Joel McCrea stars as Bob Rainsford, a celebrated big game hunter on a voyage through the south seas who is shipwrecked on an isolated jungle island by the reclusive Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), the very model of the decadent aristocrat turned mad megalomaniac. Living in a castle built in the middle of the wilds (a lovely but clearly painted money-saving matte), he entertains himself by luring passing ships to their doom on the rocky straights and then playing the smirking host to the survivors.
Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong, stars of King Kong (which was being shot concurrently), play Eve and Martin Trowbridge, siblings and fellow "guests" of Zaroff. He is all generosity as he drops hints to their fate and Bob is a little slow on the uptake, what with Zaroff's leading comments about his boredom with hunting mere animals and his quest for a true hunting challenge, and Eve's desperate warnings of "danger." Her instincts are right on. It's not just bloodlust that drives Zaroff; he's saving Eve for the post hunt festivities. "Kill!... Then love," he explains to Bob (letting the imagination of the audience fill in the rest), and then invites him to be his partner in the hunt. Bob's disgust ends the discussion and the American is sent out as his next challenge.
The origins of The Most Dangerous Game are intertwined Kong Kong. Directors/producers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack had built magnificent jungle sets for their film, which lay idle in down time during script rewrites and special effects shooting, so they decided to make another picture with the resources at hand. Not just the sets and props, mind you, but members of the cast and crew, including editor Archie Marshek, optical effects artists Vernon Walker and Linwood Dunn, sound effects man Murray Spivak, and composer Max Steiner. After grabbing up Richard Connell's short story, they cast Joel McCrea (fresh off co-producer David O. Selznick's production of Bird of Paradise) as their strapping, athletic leading man. McCrea is at once a can-do action hero, a boy scout of a handsome leading man, and a red-blooded American with a healthy sex drive but without a hint of the lascivious, sex-hungry dimension of so many other pre-code leading men. Apparently McCrea's timing was off, as the screen sensibility of the time called for street smart urban heroes or high class sophisticates. On the strength of these two films, McCrea could have been the great all-American action hero of the early sound era.
The Most Dangerous Game has moments of stiff, static exposition, notably in the opening scenes of the ship's cabin (which tees up the central conflict with the loaded question "Would you trade places with the tiger?"), but almost immediately upends everything with the spectacle of the shipwreck (clearly a miniature, but an impressively executed one) and the gruesome details of death, including a shark (courtesy of Bird of Paradise) that leaves only a dark stain in the water to mark the passing of its victims. The grotesque and lurid details, even in suggestion, give the film a pre-code perversity beyond the premise, and the ominous atmosphere of the cocktail party in the vast castle drawing room give the film the mood of a gothic horror in a castle prison, where the pose of manners and civilized society masks the savage desires of the host.
There the first half of the film is beholden to gothic horror, second half is survival thriller in the primitive world of the jungle. Bob is no passive victim and despite the promises of being set free if he can elude capture, he fights back, which brings out the hypocrite in Zaroff, a man not used to playing fair. He is a superb villain, justifying his actions by calling out God (for making him a hunter) and playing with his victims like a cat with a mouse, and for all his claims of desiring a challenge, the last thing he wants is a fair fight. Leslie Banks, a stage actor in his film debut, plays the part with aristocratic excess and sadistic megalomania, a man unaware of his contradictions, or at least unwilling to acknowledge them.
The Most Dangerous Game is filled with terrific set pieces and exotic atmosphere, all created on densely detailed and completely artificial sets. Fans of King Kong won't fail to notice the most memorable locations as the hunt takes them through some magnificent locations: cliffs, rivers, a swamp, a waterfall, and winding trails through a jungle so dense it's claustrophobic. Superb lighting and cinematography adds to the oppressive atmosphere, and McCrea's physicality gives the action a dramatic dynamism. Schoedsack and Pichel don't offer the snap that Warner Bros. directors brought to their street smart early sound productions, or the carefully sculpted mood of the best of the Universal horror movies, but they deliver great spectacle and wonderfully lurid flourishes, and once the film moves into the action portion, it doesn't slow down. It's all packed into a tight 63 minutes, making it a B-movie with A production values, the most lavish and best looking B-movie ever made.
Flicker Alley's disc isn't so much a double-feature as a lavishly supplemented Blu-ray debut, and the primary supplement is the early south seas documentary / travelogue / exploitation spectacle Gow The Headhunter (1931), a film released in a number of incarnations. The film's connection to The Most Dangerous Game is more than south seas exoticism; filmmaking partners Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack were cameramen on the two-year expedition mounted by Edward A. Salisbury in 1920, when the original footage was shot.
There's little art or ethnographic value to this feature version, which was initially constructed from a series of short silent presentations in 1928. The version on this disc is the 1956 re-release, with the name Cannibal Island on the credits but essentially the same footage and narration prepared for the 1933 sound version Gow, The Killer. Inserted shots of native nudity and suggestions of cannibalism around the edges are there to draw in audiences, while expedition member William Peck provides almost unbearably chauvinistic and exploitative commentary: the great white hunter passing judgment on the primitive tribes of his travels with paternal arrogance. I can't top the description provided in the accompanying booklet by historian Eric Schaefer: "One can almost picture him [Peck] sitting in front of the screen, fedora tipped back on his head, a bourbon in one hand and a microphone in the other..." Put that image in your head while listening to the narration and it will all come into perspective. Today, it's more of a curiosity than a classic, a pure exploitation version of a dubious documentary record and a poor cousin to Nanook, Moana, Grass, and their less respectable children.
Also features commentary on both films. Historian Dr. Richard Jewell (aka Rick Jewell, USC film professor and author of "RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan in Born") provides detailed historical background to The Most Dangerous Game, following the Rudy Behlmer model of focusing on backstory and historical notes over aesthetic observations and critical reading. He's not an exciting speaker and it comes off less a film talk than a stiffly-narrated essay, but it's packed with information and detail. On the other hand, exploitation film historian Eric Schaefer hasn't much to add to Gow, mostly reiterating and, where appropriate, amending and correcting the 1933 narration.
There's also an audio interview with Merian C. Cooper, conducted by Kevin Brownlow in the early 1970s, set to a slideshow of stills and art, and an accompanying booklet with notes on the two films.
For more information about The Most Dangerous Game/Gow the Headhunter, visit Flicker Alley. To order The Most Dangerous Game/Gow the Headhunter, go to TCM Shopping.
by Sean Axmaker
