The Most Dangerous Game

The Most Dangerous Game is a film totally dominated by Leslie Banks's florid portrayal of the mad Russian Count Zaroff who has built is own little world on a Pacific island where he hunts for sport and pleasure what he considers The Most Dangerous Game.

Though I'm sure he must have had a lot of offers from American studios after this film, Leslie Banks went back to the United Kingdom where he was a stalwart presence in a variety of roles for British cinema. Still Banks never got a part as good as Count Zaroff in which he could chew enough scenery for a three course meal and not be noticed.

Joel McCrea plays an American big game hunter who is the sole survivor of a shipwreck who is washed up on Banks's island. In the palatial home he's built out of an old Portugese fort, McCrea encounters brother and sister Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray. Armstrong, in an unusual part for him, plays a wastrel playboy who is consuming the liquor at the home at a prodigious rate. He's taken to the 'trophy' room and not seen again.

The next night McCrea and Wray discover that The Most Dangerous Game is man himself. Banks sends his guests out into the woods and stalks them like wild animals. Supposedly if they can elude him for 24 hours they earn their freedom, but no one ever has.

The Most Dangerous Game is one of those films where you have no doubt who the hero and villain are. No moral ambiguities in this one. For all of Banks's talk about man being the most challenging animal to hunt, the only other man besides McCrea we see him hunt is drunk and pathetic Robert Armstrong. In McCrea because he's a hunter Banks finally meets an opponent who's a challenge. If Armstrong is a sample of what he hunted before, Banks ranks as one of the most malevolent villains ever portrayed on screen.

If the sets look familiar to you remember the team of Meriam C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack is bringing you this film. A year later these same sets were utilized by RKO for the classic King Kong. Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong got to know that back lot jungle very well.

Banks meets a most fitting end for one as evil as he which I can't reveal, but viewers will find it poetic indeed. After 75 years, The Most Dangerous Game is still one exciting, heart pounding, entertaining film.