Hatari in Swahili means danger, exposure to liable harm. In Howard Hawks’ romantic comedy, Hatari! is meant as a warning for humans, who in this case are an assortment of characters hired to capture African animals for zoos worldwide. Hatari! is shrieked by a game hunter after a contraption to capture 500 monkeys goes awry. Hunting animals with no stunt-people or animal handlers, the cast—including a fifty-five-year-old John Wayne—is invariably the focus of danger during the eight sublime Technicolor chase sequences spliced throughout the film. But it is the animals who are chased by actors with ropes in jeeps across the vast Tanzanian landscape. Their bodies move with incredible velocity, vehicles struggle to keep up. A noose is flung around a giraffe’s neck restraining her movement not only for that moment, but for the rest of her life. Surely, if the animals could speak Swahili we would hear them shouting Hatari! over Henri Mancini’s famous score. – Jessica Sarah Rinland