Hawks assembled a cast of international knowns and unknowns, moved the whole production to an African Arcadia, and filmed a story of adventurers who run down wild animals and capture them alive for sale to zoos. They are joined by a stylish photographer, Elsa Martinelli, with whom the leader, Wayne, winds up. Two of the younger members, Kruger and Blain, compete for the affections of Michelle Girardon, the daughter of Wayne's former partner, but she winds up with the unprepossessing Red Buttons.
We get the usual sense of male camaraderie, of professionals whose bonds exclude intruders from the outside. When Martinelli first appears on the scene, the men at first don't want her around, especially the slightly bitter Wayne. When she sits down to play a tune on the piano, Wayne tells her, as Cary Grant told Jean Arthur in "Only Angles Have Wings" some twenty-three years earlier, "You'd better be good." Of course she is.
The comedic misunderstandings are enjoyable, as they generally are in Hawks' movies. The best takes place when the men return from a celebration drunk and find the stranger, Martinelli, in Wayne's bed. Hawks invited the collaboration of his cast and crew in making up funny lines and bits of business, never hesitating later to take credit for all of them.
The scenes involving animals are sometimes thrilling. That climactic chase of the rhino is a tongue biter. Here is this two-ton monstrosity with the head of a dinosaur, entangled in ropes, while men try to coax the maddened beast into a wooden container on the truck -- and Wayne is actually there, counting coups, leaping around and shoving its flanks. Not bad for a man his age (53) with only one lung.
Other animal scenes are more cute than anything else. They mostly revolve around the three baby elephants that the gang adventitiously acquire. The little elephants imprint on Elsa Martinelli and follow her around wherever she goes. The sly tune that accompanies these scenes was written by Henry Mancini, who composed the slightly jazzy, somewhat gentle, and African-tinted score for the movie. If someone alone the lines of, say, Dmitri Tiompkin had done the score, it would have been an entirely different kind of movie, full of fire and bombast. Not a WORSE movie necessarily, just a different one.
I don't know that the performances count for much in a leisurely paced comedy-adventure like this. Wayne and Hawks hadn't worked together that often but they always got along well and it shows. Hardy Kruger plays his role with deliberation as usual, as if he's always thinking two or three moves ahead in a chess game. Red Buttons is likable and there are times when it's possible to believe that he's actually in his role and not just being Red Buttons.
The rest of the cast can't act or, if they can, it's impossible to tell because they're roles are so circumscribed. Gerard Blain was a heart throb in France at the time and it was thought his presence might boost the film's appeal in Europe, but the fact is that he's not given much to say or do, and he's so much shorter than the others that it's noticeable. The writing has its moments when it doesn't fit too. Michelle Girardon is supposed to have just emerged from her adolescent growth spurt and become a young lady, generating the attention of the young men, whereas she actually is pretty, tall, and rather bulky and should have begun attracting attention ten years earlier.
All together, an enjoyable movie. The kids especially should get a kick out of it. As for the adventurous scenes of hunting down those wild animals, half-way through this second viewing, I found myself wondering why the hell they didn't stop tormenting these poor beasts. Don't they have it tough enough? Do they really NEED John Wayne wrestling them to the ground?
We get the usual sense of male camaraderie, of professionals whose bonds exclude intruders from the outside. When Martinelli first appears on the scene, the men at first don't want her around, especially the slightly bitter Wayne. When she sits down to play a tune on the piano, Wayne tells her, as Cary Grant told Jean Arthur in "Only Angles Have Wings" some twenty-three years earlier, "You'd better be good." Of course she is.
The comedic misunderstandings are enjoyable, as they generally are in Hawks' movies. The best takes place when the men return from a celebration drunk and find the stranger, Martinelli, in Wayne's bed. Hawks invited the collaboration of his cast and crew in making up funny lines and bits of business, never hesitating later to take credit for all of them.
The scenes involving animals are sometimes thrilling. That climactic chase of the rhino is a tongue biter. Here is this two-ton monstrosity with the head of a dinosaur, entangled in ropes, while men try to coax the maddened beast into a wooden container on the truck -- and Wayne is actually there, counting coups, leaping around and shoving its flanks. Not bad for a man his age (53) with only one lung.
Other animal scenes are more cute than anything else. They mostly revolve around the three baby elephants that the gang adventitiously acquire. The little elephants imprint on Elsa Martinelli and follow her around wherever she goes. The sly tune that accompanies these scenes was written by Henry Mancini, who composed the slightly jazzy, somewhat gentle, and African-tinted score for the movie. If someone alone the lines of, say, Dmitri Tiompkin had done the score, it would have been an entirely different kind of movie, full of fire and bombast. Not a WORSE movie necessarily, just a different one.
I don't know that the performances count for much in a leisurely paced comedy-adventure like this. Wayne and Hawks hadn't worked together that often but they always got along well and it shows. Hardy Kruger plays his role with deliberation as usual, as if he's always thinking two or three moves ahead in a chess game. Red Buttons is likable and there are times when it's possible to believe that he's actually in his role and not just being Red Buttons.
The rest of the cast can't act or, if they can, it's impossible to tell because they're roles are so circumscribed. Gerard Blain was a heart throb in France at the time and it was thought his presence might boost the film's appeal in Europe, but the fact is that he's not given much to say or do, and he's so much shorter than the others that it's noticeable. The writing has its moments when it doesn't fit too. Michelle Girardon is supposed to have just emerged from her adolescent growth spurt and become a young lady, generating the attention of the young men, whereas she actually is pretty, tall, and rather bulky and should have begun attracting attention ten years earlier.
All together, an enjoyable movie. The kids especially should get a kick out of it. As for the adventurous scenes of hunting down those wild animals, half-way through this second viewing, I found myself wondering why the hell they didn't stop tormenting these poor beasts. Don't they have it tough enough? Do they really NEED John Wayne wrestling them to the ground?