Big game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) is sailing back from a hunt with his wealthy friends when their yacht hits a reef and sinks. Rainsford alone makes it to the shore of a small island, which is inhabited by hunting enthusiast Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) and his servants (Noble Johnson, Steve Clemente, Dutch Hendrian). It also is currently acting as sanctuary for Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and her brother Martin Trowbridge (Robert Armstrong), survivors from a previous wreck. While it seems friendly to Rainsford, Eve tries to warn him that there’s something sinister going on, and that the secretive Zaroff may be a murderer.
How many versions of this are there? I’d seen 6 or 7 as episodes of TV shows before I read the short story, and I did that in junior high. IMDB lists 19 film versions, but there are many, many more when you include television. It’s a fun, quick little story and directors Irving Pichel and Ernest B. Schoedsack took an important lesson from the literary source and made a rapid fire movie. It runs only a touch over an hour and there’s no slow moments and no wasted time. We zip through a fearful chat to a ship wreck to a shark attack to a strange castle to a menacing henchman and on it goes.
The filmmakers also had the benefit of free sets, and good ones. Production overlapped King Kong’s, with all it’s lovely jungle sets just sitting there. The Most Dangerous Game also shares much of its cast and crew with Kong. Fay Wray is lovely and Leslie Banks makes for a proper wide-eyed sadistic loon. And it’s all shot with style.
The fast pace is needed as the flaws would overwhelm the picture if it slowed down even a little. Joel McCrea was a limited actor, and he was given no help here either by the directors or by his character, which is a generic, overly upright he-man. That makes it hard enough to root for him, but add in that Rainsford’s a rich kid that gets his kicks by murdering animals and its tough to choose between him and Zaroff. At least Zaroff has done some minor self-examination. And Martin’s drunk routine is way over the top, existing less to fit the story or character, or show how drunkenness works, and more to push producer Merian C. Cooper’s anti-alcohol views. Finally, there’s Eve. Fay Wray comes off as the best actor of the main cast, and she has some wonderful moments, but at random times, Eve acts incredibly stupidly, basically to fulfill her role as the incapable damsel in need of rescue.
All of that is pretty bad, but the viewing experience is better than it should be. Before I really get a chance to be annoyed by any one the problems, we’re on to something else, and then to something else again. Sometimes, speed saves.
Note: I’m amused that this is one of the few cases I’ve seen of white-face. Johnson was a black actor, here made up to look like a Russian Cossack.