directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel
screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman
from the story by Richard Connell

Criterion #46. Moving right along.

Check out this list of the Top Ten Most Dangerous Games Ever: you won’t believe what’s at number one!

We all already know the deal with the story. The deal with the movie is that it is a companion piece to King Kong, made by some of the same people with some of the same actors on some of the same sets at some of the same time. But this came out first, as of course it had to, seeing as it’s much dinkier.

This is like a 63-minute pulp cover illustration. Hold on to that dagger and that woman in tattered clothes! Keep holding on! Just a little longer!

Why is there a woman in a brutal man-on-man story like The Most Dangerous Game? I think you know why. The funny thing is that they easily get away with it. I was struck by how readily any scenario could be converted into a sex fantasy. “It’s Moby Dick… but there’s this girl there…”

Fay Wray is in full “can’t-help-it-I’m-just-drawn-this-way” Marilyn Monroe mode here, faux-cluelessly offering herself up in ways that seemingly have nothing to do with the Thrilling Tales business going on around her. But the movie knows what’s really going on, and it’s a little skeevy. Count Zoloft doesn’t just want to hunt the most dangerous game; he wants to hunt the most dangerous game, AND THEN AFTER HE HAS KILLED, “LOVE,” which is why Fay has to flee into the jungle alongside Joel McCrea and get her dress all wet oops.

The classic heartwarming image of a nubile beauty being carried off to be raped by a muscular beast appears here on the wicked Count’s tapestry (+ shock chord from Max Steiner!) as well as carved into his door-knocker, see title screen above. The same image at its most iconic and extreme of course forms the centerpiece of King Kong, wherein the logistics of rape per se have been transcended, in pursuit of whatever is really driving Merian C. Cooper and friends.

(Personally, my one gripe about King Kong has always been that the ape-to-girl size ratio ought to have been just a little bigger. I suspect that my kindred spirits Messrs. Cooper and Schoedsack were secretly of the same mind. Hopefully if they ever remake it again, this time there will be a scene toward the end where the ape eats a magic berry that makes him get four or five times larger, and at the same time the girl goes through a miniaturizing ray. In the interest of promoting discussion of this and related matters I have purchased the domain www.apetogirlratioforums.net, where a respectful community of like-minded enthusiasts can share speculative fiction and Photoshop work. Message me for an invite.)

Okay, I’ll be honest: I’m not really skeeved at all. This is all perfectly cozy stuff. It’s actually sort of heartwarming to me that something as nakedly pervy as King Kong is an international treasure without a smidge of shame associated with it. Pulp fantasies of virility like those on show here never really threaten me; I picture a confused Norman Rockwell kid with glasses thumbing through a comic book, eyes wide. I guess I could picture Nazis but I don’t and really why should I? If you’re female, your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Anyway I’m not interested in doing a real analysis of the ideas of masculinity or post-colonialism or Americanness or sex or whatever here. I only am interested in being goofy and meeting my quota of one (1) entry on this movie. So far so good.

This movie reminds me of the world of my grandfather. I remember, once when I was 8 or so, hearing my grandfather make reference to Mighty Joe Young — thereby teaching me that there was more than one giant gorilla movie — and in that moment being struck that he came from, and still mentally lived in, a world that was just irredeemably grandfathery, the same world from whence came the endless stacks of National Geographics that used to be ubiquitous under coffee tables the world over. “Mighty Joe Young,” seriously? And “Gunga Din”? Why did everything “exciting” have to sound so cornily stupid and pseudo-ethnic back then, and why couldn’t people like him hear how it sounded? But that sincere dedication to adventure-corn was also heartening, the way all grandparental things eventually are. I ended up permanently borrowing “Kon Tiki” and “Aku Aku” from his bookshelf, recognizing that such a world might actually be a nice place to spend some mental time. And so, at several removes, the problematic legacy of Rudyard Kipling lives on. Like I said, I’m not interested in coming up with a cogent critique here; just making some personal associations.

The fog in this movie is grade-A fog. In a movie like this that’s important. Ditto the foliage. The shot when a rock falls into a chasm (you know, to help you imagine a person falling in) is a grade-A rock-falling-in-a-chasm shot. The heavy door that mysteriously swings open to the mysterious fortress is a grade-A heavy door. There’s a pretty good point-of-view shot of running through the jungle. When the Count says that he will “take care” of his guest, and Fay looks back at him, there’s a wild crane-zoom all the way across the room into his madman face (with whooshing music to match), which is — well, a little bumpy, but the enthusiasm more than makes up for it. When the ship crashes there’s a satisfyingly prolonged explosion. This-all is what we’re here for, and they deliver. That and a girl.

One thing I would have liked… oh forget it. Seriously, forget it. I am perfectly happy with what I got. Service 5, Food 5, Would come again. (I don’t actually have to come again. It’s just nice to be nice on the survey. They work so hard, you know.)

Watching a movie like this is like eating an egg-salad sandwich. I like an egg-salad sandwich sometimes.

(Yes, I know Pee-Wee Herman put a gag about hating egg-salad sandwiches in his second movie. I was offended by it.)

Max Steiner is the egg-salad sandwich of composers. He sure did know how to make any movie sound, and thus feel, like every other movie. That’s undoubtedly a very valuable skill for a studio to have on staff but I’m not sure it’s exactly an artistic skill. If it weren’t for his totally by-the-books score, this would probably seem more overtly like a B-movie with a few fancy effects. With the music it seems like another certified bauble from the bauble factory, one more red ball that came rolling down the line into the machine that drops a cherry on your sundae.

As far as I could tell, there’s really only one theme in the movie, a simple “ominous” motif based on a hunting call that’s played over and over and clearly meant to signify the Count and his dangerous clutches. The most delightful thing about this score and possibly about this movie is that Count Zaroff is — in addition to being a Count, a Russian, a recluse, a refined host, and a madman — a pianist, with a nice grand piano in his fortress. In the final scene of the movie, having returned from (he thinks) killing our hero, with Fay Wray captive in his rooms, we suddenly cut to him in a robe at his piano, having put off rape to first play “Count Zaroff’s theme” in the finest hotel-lobby manner.

As you can hear, that gets cut off by… uh, action. He actually plays a complete arrangement earlier in the movie, but under a dialogue scene. If I were comfortable with including dialogue scenes, I would of course make this our selection.

But, with some reluctance, I think the only proper representative of the score has to be the standard, the main title, which in classic Steiner sandwich style only gives us a few bars of the big theme before settling into some certified bland scene-setting music for the ship on which our story begins (+ nautical bell). The most interesting thing here is the pre-title lead-in, with an onscreen hand grabbing the door knocker by the maiden and giving three good audible knocks, one for each sundae. Track 46. The hand represents the audience, of course, seeking entry to the world of danger. Your wish is granted!

I wrote all that before listening to the commentary because I was afraid that it might put serious thoughts in my head and spoil the spirit of the thing. Now I’ve listened.

Here’s something commentarian Bruce Eder mentions in passing:

The location shooting for The Four Feathers brought Cooper and Schoedsack to Africa. It was while they were shooting that Cooper had become fascinated with a colony of baboons living by a river, and this led him to start looking into stories he’d heard about a group of giant apes. It was an idea that hooked into a story he’d conceived in childhood of a giant ape carrying off a woman. Cooper discovered that the giant apes that he’d heard about were simply very large, not the outsize creatures he’d hoped for.

Italics mine, in accordance with the www.apetogirlratioforums.net style guide.

Basically the commentary is of the historical lore + mild thematic analysis sort, which suits me fine. It reminded me to acknowledge that for every egg salad sandwiches, there was a time before egg salad sandwiches; egg salad sandwiches needed to be invented. I grant everyone involved — screenwriter and composer especially — that this may well be one of the founding egg salad sandwiches of the modern sandwich era. It’s certainly a tighter and more commercial piece of pulp than its much-better-loved contemporary, Dracula, which has a little too much dry yolk, not enough mayo.

As far as the analysis goes, it’s fine: mostly to do with Zaroff’s place in the development of the archetype of the psychopathological villain. My mind still being fixated on the Molly Haskell idea about what forms of self-suppression are being endorsed by movies, I can’t help but see Zaroff’s libidinous and intellectual individuality vs. Rainsford’s all-American blandtastic nonentitude as part of a similarly lamentable scheme. The Merian C. Coopers in the audience, dreaming of their secret inner giant ape, are titillated, and then told no, it’s better to be a cipher in a nice shirt rather than the absolute monster you’d be if you went in that direction, you know the direction I mean. That’s the way to get the girl: be the nobody! It’s the noble thing — the only thing — to do.

Final cranky note: after I write these up I occasionally stop by the reasonably well-linked-to Criterion Contraption blog, where, from 2004 up until a couple years ago (when he sort of let it peter out around #115), a guy was taking this same trip. Roger Ebert wrote him up and he got attention from various other sources, I think including the Criterion website at one point. In this instance I happened to compare notes with him when I got to the horizontal line above, before listening to the commentary. I’ve always thought his take was a little low on personality, with its emphasis on screencaps, but only now has it become clear to me, with no small irritation, that 95% of what he writes is simply regurgitated insight from the auxiliary materials in the package. In this case, I read about this guy’s respect for the complexity of Zaroff’s psychology given the time period, the character’s relevance to future villains with particular reference to The Silence of the Lambs… and then found today that, lo and behold, this is all Bruce Eder’s analysis from the commentary, point for point. So is pretty much everything else in that “blog entry.” And, I realize, so has it been in many of his prior entries that I’ve read. Hey, that’s not cool!

Say what you will about what I write here, I am for sure making it all up.

Why do I give a crap about this guy? Well, yes, obviously in part for hey-what-about-me reasons (he gets hired to write film criticism for Slate now based on this schtick???) about which psychology trust me I don’t need any advice, I’m on it… but also for less embarrassing reasons relating from my ongoing irritation with the attitude of many of the commentaries and the whole apparatus around “talking about movies” in general. Plagiarism is a symptom of extreme anxiety which can be a dangerous contagion. Everyone making these mealy-mouthed commentaries is transparently trying to avoid the giant ape in the room which is why they love movies in the first place and is the really the main thing worth sharing. The problem is it’s often to do with, yes, their weird fetishes, vulnerabilities, whatever. Better to beat around the bush by talking about historical chains of influence, or better still, paraphrase someone else’s bush-beating. Well, I hate that. I want someone to tell me to look right directly at the cleavage, if that’s the point of the movie. That’s the only way to better my experience.

Whatever it may sound like, it is in fact the bravest possible thing when I can volunteer something like: the foliage in this movie is great and gives you a great make-believe-jungly feeling, like Maurice Sendak. That might be pretty weak stuff but I swear this is the direction I have to strive to go (with my machete). So I am pissed that Mr. Criterion Contraption got credit for his plagiarized pseudo-musings not solely because I envy credit, but because I want to live in a world where people aren’t so attracted to the reassurances that anxiety constructs to shield itself. But I’m not and I have to deal with that. I’m dealing with it.

That horizontal line keeps this part of the entry nicely quarantined from the cheery part above.