The Most Dangerous Game

Because somewhere behind them, in the dark beyond the trees, is a monster, and they are the prey.

The film they're making is called The Most Dangerous Game.

It's an RKO thriller about a Russian aristocrat, the monster in question, who hunts shipwrecked strangers through the jungle for sport.

Made quickly, three weeks on the schedule, a little over $200,000 on the budget, it's the kind of picture Fay Wray, the woman running through the jungle, knows well.

By now, she has appeared in dozens of pictures, comedies, melodramas, Westerns, and thrillers just like this.

The following year, she will have 11 more pictures released.

The Most Dangerous Game is just another film on a crowded schedule, and there's no reason to think it will be anything more than that.

Except it's not the only film using this jungle.

Mistress, the video is cued.

This evening, you will be viewing Joe McRae and Fay Ray in The Most Dangerous Game.

Oh, excellent.

Thank you, Lothar.

A pitfall.

With obsidian stakes.

Straight out of the Most Dangerous Game, you know?

Yodele Creay and Fay Gray.

He, again, he was active till I think, like, the '50s as well.

His most famous credit is that of the Skull Island native chief in 1933's King Kong, but he also appears in '32's The Most Dangerous Game and Murders in the Rue Morgue.

His earlier epics included, let's see, 1924's The Thief of Bagdad.

Um-

Isn't that what The Pest is a parody of?

There was a movie in the '30s called The Most Dangerous Game that was like the first one.

Mm.

Um, where people were hunting people for sport, and I think there's just been a lot of iterations of that over the year.

It speaks of the dark, he tells her, of evil things and shadowy places, and when she asks him what he sees in her eyes, hoping, one imagines, that he will respond with humanity, he gives the monosyllabic response of death.

Sandor, with his heavyset face and very fetching centre-parting, has a similar facial appearance to the actor Lon Chaney Jr., but is in fact played by Irving Pitchell, an actor and director whose directorial credits, up to this point, include 1932's The Most Dangerous Game and 1935's She.

Long after Dracula's Daughter, he would go on to direct the 1950 movie Destination Moon, which won an Academy Award for special effects, and the 1953 biopic Martin Luther, which would be nominated for a Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival.

Much of his work during the war years was fiercely anti-fascist and anti-Nazi, a stance which eventually got him into trouble with our old friends the House Un-American Activities Committee, and he was subpoenaed to appear before them under accusations of quote-unquote premature anti-fascism.