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The Naked Prey

By Scott Tobias | January 9, 2008 | 5:03am

Film Reviews DVD

In Burden Of Dreams, a documentary about the
troubled shooting of his 1982 biopic Fitzcarraldo, director Werner Herzog,
fed up with nature's persistent hex on his production, talks about the jungle
as a site of "overwhelming and collective murder." Though Cornel Wilde's views
are slightly more charitable, the producer-director-star of 1966's adventure
film The Naked Prey frequently cuts away to animals dueling ferociously on the
sub-Saharan plain—a reminder that nature isn't lush and harmonious, but
rife with Darwinian savagery. This perspective on African strife courts racism,
especially in the opening narration, which likens human struggle on the Dark
Continent to the animals. But Wilde's thrillingly primal take on The Most
Dangerous Game
proves more nuanced than it seems at first, and comments just as surely on the
then-contemporary issues of apartheid and the civil-rights movement as it does
on its early-19th-century colonialist setting.

Nominated for a Best
Original Screenplay Oscar even though it was only nine pages long, the spare
script took inspiration from the story of John Colter, a wily trapper on the
Lewis and Clark expedition who fled capture from the Blackfoot Indians. Wilde
plays the enigmatic leader of an ivory-hunting safari that runs afoul of local
tribesmen, who take them captive, torture them, and kill them for the leader's
pleasure. One man is hog-tied to the ground near a deadly snake, another cast
in clay and cooked over an open fire, but Wilde is set loose, naked, and hunted
down for sport by a pack of warriors. As he's pursued across the savanna, Wilde
tries to outfox the natives while staving off hunger and dehydration.

A major influence on Mel
Gibson's Apocalypto, The Naked Prey has the brute force of great pulp; there's little
dialogue, and even much of that is untranslated African dialect. Yet much as
Wilde strives to express man's animal nature, he isn't crude or culturally
insensitive, so much as sharply attuned to the hideous offenses that put his
character in such a bind. All things considered, the film implies, the locals
are perfectly justified in hunting the white man for sport. It's a bold
statement to make—especially in South Africa, where most of the film was
shot—but the film's two-fisted minimalism drives it home with righteous
authority.

Key features: An informative commentary track by film
scholar Stephen Prince and an account of Colter's escape, read by Paul
Giamatti, highlight a solid supplemental package.

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