About The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
The story behind the film
Richard Connell's 1924 short story "The Most Dangerous Game" has one of the most famous premises in fiction: a big-game hunter is shipwrecked on a remote island, where a cultured Russian aristocrat reveals that he has grown bored of hunting animals and now hunts the most dangerous game of all — human beings.
RKO brought the story to the screen in 1932 with a creative team that was simultaneously preparing King Kong. Producer Merian C. Cooper and co-director Ernest B. Schoedsack made both films on the same lot, and The Most Dangerous Game was shot largely at night on the same jungle sets later seen in Kong, with several of the same actors. Irving Pichel co-directed the dialogue scenes.
Cast & crew
- Directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel; produced by Merian C. Cooper
- Joel McCrea as Bob Rainsford, the hunter
- Fay Wray as Eve Trowbridge
- Robert Armstrong as Martin Trowbridge, Eve's drunken brother
- Leslie Banks as Count Zaroff
- Noble Johnson as Ivan, Zaroff's servant
- Music by Max Steiner
Why it's worth watching
At barely over an hour, this is a lean, fast thriller. The first half builds dread inside Zaroff's castle, with its trophy room hidden behind a locked door, and Leslie Banks is superb as the polished, chilling host who talks about hunting with the enthusiasm of a man discussing wine. The second half is one long chase through fog-bound jungle, across a ravine and toward a cliff, with Zaroff and his pack of hounds closing in.
As a pre-Code film, made before Hollywood's production rules were strictly enforced, it is darker than many films of the next few decades, and its central idea — the hunter becomes the hunted — has been reused countless times in films, TV episodes and video games.
Fun facts
- Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Noble Johnson and James Flavin all appear in both this film and King Kong (1933).
- Max Steiner, who would go on to score King Kong and Gone with the Wind, wrote the music, using a hunting horn call as a recurring motif.
- In Britain the film was released under the title The Hounds of Zaroff.
- Twenty Great Danes were used as Zaroff's hunting dogs.
Public-domain status
Our rights research found a registration for this film but no renewal in the renewal records, which means it entered the US public domain in 1961; Connell's 1924 story is also in the public domain. See "Rights & source" below for the evidence link.