Cinema: Hunting with a Hypodermic

Rhino! is a brilliantly scenic, instructive, timely and entertaining tale of African adventure. The hero (Robert Gulp) is a zoologist who dedicates his skills to the preservation of African wildlife; the villain (Harry Guardino) is a poacher who devotes his energies to their annihilation. Told that the villain is an excellent guide, the hero in all innocence hires him to hunt down a pair of rare white rhinos and transport them to a game preserve, where they may safely multiply. The villain, of course, secretly intends to make off with the hero’s pharmic rifle, a device that fires hypodermic darts, and bag the rhinos for a fence who has promised him $20,000 for the pair.

This standard situation gets anything but standard treatment from Director Ivan Tors and his two scriptwriters (Art Arthur and Arthur Weiss). They have moderated melodrama to the requirements of realism, and they have punctuated their safari with some glorious fun. The episode in which the friendly enemies get looped on native liquor and then go bungling through the boondocks in search of a lone leopard (“You take uh one on uh lef, pal, an’ I’ll take uh one on uh right”) is one of the sappiest hunting scenes ever written. Thanks mostly to the vivid work of the principal players, the central characters come off as wonderfully real and specific people, so much themselves that they couldn’t possibly be anybody else.

Rhino!, however, is not fundamentally a picture about people. It is a picture about animals and the latest techniques of stalking and taking them. The processes and instruments—dart guns, synthesized animal odors, tiny transmitters attached to the quarry’s body—are studied in detail. And the animals themselves are examined almost incessantly with wonder and with love. They are all there—hippos that seem to hang by their eyes from the water’s surface, gazelles that dart above the grasslands like big, golden bees, leopards that grow on trees like spotted, alarming fruit—and they are there in hundreds. But perhaps the most remarkable animal of all is an old male lion who, after a visit from the zoologist, rises with indomitable dignity and turns his back to the curious camera. Startling indeed to see the King of Beasts with a neat little Band-Aid on his backside.