Rent The Most Dangerous Game (1932)

Early talkie horror. - The Most Dangerous Game review by Steve

This explicit precode adaptation of Richard Connell's short story was shot at night on the sets of King Kong (1933) by the same crew. An all American big game hunter (a slim Joel McCrea) is lured onto the rocks of a remote jungle island by a crazy Russian aristocrat (Leslie Banks in his screen debut). So the hunter becomes the game.

The castaway proves a wily quarry, with his experience of bloodsports. He is accompanied by the original Queen of Scream, Fay Wray. As they make their way though the rugged terrain pursued by the Count and his hunting dogs, their clothes get shredded in a way that would lead to extensive cuts by the Hays Office on further release.

This is a tremendously exciting action film with a rich atmosphere as the fog falls on the island at twilight. There are evocative sets and locations. And there's a brilliant display of theatrical overacting by Leslie Banks, who wears the goatee of evil with conviction. A touch of philosophy in the script adds depth, without slowing the pace.

The film's most grisly moment is when the Count shows his prisoner around the human remains mounted in his trophy room. There was much more of this but audiences complained it was upsetting so RKO cut 20m. It has been remade many times, but even with the cuts imposed, it is the touch of the macabre, the feeling of transgression, that makes this the best version.

The Slender Thread of Death - The Most Dangerous Game review by CH

The previous review has described the plot and the making of this engrossing film. The action, the chase across the island's varied and terrible terrain is but a quarter of the running time. This leaves plenty of room for philosophical discussion in the lounge of the ship soon to meet its end destruction. Only Joel McCrae survives shark-infested seas, from which he emerges to spend even more time upon such talk in the even greater space of a Count's (Leslie Banks) imposing home. Here, a previous arrival, Fay Wray soon loses her brother (Robert Armstrong) to the Count's evil plans.

This sounds the stuff of many a horror film., but there is another angle to this. McCrae plays a hunter for whom, say, a tiger is fair game; he now finds himself the target of the Count's pursuit. The hunter becomes the hunted, and any tiger might cheer on the Count in the task. Are McCrae and the Count aspects of the same person? What does it take for anybody to kill another? This was, apparently, the thrust of the long story - once well known in America - to which this film added a female rôle.

Within this hour, much happens amidst interiors and exteriors to give free range to expressionist cinematography better seen than described. This was the first film with Leslie Banks, a noted stage actor. Be sure to see anything with him in it (such as Went the Day Well? where he is another form of overlord). We must lament that he died suddenly at sixty-one. Anybody drawn to the Dorset village of Worth Matravers by its celebrated small pub The Square and Compass should also be sure to include a visit to the nearby graveyard and, in this very different landscape from the Count's island, pay tribute to this fine actor who is buried there.