White Hunter Black Heart


1h 54m 1990
White Hunter Black Heart

Brief Synopsis

A filmmaker travels to Africa to shoot a movie but becomes obsessed with hunting elephants.

Film Details

Also Known As
Chausseur blanc, coeur noir, White Hunter, Black Heart
MPAA Rating
Genre
Adventure
Action
Drama
Release Date
1990
Distribution Company
Warner Bros. Pictures International (WBI)
Location
Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom; London, England, United Kingdom; Harare, Zimbabwe

Technical Specs

Duration
1h 54m

Synopsis

A filmmaker travels to Africa to shoot a movie but becomes obsessed with hunting elephants.

Crew

Matthew Allwork

Other

Peter Allwork

Camera Operator

Linda Armstrong

Makeup

Bub Asman

Sound Editor

Donah Bassett

Negative Cutting

Ron Beck

Wardrobe Supervisor

Richard Bell

Production Consultant

Robert Betts

Other

Fiona Birrell

Other

James Bridges

Screenplay

Chris Brock

Assistant Director

Donald D Brown

Sound

Roy Button

Production Manager

Steady Chidyausiku

Props

David Chiganze

Grip

Tituss Chitokoda

Location Manager

Michael Cipriano

Assistant Editor

Nikki Clapp

Script Supervisor

Vincent Clarke

Electrician

Patrick Clayton

Assistant Director

Murray Close

Photography

Ian Cochrane

Pilot

Ian Cochrane

Helicopter Pilot

David Coldham

Other

Virginia Cook-mcgowan

Sound Editor

Joel Cox

Editor

Tom Danaher

Pilot

Nick Daubeny

Location Manager

Robin Demetriou

Caterer

Kevin Draycott

Special Effects

Arthur Dunne

Transportation Manager

Clint Eastwood

Producer

Duke Ellington

Song

Paul Engelen

Makeup Supervisor

Brian Estabrook

Driver

John Evans

Special Effects Supervisor

Judy Farr

Production

Peter Field

Effects Assistant

Roy Field

Visual Effects Supervisor

John Fletcher

Other

Kevin Fraser

Grip

Les Fresholtz

Sound

Mark Fruin

Props

Elector Garaba

Wardrobe Assistant

Mark Gill

Assistant Editor

Julie Glanfield

Other

Nobby Godden

Camera

John Graysmark

Production Designer

Tony Graysmark

Construction Manager

Jack N Green

Camera Operator

Jack N Green

Director Of Photography

Beaulah Guuraza

Wardrobe Assistant

Nigh Haddon

Other

Graham Hall

Other

Peter Handford

Sound Mixer

Jamie Harcourt

Camera Operator

Donald Harris

Music Editor

Pat Harrison

Location Manager

Robert Henderson

Sound Editor

Martin Hitchcock

Assistant Art Director

David M Horton

Sound Editor

Peter Howitt

Set Decorator

Phyllis Huffman

Casting

Joseph A Ippolito

Sound Editor

Derek Ixer

Propman

Marianne Jacobs

Location Coordinator

Colin Jamison

Hair

Janet Jamison

Hair

Ben Jenkins

Office Runner

Michael Jiron

Sound

Patricia Johnson

Assistant Art Director

Peter Jones

Other

Burt Kennedy

Screenplay

Martin Kenzie

Other

Richard Law

Production

Chris Lemmer

Other

Ron Lenoir

Other

Tim Lewis

Assistant Director

Isaac Mabhikwa

Assistant Director

David Mabukane

Stunt Man

Clive Mackey

Other

Colin Manning

Key Grip

Rob Martens

Animal Wrangler

Alan Martin

Gaffer

Michael Maurer

Production Accountant

Johnny Mercer

Song

Karen Minahan

Sound Editor

John Mollo

Costume Designer

Randall Jay Moore

Animal Trainer

Alan Robert Murray

Sound Editor

Lennie Niehaus

Music

Gift Nyamandi

Special Effects

Peter Nyarambi

Props

Coaster Nziramassanga

Transportation

George Orrison

Stunts

John Palmer

Props

Jayme S Parker

Sound Editor

Michael Pelly

Other

Arlene Phillips

Choreographer

Keith Pitt

Props

Michelle Pleis

Sound Editor

Vern Poore

Sound

Tony Reading

Art Director

Carol Regan

Production Coordinator

Caitlin Rhodes

Casting Associate

Tony Rivetti

Other

Peter Robinson

Camera Operator

Tom Rooker

Assistant

Stanley Rubin

Coproducer

Murray Russell

Location Manager

Hank Salerno

Adr Editor

Steve Sango

Special Effects

Mary Selway

Casting

Tom Shaffer

Color Timer

James Simcik

Adr Editor

Barbara Spiller

Production

Billy Strayhorn

Song

Roy Street

Other

Arthur Tarry

Production Accountant

Janet Tebrooke

Wardrobe

Tony Teiger

Property Master

Ty Teiger

Props

Martin Trevis

Boom Operator

Simon Trevor

Camera Operator

David Valdes

Executive Producer

Annie Van Wyk

Other

Peter Viertel

Source Material (From Novel)

Peter Viertel

Screenplay

Keith Vowles

Props

Brooke Henderson Ward

Sound Editor

Bill Weston

Stunt Man

Andrew Whalley

Casting

Barry Whitrod

Special Effects

Peter Williams

Carpenter

John Wilson

Other

Marshall Winn

Sound Editor

Russell Woolnough

Assistant Editor

Film Details

Also Known As
Chausseur blanc, coeur noir, White Hunter, Black Heart
MPAA Rating
Genre
Adventure
Action
Drama
Release Date
1990
Distribution Company
Warner Bros. Pictures International (WBI)
Location
Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom; London, England, United Kingdom; Harare, Zimbabwe

Technical Specs

Duration
1h 54m

Articles

White Hunter Black Heart - White Hunter, Black Heart


The Clint Eastwood of 1990's White Hunter Black Heart was not quite the same Clint we had all loved as a box office institution since the spaghetti westerns of the late '60s. Rather, this Clint was a newly anointed auteur. It was the uncompromising, intensely stylish Bird in 1988 that turned his profile around; before that, he'd directed a dozen films, ranging from provocative pulp (Play Misty for Me [1971], High Plains Drifter [1973]) to, more prevalently, action trash (Firefox [1982], Sudden Impact [1983], Heartbreak Ridge [1986]). But in contrast to the other movie stars-turned-auteurs of his generation (Beatty, Redford, Newman), Eastwood seemed, by the late '80s behind the camera, not subtle nor ambitious nor Oscar®-bound. Perhaps only a bit more than a Charles Bronson who could read scripts and knew where to put a camera, Eastwood for a while seemed as if he might've been content rapping out Dirty Harry sequels forever, and never try for more.

A doomy jazz biopic to end all jazz biopics, Bird was a radical change in venue, as was White Hunter, the film that followed, a fictionalized Hollywood saga that takes a steady bead on American imperialist chutzpah and pumps one bullet after another into the blubber. Peter Viertel, screenwriter on The African Queen (1951), wrote the source novel immediately after returning from the Queen shoot in Africa, centering his tale on director John Huston (here, "John Wilson"), as the notorious iconoclast rebelled against the moneymen, sought out heedless adventure, and stubbornly exploited the troubled on-location production in order to indulge his dream of shooting an elephant, with tragic results. The book's nature as a roman a clef was plain to the eye, and it remains unknown how it might've soured Viertel's bond with Huston. (They worked on Beat the Devil in 1953, the same year the novel was published, and never worked together again.)

Not that Huston was the type of hard-living, muy-macho dude that couldn't take a blitzkrieg of insults and get up smiling - particularly if the opprobrium is targeted at the devil-may-care behavior of which he's most proud. Eastwood's movie doesn't pull any punches, either; though there are simulacra of Humphrey Bogart (Richard Vanstone), Katharine Hepburn (Marisa Berenson), producer Sam Spiegel (George Dzundza), et al., wandering through, the film hones in on Eastwood's Wilson, and paints him clearly as an inscrutable ass, a selfish, creepy, grandstanding maniac who thinks he's larger than life but is really merely foolhardy and narcissistic. It's as potent a dressing down of the man's-man Hemingway paradigm as American movies have ever offered. Eastwood's performance is instrumental in this effect: He nails Huston's long-voweled drawl but his voice has none of the real man's booming depth. Neither is Eastwood half the vivacious personality that Huston seemed to have been, and so the effect - which may well have actually been very close to others' experience of Huston on the ground - is of a brat of a man calcified into meaningless anti-authoritarian posturing, and quite possibly lost in a movie in his own head.

This is deliberate, and the key to the movie's thrust - the idea Wilson has of himself as the great "white hunter" is a destructive fantasy, just as most Western ideas about the Third World are and have been. (An early nightclub scene, in which a stripper is chased around the tables by a man in a gorilla suit, nicely encapsulates the absurdity of Wilson's desires.) Eastwood's film is a classic post-colonialist story, indicting the imperialists responsible for so much havoc and social ruin in Africa. On-location Hollywood film shoots are merely a miniature form of this dynamic, and one completely contingent on fantasy, making for nasty metaphoric torque. But here the mayhem is blood on the director's hands, not the result of the shoot itself, as Wilson postpones and ignores everything once production is supposed to begin, in order to grab his opportunity to perform the monstrous "sin" of killing Earth's largest land animal with a single thunderous shot in the head.

Which he never quite ends up doing - without giving too much away, Wilson gets what he wants and then doesn't and then gets far too much. As Viertel, Jeff Fahey gets the thankless role of being the voice of reason disregarded by Wilson's bloodlust and exotic intoxication, but even so, the whole film is strangely uninflected by drama - it doesn't build so much as march toward its dire climax, with scene after scene of Wilson demonstrating his abusive personality on everyone around him. (The sexist and racist language is not something you hear too much anymore, even in period films about old-school jerks.) It's a strange experience, partly because the film is very self-reflexive and competes at every turn with our own memories of The African Queen, Huston, Bogart, etc., and ends up feeling like a pale imitation. Which seems deliberate, too. Not quite a character study - we never get close to being "inside" the man - White Hunter is more like an essay on oppressive culture clash, some of it conscientiously irritating, just like its antihero, and all of it leading up to the final moments, and a single final shot and a single final bit of dialogue - "Action" - that might be the best and most mysterious piece of acting Eastwood has ever done. If you're perhaps wondering what the point of all this is, you find out here, with a punch to the gut.

By Michael Atkinson
White Hunter Black Heart - White Hunter, Black Heart

White Hunter Black Heart - White Hunter, Black Heart

The Clint Eastwood of 1990's White Hunter Black Heart was not quite the same Clint we had all loved as a box office institution since the spaghetti westerns of the late '60s. Rather, this Clint was a newly anointed auteur. It was the uncompromising, intensely stylish Bird in 1988 that turned his profile around; before that, he'd directed a dozen films, ranging from provocative pulp (Play Misty for Me [1971], High Plains Drifter [1973]) to, more prevalently, action trash (Firefox [1982], Sudden Impact [1983], Heartbreak Ridge [1986]). But in contrast to the other movie stars-turned-auteurs of his generation (Beatty, Redford, Newman), Eastwood seemed, by the late '80s behind the camera, not subtle nor ambitious nor Oscar®-bound. Perhaps only a bit more than a Charles Bronson who could read scripts and knew where to put a camera, Eastwood for a while seemed as if he might've been content rapping out Dirty Harry sequels forever, and never try for more. A doomy jazz biopic to end all jazz biopics, Bird was a radical change in venue, as was White Hunter, the film that followed, a fictionalized Hollywood saga that takes a steady bead on American imperialist chutzpah and pumps one bullet after another into the blubber. Peter Viertel, screenwriter on The African Queen (1951), wrote the source novel immediately after returning from the Queen shoot in Africa, centering his tale on director John Huston (here, "John Wilson"), as the notorious iconoclast rebelled against the moneymen, sought out heedless adventure, and stubbornly exploited the troubled on-location production in order to indulge his dream of shooting an elephant, with tragic results. The book's nature as a roman a clef was plain to the eye, and it remains unknown how it might've soured Viertel's bond with Huston. (They worked on Beat the Devil in 1953, the same year the novel was published, and never worked together again.) Not that Huston was the type of hard-living, muy-macho dude that couldn't take a blitzkrieg of insults and get up smiling - particularly if the opprobrium is targeted at the devil-may-care behavior of which he's most proud. Eastwood's movie doesn't pull any punches, either; though there are simulacra of Humphrey Bogart (Richard Vanstone), Katharine Hepburn (Marisa Berenson), producer Sam Spiegel (George Dzundza), et al., wandering through, the film hones in on Eastwood's Wilson, and paints him clearly as an inscrutable ass, a selfish, creepy, grandstanding maniac who thinks he's larger than life but is really merely foolhardy and narcissistic. It's as potent a dressing down of the man's-man Hemingway paradigm as American movies have ever offered. Eastwood's performance is instrumental in this effect: He nails Huston's long-voweled drawl but his voice has none of the real man's booming depth. Neither is Eastwood half the vivacious personality that Huston seemed to have been, and so the effect - which may well have actually been very close to others' experience of Huston on the ground - is of a brat of a man calcified into meaningless anti-authoritarian posturing, and quite possibly lost in a movie in his own head. This is deliberate, and the key to the movie's thrust - the idea Wilson has of himself as the great "white hunter" is a destructive fantasy, just as most Western ideas about the Third World are and have been. (An early nightclub scene, in which a stripper is chased around the tables by a man in a gorilla suit, nicely encapsulates the absurdity of Wilson's desires.) Eastwood's film is a classic post-colonialist story, indicting the imperialists responsible for so much havoc and social ruin in Africa. On-location Hollywood film shoots are merely a miniature form of this dynamic, and one completely contingent on fantasy, making for nasty metaphoric torque. But here the mayhem is blood on the director's hands, not the result of the shoot itself, as Wilson postpones and ignores everything once production is supposed to begin, in order to grab his opportunity to perform the monstrous "sin" of killing Earth's largest land animal with a single thunderous shot in the head. Which he never quite ends up doing - without giving too much away, Wilson gets what he wants and then doesn't and then gets far too much. As Viertel, Jeff Fahey gets the thankless role of being the voice of reason disregarded by Wilson's bloodlust and exotic intoxication, but even so, the whole film is strangely uninflected by drama - it doesn't build so much as march toward its dire climax, with scene after scene of Wilson demonstrating his abusive personality on everyone around him. (The sexist and racist language is not something you hear too much anymore, even in period films about old-school jerks.) It's a strange experience, partly because the film is very self-reflexive and competes at every turn with our own memories of The African Queen, Huston, Bogart, etc., and ends up feeling like a pale imitation. Which seems deliberate, too. Not quite a character study - we never get close to being "inside" the man - White Hunter is more like an essay on oppressive culture clash, some of it conscientiously irritating, just like its antihero, and all of it leading up to the final moments, and a single final shot and a single final bit of dialogue - "Action" - that might be the best and most mysterious piece of acting Eastwood has ever done. If you're perhaps wondering what the point of all this is, you find out here, with a punch to the gut. By Michael Atkinson

Quotes

Trivia

Miscellaneous Notes

Shown at Edinburgh International Film Festival August 11-26, 1990.

Shown at Toronto Festival of Festivals September 6, 1990.

Shown at Sydney Film Festival June 7-21, 1991.

Completed shooting August 1989.

Began shooting June 13, 1989.

This is Clint Eastwood's 20th film for Warner Bros.

Limited Release in United States September 14, 1990

Released in United States Fall September 14, 1990

Wide Release in United States September 21, 1990

Released in United States on Video March 13, 1991

Released in United States 1990 (Shown at Telluride Film Festival August 31-September 3, 1990.)

Released in United States August 1990 (Shown at Edinburgh International Film Festival August 11-26, 1990.)

Released in United States September 6, 1990 (Shown at Toronto Festival of Festivals September 6, 1990.)

Released in United States June 1991 (Shown at Sydney Film Festival June 7-21, 1991.)

Limited Release in United States September 14, 1990

Released in United States Fall September 14, 1990

Wide Release in United States September 21, 1990

Released in United States on Video March 13, 1991

Released in United States 1990

Released in United States August 1990

Released in United States September 6, 1990

Released in United States June 1991