THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME OF THEM ALL

Webster's defines HORROR as: ( n. ) 1. the strong feeling caused by something frightful or shocking; terror and repugnance.  2. strong dislike or aversion.  3. the quality of causing horror.  4. something that causes horror.

Webster's defines ADVENTURE as: ( n. ) 1. the encountering of danger.  2. a daring, hazardous undertaking.  3. an unusual, stirring experience, often of a romantic nature.  4. a liking for danger, excitement, etc.

 

MY INTEREST in horror films has always had less to do with their actual elements of terror and fear and more to do with their innate ability to create adventurous environments around those intrinsic elements.  It's that requisite search for horror-adventure that has pushed me to watch, or sample in most cases, hundreds of horror films throughout my lifetime. 
 

The movie that spawned this particular interest for me was The Most Dangerous Game.

The Most Dangerous Game was released in theaters in the year 1932.  It's a pre-Code, RKO Radio Picture production that is 62 minutes long and was shot in black & white by cinematographer Henry W. Gerrard.   

Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel, of King Kong fame, were the film's co-directors.  The producer was Merian C. Cooper.  The film was edited by Archie Marshek and the screenplay was written by James Ashmore Creelman.  The score was produced by Max Steiner.

 

Fay Wray and Joel McCrea were cast as leads in The Most Dangerous Game, which also starred Leslie Banks and Robert Armstrong.  Wray of course would be destined for ultimate remembrance one year later for her iconic role as Ann Darrow in King Kong, while McCrea would become, after effectively starring in such classic films as Foreign Correspondent and Union Pacific, one of Hollywood's most forthright, leading men, especially in Westerns.

Their characters Eve Trowbridge and Sanger "Bob" Rainsford are shipwrecked on a remote island, inhabited by the fiendish megalomaniac Count Zaroff (played melodramatically but effectively by the great English stage actor Leslie Banks), who forces them to engage in a sadistic hunt with the two of them as his human prey.  The hunt, aided by Zaroff's loyal henchmen, becomes a testosterone fueled duel in which the world class hunter Rainsford's honor-bound rules are challenged in the most extreme way.  Eve, although unaware of it during the ordeal, is slated to be the compulsory prize to the successor.

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It's been stated that The Most Dangerous Game represents American isolationist fears during the Great Depression, with Zaroff's führer-like figure symbolizing decadent Europe. That expositor does feel accurate, at least to some degree (Banks would have made an incredible on-screen Hitler), but even with that political conflagration in place I see this movie only as a suspenseful adventure story, yet one tinged with dark, underlying Sadeian horror.

The Most Dangerous Game is based on a short story of the same name by Richard Connell (1893-1949). It was originally published in Colliers magazine on January 19, 1924, with illustrations by the American born artist Wilmot Emerton Heitland (1893-1969).   Connell's yarn won the O'Henry Memorial Award for short fiction the year it was published.  Connell himself was a prolific short story writer, credited with over 300 stories, many of them published in either Collier's or The Saturday Evening Post.  He also wrote more than a dozen screenplays and was a contributing screenwriter on The Most Dangerous Game.  In 1942 he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Story for the movie Meet John Doe (1941), based on his 1922 story "A Reputation."

Connell's short story is now considered a classic. It has been reprinted at least sixteen times in various English language anthologies, but illustrated only twice on an actual book cover.  The first was on Berkley's 1957 paperback anthology, The Most Dangerous Game and Other Stories of Adventure, with cover art by Mel Crair, and the second on Random House's 1967 hardcover anthology Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbinders in Suspense, with cover art and interior illustrations by Harold Isen.
 

BELOW are the cover liners of all three video releases so far of the film that are on DVD and Blu-ray.  The picture quality is relatively good on all three releases, or about as good as can be expected in these formats with such an old movie.  The Criterion is the probably the definitive one to own, if nothing else because of their extra features.  

 

1999 CRITERION COLLECTION DVD LINER ART (Designer(s) unknown)

2007 LEGEND FILMS DVD LINER ART (Designer(s) unknown)

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2012 FLICKER ALLEY BLU-RAY LINER ART (Designer(s) unknown)

 

I WAS seven or eight years old when I first saw The Most Dangerous Game film broadcast on television, and I absolutely loved it.  Even now, a half century later, its legacy of adventure, horror, suspense and romance hasn't diminished at all with me-- it's actually increased.  

As I alluded to at the beginning of the article, The Most Dangerous Game is the one film besides King Kong that more than any other helped set the tone for what I have liked in cinematic entertainment ever since. 

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[Originally posted in 2008. © September, 2019, Jeffersen]