Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel | The Most Dangerous Game / 1932

one passion builds upon another

by Douglas Messerli

 

James Ashmore Creelman (screenplay, based on the story by Richard Connell), Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel (directors) The Most Dangerous Game / 1932

 

Produced by Merian C. Cooper of King Kong fame, and staring Fay Ray of the same movie, the 1932 film The Most Dangerous Game, because of RKO budget cuts was filmed on the same set as King Kong for at least part of the movie; but contrary to some claims, this film was not shot at the same time as the classic film that was released the following year, 1933.

    And if Wray can be said to be the star, along with the grand ape, in the 1933 movie, her existence in this film is basically peripheral. In fact, there is no female love interest in the original story; no females at all. Even in the pre-Joseph Breen production code period of filmmaking, producers and directors were still made to feel that there needed to be a heterosexual story at the center of their movies, a so-called “love interest,” here perversely described as the sexual “reward” for the hunter having succeed in stalking down his prey, who then feels privileged to rape any available woman.

     But, in actuality, the villain of this piece, the wealthy expatriate Russian Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) is hardly interested in women. A bit like the central figure of the Moreau’s island horror tales, the Count has found a way to lure men to his spot by rearranging the channel lights and sending the ships off-course in hidden reefs which sink their vessels, only the strongest and luckiest of survivors finding their way to his fortress on the jungle island. The ones who survive, mostly male, become the objects of his sadistic compulsions to lure them into his trophy room, lock them up, torture them, and set them free in an attempt to escape his determination to hunt them down and kill them, perceiving them as far more clever prey than mere lions, elephants, or jaguars with his heavy-bow and arrows, his guns, and his hounds.  

     By accident, the survivors of another shipwreck already ensconced in his castle are a brother and sister who are quite meaningless to him, Eve Trowbridge (Wray) and her obnoxiously drunk of a brother, Martin (Robert Armstrong), who he grandly entertains after having already lured in and killed the two sailors who have accompanied them.

     Any viewer of this 1934 film would have immediately recognized Count Zaroff, despite his prowess as a hunter, as an elite and slightly effeminate human being simply because of his affectations, his grand dress, his taste of great wines and liqueurs, his love of classical music and his abilities to play the piano, as well the way he controls the thugs around him, Ivan and Tartar, as simple brutes whom he manipulates, in the manner of all authoritarian villains, as if they were mere robots meant to service him. Finally, the way he stares of his guest’s brawny chest makes it clear where his attention is focused. Despite his theory that the female is a reward for his hunting the prey, it is clear our attractive Russian madman is a homosexual with hardly any interest in actually having intercourse with the woman hostage after. Rape, one must remember, generally does not emanate from sexual desire but from hate.

     In fact, when he is finally lucky enough to snag, through yet another shipwreck, the noted big game hunter, Robert Rainsford (the hunky beauty Joel McCrea), he recognizes him immediately and, at first, is not at all interested in employing him as prey, but imagines he might be the perfect partner in his horrific hunting of human prey. Without fully expressing his intentions, he certainly does intimate that he would like Bob to join him in the pleasures of his life, including, perhaps, the wine, musical entertainments, and lovemaking of his bed. Even we can see him slightly drooling as he describes his philosophy to Rainsford: "One passion builds upon another. Kill, then love! When you have known that, you have known ecstasy!"

     He quickly puts “Bob” in some of his own hunter’s pants, and obviously dresses the half-naked survivor in his own pajamas and dressing robe. Eve wears a single dress throughout, and where she has gotten that is inexplicable. Perhaps she survived intact or it is a remnant of another female survivor of the past.

    Basing his ideas on the concepts of sexual normality threated by a monster as described in the writings of Robin Wood, critic Shane Brown observes that in the 1930s films, the starting point of many of the later horror films, consist primarily of two types of queer monsters in classical Hollywood films: “The first of these attempts to disrupt a heterosexual coupling in order to allow a union for the monster with the male in most cases…. This type of queer monster seems to be found more commonly in horror movies that are not wholly supernatural affairs, such as White Zombie (dir. Victor Halperin, 1932) and The Most Dangerous Game (dir. Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932). The second type of queer monster is that which appears to be attempting to spread homosexuality among the masses as some sort of contagion—although…this is suggested implicitly rather that explicitly within the texts. Here, we are entering a world of werewolves and vampires as found in films such as Nosferatu (dir. F. W. Murnau, 1922), and Dracula (Dir. Tod Browing, 1931).”

    Both of the latter are described earlier in this and other volumes, but here it is the first kind of queer monster that we are facing. If in the early hours of the evening, Rainsford appears to actually enjoy the company of the Count, particularly after having just survived the shipwreck and asked by Zaroff to pretend happiness for the sake of his other two survivors, he is quickly cued into the oddities of the Count’s behavior by Eve, and perhaps is even a little disturbed by the interruptive rudeness of Martin’s drunken comments which also mention the missing seamen.  

     By the time Eve comes to him in the middle of the night, quite worried about her brother not yet having returned from his visit to the trophy room, our hero has begun to become aware that the prey Zaroff is after is other human beings, not wild animals. And by the time he actually visits the trophy room with Eve in search of Martin, he too is horrified by what he observes: a shrunken human head and floating head in glass. Evidently, in the original version there were far many other horrors shared with the viewer, but the test audiences were so disturbed by the images, that Schoedsack, the primary director, cut the movie from its original longer showing time to the brief 62-some minute work it is today, both he and producer Cooper determined to produce a tightly-time film that provided the ultimate in horrors.

     By the time Zaroff encounters them in his official shrine, he is forced to tell Rainsford his hopes for their relationship and admit to the true prey of his hunts, admitting that Eve’s brother has been yet another victim, which makes his obsession seem even more perverse since Martin could certainly not have run for more that a few feet and probably could not have survived more than a few minutes at most.

     Hearing Zaroff’s pleas for him to join him, in a kind of mad wedlock of a hunting obsession, Rainsford, an obvious cinematic heterosexual hero, has no choice but to refuse Zaroff’s offer to join his horrific cult. And the moment that he makes his disgust apparent, the Count has no choice but to turn him into another beast of prey, offering him a hunting knife, a few provisions, and permission to roam the island until midnight, when the Count will begin the hunt. If Rainsford survives until 4 a.m., he wins the battle and Zaroff promises him the keys to the boathouse so that he can leave the island. But then Zaroff has never lost in his game of “outdoor chess.”

     At the last moment, Eve decides to join the stranger rather than remain as a different kind of prey in the Count’s mansion.

   The rest of the film, accordingly, is involved in the chase through the King Kong jungle, which must have provided Wray with some sense of déjà vu.

      Once the two have realized the small chances of their escape, Rainsford begins to create a number of hidden traps, which were all based on real traps, so we learn in the Wikipedia entry, that Schoedsack learned to use in Thailand.

      Yet Zaroff eludes all of these, and they help him to locate the couple hiding nearby. They jump chasms, cut down vines and trees, and hide is a cave, but ultimately are forced to enter the alligator ridden swamp where, along with the shark-infested waters near the island, they are probably safer than in the jungle.

      Finally, loosing the hounds, Zaroff tracks them down, after he loses one of his servants as the prey breaks his neck, shooting Rainsford when a dog attacks him, spinning both into a long voyage into the sea waters below a cliff. Zaroff pulls the girl back into his mansion for the promised later orgasm of pleasure, even if we doubt his sexual abilities with the female kind.

      But, we discover, the shot has killed the dog, not Rainsford, who sneaks back into the castle, and in all fairness is given the boathouse key for having survived. Yet Rainsford goes further, grabbing up Eve and stabbing Zoraff with one of his own arrows.

      Zoraff survives just long enough as he lays out beside a window, rifle in hand, to observe Eve and Bob speeding away before he falls from the window into the sea below, presumably dead.

      Commentators claim this film, titled The Hounds of Zaroff in England and was later reissued as Skull Island in 1938, probably influenced a slew of later movies in which human beings became prey, including Zodiac Killer, Apocalyto, Bloodlust!, The Hunt, The Pest, Predator, Surviving the Game, Hard Target, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Hunger Games.

 

Los Angeles, May 20, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).