The Most Dangerous Game - Criterion Collection

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The Most Dangerous Game is a classic, one of the first talkies to get pictures moving after five very static years following the birth of sound. The plot finds resourceful hero Joel McCrea and heroine Fay Wray being hunted on the island of the insane Zaroff (Leslie Banks). One of the grandfathers of the summer blockbuster, the film's setup has been reworked many times since, notably in John Woo's Hard Target (1993). By modern standards it's technically primitive, though still gripping stuff, complete with the jungle set built as a test run for King Kong (1933) and graced by Max Steiner's prototype of all Hollywood action scores. --Gary S. Dalkin

Description

"One of the best and most literate movies from the great days of horror," The Most Dangerous Game stars Leslie Banks as a big game hunter with a taste for the world's most exotic prey-his houseguests, played by Fay Wray and Joel McCrea. Before making history with 1933's King Kong, filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack wowed audiences with their chilling adaptation of this Richard Connell short story. Criterion is proud to present the DVD premiere of The Most Dangerous Game in a new digital transfer.

Customer Reviews:

Very good indeed!!.......2007-07-10

Saw this on Turner Classic Movies last week and I liked it a whole lot! I remember reading a review about it a few years ago and was always curious about it.Even though the movie is a little over 60 minutes,it manages to pack enough suspense than most movies do in 90 minutes or 2 hours.This is a very well-made movie that has been done many times before.Does anyone remember the movie BLOODLUST with Robert Reed??Plus,they had a similiar storyline on one of the episodes of Gilligan's Island..If you love old movies or movies with suspense and action,then get this!

The Most Dangerous Game (1932).......2007-06-21

Made by RKO during Willis O'Brien's simultaneous production of "King Kong," and utilizing much of the same cast, crew, and sets, this thrilling adaptation of Richard S. Connell's short story about a man who waylays seafarers and then hunts them for sport wowed audiences in 1932. McCrea, playing a professional hunter journeying to Brazil when his ship strikes a reef, is suitably rugged, especially in a breathtaking, cliff-edge fight with one of the Count's vicious hounds. But Wray's woman-in-distress (honing her scream for "Kong," no doubt!) and Banks's slightly campy yet menacing count really drive the picture. Fabulous sets, cogent direction, and a diabolical concept all make this "Game" a visceral pleasure. Imitated many times, but never with as much vigor.

Great Early Adventure/Action Film.......2007-03-20

As a fan of the great 1933 classic King Kong, I bought this DVD mainly out of curiosity, as the jungle sets built for it were used several months later in King Kong. The film is fairly predictable, but the hunt/chase sequence is truly nerve-rattling and well worth the price of admission. The scenes of Fay Wray (this time a brunette) running terrified through foggy jungle foliage anticipates her later work in Kong; indeed, sometimes it's hard to tell the difference!

However, Robert Armstrong (as Wray's brother) is completely wasted in this film (literally and cinematically, as you'll see). He's a rather foppish drunk throughout, and his character hardly resembles that in the later Kong. Wray's patented scream is well in evidence though, and I can see why the producers brought her in for Kong. Leslie Banks, as the sinister Zaroff, is a tad formulaic, especially when he's seen stroking his old head wound constantly, and his ultimate demise could have been better thought out.

There are no dinosaurs on this Skull Island, but a dozen or so large, vicious hunting dogs fill the bill adequately, particularly during the foggy chase scenes. The film's rear-projection work is cleverly done and very effective.

Joel McCrea's character is good, but the violent loss of the boat's entire crew in the beginning seems to have had little effect on him. As a big-game hunter, toward the end he reflects on what it's like to be frightened and hunted himself.

Overall, a very entertaining movie.

Not bad........2007-02-28

The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel, 1932)

I have an admission to make that's pretty embarrassing for a self-professed film snob-- I'm a big, big fan of Ernest Dickerson's star-studded 1994 flop Surviving the Game, the most recent (that I know of) adaptation of Richard Connell's infamous short story "The Most Dangerous Game." And I tend to compare all the other adaptations to it, and find they all fail. This one's no exception, though it's certainly better than most.

The 1932 film version The Most Dangerous Game will probably end up an historical footnote; much of the crew behind this movie-- co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack, screenwriter James Creelman, producers Merian C. Cooper and David O. Selznick, composer Max Steiner, and roughly half the cast-- would get together again the next year to film the classic King Kong. Kong, of course, is one of the much-beloved classics of the cinema, while The Most Dangerous Game languished in obscurity for decades. The reason? Well, there's not much to it.

In this adaptation, a yacht encounters a nasty storm, and ends up sunk near an island owned by eccentric Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks). Zaroff is a big-game hunter, as is one of the wreck's survivors, Bob Rainsford (These Three's Joel McCrea), and Zaroff promises Rainsford excellent hunting in the morning. Rainsford knows something suspicious is up, as does Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray), a survivor from a wreck a few days before who's still at the mansion. They just can't figure out what until they're caught in it...

Much of the problem with The Most Dangerous Game is that Creelman took what is at its heart an action story and tried to make a suspense movie out of it. The first half of this surprisingly short (sixty-three minutes) film is spent in drawing rooms talking, rather than focusing on the action, as the story does. Now, this sort of thing has been done very well many times, of course, but not here. First, because there's just not a great deal of suspense built up, but second (and more important) because the source material is so well-known that the audience already knows what's coming. It probably doesn't help that Pichel was a first-time director; even with Schoedsack's input (Schoedsack was responsible for four films previous to this, with the most famous being 1929's The Four Feathers), there are still pacing and camerawork issues that mark this as a first film. And for a first film, it's a very good one, especially once the hunt begins. As an enduring classic of the silver screen, however, it seems a bit lacking. ***

a product of an era much like our own.......2007-01-18

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 on 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 - is it 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 an awful like Skull Island, you wouldn't be wrong. Both Game and Cooper and Schoedsack's 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.

Great Adaptations - Criterion Collection (Great Expectations / Lord of the Flies / The Most Dangerous Game / Oliver Twist)

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Great Adaptations - Criterion Collection (Great Expectations / Lord of the Flies / The Most Dangerous Game / Oliver Twist)
Starring: Joel McCrea , Fay Wray , Leslie Banks , Robert Armstrong , and Noble Johnson
Director: Ernest B. Schoedsack , Irving Pichel , and David Lean
Manufacturer: Criterion
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0002JELNQ
Release Date: 2004-09-07

Description

Great Expectations: One of the great translations of literature into film, David Lean's, Great Expectations brings Charles Dickens' masterpiece to robust onscreen life. Pip, Magwitch, Miss Havisham, and Estella populate Lean's magnificent miniature, beautifully photographed by Guy Green and designed by John Bryan. Lord of the Flies: Lord of the Flies is famed theater director Peter Brook's daring translation of William Golding's brilliant novel. The story of 30 English schoolboys stranded on an uncharted island at the start of the "next" war, Lord of the Flies is a seminal film of the New American Cinema and a fascinating anti-Hollywood experiment in location filmmaking. As the cast relived Golding's frightening fable, Brook found the cinematic "evidence" of the author's terrifying thesis: there is a beast in us all. The Most Dangerous Game: "One of the best and most literate movies from the great days of horror," The Most Dangerous Game stars Leslie Banks as a big game hunter with a taste for the world's most exotic prey—his houseguests, played by Fay Wray and Joel McCrea. Before making history with 1933's King Kong, filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack wowed audiences with their chilling adaptation of this Richard Connell short story. Criterion is proud to present the DVD premiere of The Most Dangerous Game in a new digital transfer. Oliver Twist: Expressionistic noir photography suffuses David Lean's Oliver Twist with a nightmarish quality, fitting its bleak, industrial setting. In Dickens' classic tale, an orphan wends his way from cruel apprenticeship to den of thieves in search of a true home.

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