 |
A group of professionals with a common goal--in this case, animal trapping in Africa.
Starring: John Wayne, Hardy Krüger, Elsa Martinelli, Red Buttons, Gérard BlainAdventure | Insignificant |
Family | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: Dolby TrueHD 2.0 Mono
French: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono (224 kbps)
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 1.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 2.0 |
Legendary director Howard Hawks has been accused of making his 1962 hit Hatari! primarily because he wanted to take a studio-paid vacation chasing big game in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), Africa. Maybe so, but Hawks's idea of a vacation was to shoot a movie, even if all he had was a story idea, an incomplete script and only one star, John Wayne, instead of the two he'd originally envisioned (Wayne plus Clark Gable). Ever the iconoclast, Hawks was the exception who proved the rule that a good film requires a solid script. He'd already proved his ability to make a classic murder mystery, The Big Sleep (1946), from a script in which, to this day, no one, including Hawks and the screenwriters, has been able to figure out who killed whom. One of that film's screenwriters, Leigh Brackett, wrote and rewrote pages from a story outline by Harry Kunitz (Wait Until Dark) that attempted to give Hawks what he wanted: scenes of hunters chasing big game in Africa, connected by some sort of narrative. Not just ordinary hunters, though. Hatari! (the word means "danger" in Swahili) chronicles the exploits of professionals who capture live animals for zoos and circuses. Hawks hired a government-licensed animal catcher as a technical adviser, but he insisted that all the actors (at least the men) do their own stunts, capturing zebras, monkeys, water buffalo and a rhinoceros for real. Aside from the obvious rear-projection shots in vehicles (necessary in the days before gyro mounts and Steadicams made it possible to capture viewable shots in moving vehicles), much of the footage in Hatari! is remarkable for its realism. But Hawks knew better than to make a documentary. The man who did so much to define the screwball comedy with Bringing Up Baby (1938) and His Girl Friday (1940) understood that the best way to engage an audience between the animal adventures was to keep 'em laughing. When my brother and I saw Hatari! in the theater as kids, it was like a trip to the zoo with some adults acting silly in between. From a much older perspective, I realized that Hawks and Brackett shoehorned a classic romantic comedy around the exploits of Wayne and his colleagues capturing wild animals on the African plains. As Paramount's trailer for Hatari! faithfully promised, the film really did have something for everyone in the family, which no doubt helped it become the eighth highest grossing film of 1962.
Russell Harlan's (To Kill a Mockingbird) color cinematography for Hatari! was nominated for an Oscar. So it pains me to report that this 1080p, AVC-encoded Warner Blu-ray of a Paramount catalog title does indeed appear to be the same poor release that is already circulating in Europe and has been anticipated with dread ever since the title was announced in North America. I was prepared for disappointment when I spun up the disc, and even then I could not believe what I was seeing. Eight years into the Blu-ray format, transfers of such poor quality should be a thing of the past. As I have said previously, one can only guess at the age of a transfer, but one can certainly identify the aesthetic principles that guided the colorist(s) who worked on it. Hatari! looks like something made for an age of NTSC resolution and small screens. The colors are weak and undersaturated, as if the transfer were intended for media with limited color space and a danger of color noise or bleeding. Detail is weak and inconsistent. Worst of all, sharpening has been applied throughout the image so that the entire frame suffers from digital harshness, with film grain converted into digital noise and figures unnaturally "popped out" of the frame by their enhanced edges. The electronic sharpening isn't so bad as to create significant ghosting, but it destroys any semblance of a film-like image. In short, this looks like an image created for DVD. It is not an upconversion (though some will no doubt claim otherwise), but the colorist who did the transfer appears to have had an eventual DVD image in mind. This entire transfer should be junked and a new one made from scratch. Discussion of compression and bitrates is irrelevant. Even uncompressed, this transfer would still look bad. If I didn't have this review to write, I'm not sure I would have finished the film.
On the audio front, the news is somewhat better. Hatari!'s original mono track has been presented as lossless Dolby TrueHD 2.0, with identical front and left right channels, and it's an effective track with good dynamic range and surprisingly powerful impact, especially during the dramatic chase sequences. When fierce animals like the rhino crash into the moving vehicles, the sound may not spread throughout the room, but it's enough to convey the danger. Many of the animal cries had to be imitated and dubbed by game experts and zoo collectors, because wild creatures don't emote on cue, but the various cries, growls and bellows sound convincing, and the human dialogue is clear. Henry Mancini's score would no doubt sound better in stereo, but it sounds pretty good in lossless mono.
Other than the film's trailer (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 3:00), the disc contains no extras. Paramount's 2001 DVD was similarly bare bones.
Despite its often clunky plotting, Hatari! is a grand entertainment with spectacular scenery and uniquely realistic action. Unfortunately, watching it on this Blu-ray is not an enjoyable experience, and certainly not one I can recommend, except perhaps on a tiny screen or on your computer desktop—and Blu-ray buyers deserve better. So does Hatari!
1965
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1963
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