The Most Dangerous Game

A formative horror-watching experience from the horror medium’s own formative years, 1932’s The Most Dangerous Game is the kind of film that resonates in a viewer’s mind like some acquired primal memory. To have seen it is to never forget it, in the touchstone sense; there’s something as fundamental and foundational to The Most Dangerous Game as there is to Dracula and Frankenstein, only minus the supernatural, as if it has more to do with that which lurks within us.

Based on Richard Connell’s endlessly anthologized 1924 story of the same name, The Most Dangerous Game has to number among the first horror films many people ever saw. That’s because it was “allowed,” being regular school-system fare, and we can only guess how many TVs were rolled into how many classrooms for the screening of this early creeper.

The premise is smart, and don’t make the mistake of calling it simple, which is what we tend to do with those things that cause us to say, “I wish I thought of that.” We begin on a yacht off the northeastern coast of South America. Men are doing what men do in these situations—making like they’re at their club, shooting the bull—when a reef is struck, a hole is torn, in comes the water, and down goes the ship.

Big-game hunter Bob Rainsford (Joel McCrea) is the lone survivor after some sharks help themselves to a meal of a couple of his buddies and washes up on the beach of a most remote island. Fortunately for him—or so he thinks—there’s a château there owned by a gentlemanly Russian expatriate, Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), who is a huge hunting nut himself. Fancy that—the boys can talk about their hobby until the rescue ship gets there. Only, that’s not what’s going to happen, is it?

But what is this game of which the title speaks? As if we haven’t guessed by now. To flush the quarry out into the open, though: Zaroff proposes that Bob will be the prey on this jungle island, and he the hunter. To the victor goes the château and the land. Bob is granted a head start and food, and he can make all the traps his heart desires. And before we forget—Fay Wray also appears as a guest (speaking loosely now) at Zaroff’s digs, on account of having survived a shipwreck along with her alcoholic brother (Robert Armstrong), who is of the type that is never long for a movie like this, and because all-boy affairs were permitted only with war films.