The Most Dangerous Game!

This movie is famous for being shot simultaneously with King Kong and using Fay Wray, Noble Johnson, and Robert Armstrong from Kong as actors. It's an adaptation of the famous short story "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell which is anthologized in most every school literature book. It's a good cracking tale of danger and hazard, pitting a hero against a morally corrupt villain of classic proportions. It's a good tale and it turns out it's a good movie.

The story is pretty easy to summarize. A famous big-game hunter named Rainsford ends up shipwrecked on an island owned and operated by a expatriate Russian nobleman who it turns out lures in ships and uses the survivors as "the most dangerous game" in his attempts to constantly prove his superior hunting craft. It's a spare story of adventure, evil, and some small intrigue.

The movie is beautifully shot (at night it seems on many of the same jungle sets as developed for King Kong) and the story rockets along in this old-fashioned flick coming in at just over an hour. I love that old movies don't waste time, it's that spare storytelling that keeps them keen for new audiences I think. Fay Wray is dandy in the role of mildly competent damsel in distress, Robert Armstrong is wacky as her drunken brother, and Joel McCrea is downright dashing as the hero Rainsford. But the show here is stolen by Leslie Banks as the villain Zaroff who hunts his prey with bow and arrow and then rifles, all the while caressing the scar on his face in classic villainous fashion. Noble Johnson in whiteface is convincing as a mute Cossack henchman. It's the whole shebang, the castle, the island, the game itself that make this a movie you want to check out.

It's worth the time.

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