The Most Dangerous Game

The famous big game hunter Robert Rainsford (Joel McCrea) ends up on a remote island after a shipwreck. There he meets the mysterious Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks), a Russian aristocrat who lives in a castle with his servants. Zaroff is bored of hunting animals and has developed a new passion: hunting humans. Zaroff deliberately provokes shipwrecks in order to get new “prey”. This includes shipwreck survivor Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and her brother Martin. It soon becomes clear that Zaroff wants to hunt them down, but gives them one last chance: if they survive until dawn, they will be free. A gruesome hunt through the island's jungle begins, with Zaroff attacking them with bow, arrow, gun and pack of dogs The action horror film “Count Zaroff” by Ernest B. Schoedsack (“King Kong and the White Lady”) and Irving Pichel (“Rocket to the Moon”) is considered one of the first representatives of the “manhunt” film. A popular suspense motif that was later taken up by many films - such as “Predator”, “Hard Target” or “The Hunger Games”. The film was shot on the same set as Schoedsack's film “King Kong and the White Lady” (1933), which gives it a special place in the history of early Hollywood cinema. Using expressionist imagery, Schoedsach and Pichel addressed phenomena such as decadence, abuse of power and the perversion of hunting at an early stage. "Through the imaginative fashion in which it has been produced, together with its effective staging and a note-worthy performance by Leslie Banks, the fantastic theme of 'The Most Dangerous Game', the film feature at the Paramount, makes a highly satisfactory melodrama. It has the much-desired virtue of originality, which, in no small measure, compensates for some of its gruesome ideas and its weird plot." (Mordaunt Hall, The New York Times)