The Last Safari (1967) ***

Producer Hal Wallis was known as a star maker. He had launched the careers of Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, Lizabeth Scott, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis and Shirley MacLaine and was instrumental in shaping Elvis Presley’s screen persona. Continually on the lookout for new talent and with a roster of pictures to cast, he had swooped in the mid-60s on Suzanna Leigh (Boeing Boeing, 1965), Broadway rising star Tanya Everett and on the basis of a television pilot Lithuanian-born Kaz Garas.

So if The Last Safari appears both overcooked and undercooked, put that down to Wallis saddling director Henry Hathaway with the untried Garas as his star, billed ahead, much to his fury, of veteran Stewart Granger (The Secret Invasion, 1964). The film’s way too long as the producer keeps finding ways to insert the youngster into the older man’s tale of hunting an elephant that killed his buddy. In fact, it’s another youngster, Gabriella Licudi (The Unearthly Stranger, 1965) who, with a fraction of Garas’s dialog, steals the show.

The safari picture was by now fast out of fashion, the days of glorifying hunting, even just to supply zoos as in Hatari! (1962), losing its appeal especially with the softer conservationist approach of Born Free (1966) and Africa, Texas Style (1967). So while issues regarding poaching, native self-determination, tribal tradition and colonial interference are given more coverage than you might expect, it still boils down to great white hunter Gilchrist (Stewart Granger) setting out to kill an elephant. That millionaire playboy Casey (Kaz Garas) keeps getting in his way is down to an odd screenplay and the top-billing error that seems determined to find more space for the younger irritant than for the older guy coming to terms with himself.

By the time Casey lands in Kenya in a zebra-striped private plane with native guide Grant (Gabriella Licudi), Granger has already torn up his hunter’s license. Much of the initial narrative is simply Casey pursuing him and being turned down, until the American simply decides to tag along, despite inexperience of the bush.

It’s unclear whether Grant is a guide-with-benefits but she milks him at every turn and filches anything she can, including a lucky charm belonging to Gilchrist. But where Casey drones on, the camera is kind to her, showing her character in tiny snippets, concealing the lucky charm at Gilchrist’s approach, for example, or not being at all perturbed at being excluded from dinner on the grounds that’s she’s a servant and astonished that Casey gets himself so wound up at what he sees as an injustice. She’s perfectly happy dancing the Watusi on her own away from the boring grown-ups. And she puts him in his place, “You want a trophy…I’m not for sale.”

Quite why Gilchrist is obsessed with this particular elephant is never satisfactorily explained. There’s guilt of course since he was the protector but any observer would see that the buddy had stupidly put himself in harm’s way for the sake of getting a better photo of a charging elephant. You get the impression that Gilchrist is just finding a long slow way to die, now he has little else to live for, and his profession is being swamped by idiots, and the work involves dealing with entitled nincompoops like Casey.

Every now and then the movie takes a different, occasionally cute, turn, like watching the baby hippos clamber all over their parents in the water, repetition of this item explained by Gilchrist’s preference for that animal rather than that someone dug up some interesting library shots. But, more likely, it’s dangerous intrusion on tradition. Both Grant and Casey take it upon themselves to participate in a tribal dance, which leads to fisticuffs after a native, following her response to his moves, takes a fancy to the woman. Another time Gilchrist has to rescue some white people trapped in a village because they had violated tradition or were upholding tradition (the reason was unclear). Another chap is trampled to death because his watch alarm went off at the wrong time.

Once the movie settles down to what Hathaway is expert at, old men heading off on quests, long vistas, unwanted traveling companion, it picks up though audiences were probably let down by the ending, not the expected savage slaughter. By the time Casey admits he has learned humility you’ve long lost interest in him.

Howard Hawks would have swung in with a gender switch to make this work, turning Grant into an annoying female, introducing a romantic tussle, hoping the age gap wouldn’t act as too much of a deterrent. Frustratingly, this is excellent in patches, primarily when Gilchrist gets to demonstrate tradecraft and understanding of tribal tradition.

Stewart Granger, in festering in his guilt far removed from the traditional hero, is surprisingly good. Kaz Garas’s career told its own story, this being his only top-billed movie. He’s been thrown in at the deep end and sunk not swam. I was surprised to see Gabriella Licudi not popping up elsewhere because she makes a good stab at the self-sufficient sassy heroine. Hathaway looks overburdened with Wallis’s star-making. John Gay (Soldier Blue, 1970) adapted the Gerald Hanley novel.

Despite the flaws, still interesting.