The Most Dangerous Game

“I have done a rare thing, I have invented a new sensation.”

“An-nd is he stingy with it!”

Count Zaroff the Cossack huntsman in his fortress lair on an island in the Pacific, he of “the Tartar war-bow”.

“Tartar which?”

From the very first frames, the King Kong motif, with Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray.

Joel McCrea the horribly shipwrecked author on hunting, Leslie Banks his Russian host with a trick harbor.

Expatriated by the Revolution, gored by a Cape buffalo, bored in the Amazon, hunting “the Great Whatsit”, blackshirted in his “trophy room” an unmistakable picture, “now we’ve got to think of something to worry him.... a perfect Malay deadfall,” for example. Fritz Lang’s Man Hunt appears in due course, also Peter Brook’s Lord of the Flies, Cy Endfield’s Sands of the Kalahari, etc.

A magnificently advanced technique, one of the cinema’s great works.

Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times, “a highly satisfactory melodrama.” Variety, “not very effective.” Leonard Maltin, “vivid telling... a florid, sometimes campy villain.” Tom Milne (Time Out), “most chilling”. TV Guide, “a grim and morose film with strong undertones of sadism and, toward the end, brutality... genuinely frightening”. Halliwell’s Film Guide, “dated but splendidly shivery melodrama”.