THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME
by Kevin Koehler
Previously considered a dress rehearsal for Cooper and Schoedsack's
history-making King Kong (released the following year) or,
truth be told, not at all (it was a lost film until prints were discovered
in the 1970s), The Most Dangerous Game has undergone a critical
makeover of sorts in recent years. It's not hard to see why. Adapted
from Richard Connell's acclaimed short story of the same name, Game is
deeply a product of an era echoed by our own - a people still coming
to grips with the assembly-line slaughter of the first world war
while standing on the precipice of a second.
Celebrity big game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) is on his
way to yet another safari - we meet him on the deck of a yacht,
regaling those around him with his intrinsically Darwinian philosophy
of life: "The world is divided into two kinds of people in life,
the hunter and the hunted." Ah, but how easily one becomes the
other when the yacht is shipwrecked off the shore of a nearby island
and the passengers are eaten by sharks. Rainsford luckily is able
to swim to shore, but it is here where the story really begins as
he becomes the target of a maniacal "Cossack" Count Zaroff
(Leslie Banks, his own face scarred by war, here exaggerated with
makeup), bored with traditional hunting but consumed by a different
kind of "game."
The double meaning of the title (Game refers both to the
pastime and the prey, this being man) becomes quite clear in the
film's artfully directed climactic chase sequence when tables are
turned once more. The villain Zaroff is an artifact of an older,
dying world of brick castles, dungeons, and crossbows. Gentlemen
hunt each other (read: war) out of boredom and call it sport, initiated
after brandy and cigars in the study.
Alas, even for an aristocrat like Zaroff, there's no chivalry to
be had in death - it is no accident that the Cossack, with his affinity
for rustic weaponry, ultimately sees his henchman done in with a
pistol. As he himself lay dying, Zaroff can only watch helplessly
from his little island as Rainsford and love interest (Fay Wray)
jet off in a gas-powered motorboat. It's a direct affront to the
villain's spoken axiom that lust for flesh is best fulfilled after
lust for blood, and indeed, one of the earliest cinematic expressions
of "Make Love, Not War." While only preceding King
Kong (and its overt anti-hunting themes) by a few months, it
predates (in its own charmingly unsuspecting way) the 1960s hippie
movement by a good thirty years.
Interesting footnote: If you think Zaroff's isolated stretch of
land looks awfully like Skull Island, you wouldn't be wrong. Both
Game and Cooper/Schoedsack follow-up King Kong
were shot using the same sets at the very same time - Game was
photographed at night while Kong was filmed during the day. The
Most Dangerous Game was later remade by Robert Wise as 1945's A
Game of Death. Emphasizing the war parallels, "Count Zaroff" the
Cossack was converted into "Erich Kreiger" the Nazi.
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