Livestock in Trade

Africa--Texas Style! A herd of elephants pads its way up the green hills of Africa. A horde of eland tries to out run the pursuing cowboy. Cowboy?

Producer-Director Ivan Tors, who with such TV series as Flipper and Daktari has made animals his livestock in trade (TIME, June 16), combines two supposedly potent ingredients into one wide-screen epic: The Dark Continent and the Wild West. In Africa, the world's champeen rodeo rider (Hugh O'Brian) and his Navaho sidekick come to Kenya to round up a bunch of wild beasts for an altruistic rancher (John Mills). Object: to create a meat source for the protein-poor Masai.

No sooner have the lone stranger and his faithful Indian companion settled in than the villain appears. He is a pop-eyed homesteader (Nigel Green) who fears that the wild herd will spread disease among his prize cows. Accordingly, he releases Mills's new-found herds from their corrals. O'Brian fights back, and gets moral support from Adrienne Corri, a willowy nurse devoted, as all nurses in this kind of film, to everything cute and cuddly--baby animals, native children and the hero.

Buried somewhere in Africa is a valid idea. Far-sighted ranchers are indeed beginning to breed wildlife as a partial answer to the world's dwindling food supply. Tors, a director of the World Wildlife Fund, obviously hoped to make a film that would entertain as well as in struct. This one does neither. Africa--Texas Style! has not enough of the real Africa, less of Texas, and no style at all. It patronizes the natives, shows the beasts in badly edited shots that unconvincingly mix footage of wild lions and tame humans. Tors has even included the ancient anthropomorphism of a pet monkey guzzling beer--which only goes to prove that successful films with monkeys in them can still be counted on the fingers of one foot.

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