Programme notes CH 03 — The Haunted Screen
The Most Dangerous Game
A shipwrecked big-game hunter swims ashore on an island whose host has tired of hunting animals.
Shot at night on the jungle sets where the same team was making King Kong by day; Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong worked both shifts. Connell's story had no woman in it, so the film adds one and turns the chase into a pair running together. Leslie Banks plays Count Zaroff as a host first and a hunter second, and the menace is in the manners: the dinner, the piano, the room he keeps for after it. Sixty-two minutes, and the last third barely stops running. Watch the door knocker under the titles, a centaur with an arrow through it and a woman in its arms. The whole plot is carved there.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Ernest B. Schoedsack · Irving Pichel
- Photographed by
- Henry W. Gerrard
- With
- Robert Armstrong · Fay Wray · Joel McCrea · Bill Davidson · James Flavin · Noble Johnson
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Fay Wray, four months apart: hunted through RKO's jungle at night in one, menaced in a rented Universal village in the other. The big studio shot its thriller on sets built for King Kong; the small one borrowed somebody else's Europe. Both run about an hour and waste none of it.