Serge Just Saw "The Most Dangerous Game" (1932) and Wants to Talk About it

What a cool little film!

The Most Dangerous Game is a 1932 production by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the producing team which brought us, one year later, the original King Kong (1933).

The story is about a small yacht which runs aground in the Pacific on a tiny island. Only one crewmember survives, Bob Rainsford, a celebrity in the hunting world, who has hunted more animals on the planet than anyone else. He makes his way to shore and, deep in the jungle, he finds a private castle housing the mysterious Count Zaroff, who shares Bob's passion for hunting.

Let's get to the chase: Count Zaroff picks up shipwrecked sailors, feeds them, clothes them, gives them a knife, and a day's headstart, then plunges into the jungle after them with a hunting bow, a rifle, and a pack of hunting hounds. You see, Count Zaroff, too, hunted every animal on earth, and he grew so proficient that it was no longer a challenge, so he decided to move on to hunting humans in order to re-invigorate the hunt.

Bob is released into the jungle (with Fay Wray alongside, of course, who would go on to be the second main attraction in King Kong), and together the pair must outwit the evil Zaroff or face the fate of so many others before them and be mounted in his macabre human-trophy room.

The Most Dangerous Game has been remade (in spirit) several times with several different components of the story altered. In Predator (1987), it was an alien hunting a group of hardened marines. In Zodiac (2007), it was a newspaper cartoonist tracking down a killer, some would say, just for the thrill of it, just for the obsession. Ok, so maybe Zodiac is a stretch, but at least it references The Most Dangerous Game several times. Pursuit and obsession is a fascinating topic to dissect in film, and would be the suitable subject of an entire other post.

Cooper and Schoedsack (pronounced /showed-szack/) were no strangers to the dangerous jungles depicted in TMDG. Or to danger in general. Refusing whenever possible to use stock footage, the pair would often venture into the real-life wilds in order to cram their cameras into the faces of charging tigers and rhinos. The first initial concept of King Kong called for imported gorillas to be fought with komodo dragons on-location in Indonesia and filmed for the audiences back home. Luckily, no studio bankrolled that film.

(Nor were they strangers to being pursued by humans themselves. Cooper was shot down over Soviet Russia in 1920 and spent 9 months in a Soviet prison-camp before escaping shortly before the war ended.)

Was all of that interesting? It was to me. The Most Dangerous Game needed to be remade, IMHO, as its runtime is only a fairly disappointing 63 minutes. The version streaming on Netflix is colorized, and that's too bad, but you should still czech it out.

--Serge