Hardy Kruger wears an Omega Speedmaster

Hatari means danger in Swahili, and Howard Hawks earned the title honestly: every animal capture in the film was performed by the actors themselves, no stuntmen, no handlers swapped in, and when a rhino actually escaped, the cast actually recaptured it and Hawks kept the footage. The film (1962) follows a crew of professional game catchers in Tanganyika, John Wayne in charge, Hardy Kruger as Kurt Muller, the German driver in the catching truck. Much of Leigh Brackett's script was written after the unit came home from Africa, shaped around the capture footage they had. Henry Mancini wrote Baby Elephant Walk for it. Kruger liked the country enough that he bought the farm that had served as the film's setting.

On Muller's wrist the French spotting press identified an Omega Speedmaster, worn on a black alligator strap. The frame that backs the identification shows a steel watch with a dark dial under a dark bezel, the Speedmaster look, though not sharply enough to read a name or count the registers, and no one has published a reference; by the calendar it would be one of the earliest. Omega had launched the model in 1957 as a racing chronograph. NASA would not qualify it for spaceflight until 1965, and the moon was seven years away from Kurt Muller's catching truck.