THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (72)

Directed by: Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel (1932)

Starring: Leslie Banks, Joel McCrea, Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong

The Pitch: A big-game hunter, shipwrecked on an isolated island, finds himself hunted down like an animal by a mad Count.

Theo Sez: A dry run for the jungle-movie splendour of the same team's KING KONG - which, released a year later, was (among other things) a more fleshed-out exploration of the same proto-environmentalist theme : "the beast of the jungle, killing just for his existence, is called savage ; the man, killing just for sport, is called civilised". This one - concentrating more on the latter half of the equation, closer to the mad-scientist genre than the monster movie - clearly isn't in the same league, with a running time of little more than an hour and a rather anaemic heroine, Wray not having quite mastered the damsel-in-distress bit yet (she does a notably hilarious job of banging at the villain with her fists) ; but it's a terrific entertainment, with still-exciting action sequences (the opening shipwreck, the superbly-edited chase climax) and an unrelenting pace. And of course, when all else fails, there's no reason why you can't enjoy it simply as a camp classic : bits like the dolly-shot from the top of a staircase whooshing right down to a close-up of the villainous Banks (as "Count Zaroff"!) standing at the bottom, looking bug-eyed and utterly demonic, may be corny - but they're also irresistible.