The Watchdog Barks INTRADA has fulfilled a long- held dream of mine by issuing the first-ever expanded edition of Henry Mancini’s score for


Howard Hawks’ HATARI! (1962; $19.99, 61m 36s). The official soundtrack album released 50 years ago consisted of only nine tracks, all re-recorded from the cues heard in the actual film and se- quenced to provide a more pleasant all-around listening experience; a collection of Mancini num- bers rather than an overview of Mancini’s scoring for the film.


Because of that original album, HATARI! be- came the first movie in my lifetime to have a tran- scendental, multi-media effect on me. On my sixth birthday, I was taken to a downtown department store by my mother and grandmother and allowed to buy any two records I wanted. I could not con- nect the names of things to music I’d heard on the radio, so I was drawn instead to arresting cover art—and the HATARI! album had that in spades. The cover presented the title (“Danger!” in Swahili) in multiple colors—each letter red, butterscotch, purple, red, green and sky blue in turn, with a lav- ender exclamation mark standing up like a sky- rocket. The strange exclamation hung festively above a lush Frank McCarthy painting of the sa- fari truck, John Wayne strapped to a seat on the hood, with a rhino charging him in defiance of his lasso. The composition screams adventure, and the way McCarthy incorporates so many different textures into the moment—the pebbled fore- ground, the rhino hide, the dull finish on the truck—it communicates a strong sense of hori- zon although both sky and earth are painted the same shade of desert gold. McCarthy also used a low angle perspective, making the image feel big- ger than life, and he slathered the underside of the rhino with the sort of glowing crimson light you could only find in a Mario Bava movie. As you can tell, I spent a fair amount of time absorbed in the album cover art as I listened.


I played that album so incessantly, you would think it was the only one I owned—and, of course, it practically was. I memorized the music thor- oughly before HATARI! actually came to my local theater and, despite my young age, it was the moodier, atmospheric tracks that drew me in rather


than the more popular “Baby Elephant Walk.” This was the dawning of my consciousness as a music lover; the music wasn’t just one kind of music, it was all kinds of music from dramatic to romantic, from humorous to exotic, and the sheer diversity of the cues made me wonder what kind of movie this might be. The baby elephants were easy to envision, but who in the movie, I wondered, would be dancing to “Just For Tonight” (which, I remem- ber, sounded Swiss to me then, though I haven’t any idea where a 6-year-old me would have any consciousness at all of what was or was not Swiss)? And what serious things its characters might be discussing when the music seemed to spread out with a sense of suave adventure? When HATARI! came to my local theater, I pleaded with my grandmother to take me. She did, but, at two and a half hours, it proved too long a film for my attention span. I cried to leave and, the very next day, I cried to go back. It took my grandmother and I three separate attempts (always with much additional pleading on my part) to see the whole thing. I don’t have any fantasies about participating in an actual safari, yet HATARI! is one of the few films I’ve always felt I would gladly inhabit; aside from the fact that Sean Mercer (Wayne) and his crew are capturing these beauti- ful wild animals and shipping them off to zoos (a fact that became more sensitive with me later), I think this film proposes a very sane and sensible way to live—in a scenic place with a core group of friends who know how to work hard and celebrate harder. I’ve seen it countless times, and never be- cause I needed to be told its story again; I just like hanging out with the people in it and, to be plain about it, sometimes I miss them.


Intrada’s single disc 50th anniversary release extends Mancini’s soundtrack by a whopping 23 tracks. Most importantly, it restores the thunder- ous tribal drumming to the main theme, one of Mancini’s most visionary compositions, and some- thing I particularly missed on the original sound- track album. An illustrated 20-page booklet includes informative liner notes by Douglass Fake and a complete list of all the musicians who con- tributed to the sessions. The definitive HATARI! took 50 years to materialize but, by God, some things are worth waiting for.


Tim Lucas


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