Dis­cov­er the haunt­ing human hor­rors of this Pre-Code classic

Irv­ing Pichel and Ernest P. Schoedsack’s The Most Dan­ger­ous Game opens, appro­pri­ate­ly enough, with an entrance – a huge wood­en door, on which there is a carv­ing of a bes­tial fig­ure with vam­pir­ic fangs and an arrow pierc­ing his chest, hold­ing in his arms an uncon­scious woman. As the titles appear, a hand reach­es for­ward, and pulls sev­er­al times on the carved woman – who it is revealed is also the door’s knocker.

Just when the door begins to creak open, there are two cuts, first to a pair of can­dles in front of a cur­tain, and then to a pair of ​‘chan­nel lights’ intend­ed to mark the safe pas­sage through a water’s treach­er­ous reefs and shoals. There will be a ship­wreck sequence out to sea before we return to the island fort with that elab­o­rate door, but even­tu­al­ly a sim­i­lar art­work will be seen on one of its inte­ri­or walls, depict­ing a fanged cen­taur also hold­ing an uncon­scious woman in his arms, even as he has been shot in the chest with an arrow from a near­by hunter.

These two art­works – the door sculp­ture and the mur­al – are mis­es en abyme, reflect­ing broad­er themes of the film in which they appear. For the sce­nario and drama­tis per­son­ae that they por­tray – a mon­strous mix of man and beast, his female prey and a hunter – are rôles that will also be found dis­trib­uted between the three main char­ac­ters of The Most Dan­ger­ous Game. When we first meet the pro­tag­o­nist, world-renowned Amer­i­can big game hunter Robert ​“Bob” Rains­ford (Joel McCrea), he is aboard a pas­sen­ger yacht and engaged in a debate with a doc­tor whose ques­tions will rever­ber­ate through­out the film.

“I was think­ing of the incon­sis­ten­cy of civil­i­sa­tion,” says the doc­tor. ​“The beast of the jun­gle killing just for his exis­tence is called sav­age. The man, killing just for sport, is called civilised. It’s a bit con­tra­dic­to­ry, isn’t it?”. Here the doc­tor is point­ing out the prox­im­i­ty, per­haps even the indis­tin­guisha­bil­i­ty, between civil­i­sa­tion and sav­agery, human­i­ty and bes­tial­i­ty, as though a hunter, like that hybrid crea­ture on the art­work, some­how strad­dles both.

“This world’s divid­ed into two kinds of peo­ple, the hunter and the hunt­ed,” replies Rob, ​“Now luck­i­ly I’m a hunter, and noth­ing can ever change that…” – but Rob’s words are vio­lent­ly cut off, and his mean­ing under­mined, when the boat sud­den­ly runs aground on a reef. The sole sur­vivor of this col­li­sion will be Rob, who man­ages to swim away from the sunken vessel.

Wash­ing up ashore on a near­by island, Rob heads to the only man-made struc­ture there, enter­ing by that large door with the sculpt­ed knock­er. Now he is in the domain of Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), a noble­man exiled from post-Rev­o­lu­tion Rus­sia who, with a small, loy­al staff of Cos­sack ser­vants, has tak­en over the island and turned it into his pri­vate hunt­ing grounds.

Hav­ing read all Rob’s books, Zaroff is delight­ed to have such a celebri­ty in his own home. He intro­duces Rob to his oth­er two guests, Eve Trow­bridge (Fay Wray) and her dip­so­ma­ni­ac broth­er Mar­tin (Robert Arm­strong) who had sur­vived a pre­vi­ous ship­wreck along with two sailors who have since mys­te­ri­ous­ly dis­ap­peared. As Zaroff talks of hav­ing dis­cov­ered a way to pur­sue ​‘the most dan­ger­ous game’ on his island, it will grad­u­al­ly dawn on Rob that Zaroff is hunt­ing humans whom he has ensnared there – and the Amer­i­can must decide whether he is Zaroff’s part­ner in blood sports, or his next quar­ry, as the great hunter becomes the hunt­ed and will for the first time dis­cov­er how it feels to be cor­nered prey.

Shot at night on the same jun­gle sets as Mer­ian C. Coop­er and Ernest P. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933) with sev­er­al over­lap­ping cast (Wray, Arm­strong, Noble John­son and James Flavin) and crew, The Most Dan­ger­ous Game sim­i­lar­ly con­founds human and ani­mal. Adapt­ed from Richard Connell’s 1924 short sto­ry of the same name, it has itself had an untold influ­ence on sub­se­quent cinema.

While films like Peter Watkins’ Pun­ish­ment Park (1971) and Kle­ber Mend­honça Fil­ho and Juliano Domelles’ Bacu­rau (2019) have care­ful­ly con­vert­ed the man­hunt premise for polit­i­cal­ly point­ed alle­go­ry, The Most Dan­ger­ous Game broad­ly fol­lows the request that a drunk­en Mar­tin gives to Zaroff at the piano: ​“Not high­brow like last night, just a good tune.”

For like Ralph Brooke’s Blood­lust! (1961), Bri­an Trenchard-Smith’s Turkey Shoot (1982), John McTiernan’s Preda­tor (1987), John Woo’s Hard Tar­get (1993), Ernest R. Dickerson’s Sur­viv­ing the Game (1994) and Craig Zobel’s The Hunt (2020), this is all about the thrill of the chase.

As a pre-Code hor­ror, The Most Dan­ger­ous Game has a real nas­ti­ness to it too. Even before Rob has reached the island, the ship­wreck leads to the crew being boiled alive in the flood­ed engine room and men in the water tak­en by sharks; Zaroff’s base­ment ​‘tro­phy room’ is not only dec­o­rat­ed with the pre­served heads of those he has pre­vi­ous­ly hunt­ed, but is also a tor­ture cham­ber; and while Zaroff does not intend to mur­der Eve (“one does not kill a female ani­mal,” he assures Rob in typ­i­cal­ly dehu­man­is­ing lan­guage), his designs on her nonethe­less clear­ly con­sti­tute rape (“Only after the kill,” he says, mean­ing Rob’s death, ​“does man know the true ecsta­sy of love”).

There is, amid all this sen­sa­tion­al­ist mate­r­i­al, an ongo­ing dis­course on what it means to be human, and how far a man should be will­ing to go, as Zaroff puts it, to ​“fol­low his con­vic­tions to their log­i­cal con­clu­sion.” Some doors evi­dent­ly should nev­er be opened, and some thresh­olds nev­er crossed.

The Most Dan­ger­ous Game is released for its 90^th Anniver­sary in its UK debut on Blu-ray, from a 2K restored scan, as part of Eure­ka Video’s The Mas­ters of Cin­e­ma series, 24^th Oct 2022.