Hollywood character actor Harry Guardino and Bond girl Shirley Eaton (who was in only seven minutes of Goldfinger that same year, and had her voice dubbed by another actress) got their first taste of international movie stardom as the leads in this this African adventure, which follows the example of Howard Hawks' Hatari! (1962) to the extreme of cadging the exclamation point. In Ivan Tors' Rhino! (1964), Guardino plays a poacher who signs on to assist veldt veterinarian Robert Culp in the capture - for the sake of propagation - of two endangered white rhinos. Though Guardino's hunter-for-hire has ulterior motives, fate lends a hand to set him straight, a mission abetted by his district nurse girlfriend Eaton. However derivative of the Hawks film, Rhino! was no mere exploitation picture. A former MGM screenwriter (In the Good Old Summertime, That Forsyte Woman) and science fiction specialist (The Magnetic Monster, Gog), Tors was also an avowed animal rights activist whose love of the outdoors and wildlife informed his later work on such television series as Sea Hunt (1958-1961), Flipper (1964-1967), Daktari (1966-1968), Gentle Ben (1967-1969), and Cowboy in Africa (1967-1968), a spinoff of his 1967 feature Africa: Texas Style. In 1964, Tors established his own Miami film studio, which would remain his base of operations until his death in 1983. Equally at home under water as on terra firma, the Hungarian expatriate was hired by Eon Productions to direct the underwater scenes for the 1965 James Bond outing Thunderball.

By Richard Harland Smith