Curse of the Leisured Class: Count Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game
Pity poor Count Zaroff. As the man who has everything, including money, servants, valuable artworks, a pack of skilled hunting dogs, a chateau-like fortress, and his own isolated tropical isle on which to keep them, you think he’d be satisfied. But Zaroff suffers–and how!–from the plight of those with nothing to do and too much time to do it in. He’s bored. Especially with the one thing he’s devoted his life to: big-game hunting. He’s chased after every beast the planet has to offer, but now the thrill is gone; and, like Alexander, he has no more worlds to conquer. That is, until his invention, as he explains with unsavory relish to his (rather unwilling) houseguests, of “a new sensation” for the hunt. Which happens to be his fellow human beings. He’s even set up a secret trophy room to house his collection of prize heads.
What struck us in our recent re-viewing of RKO’s 1932 classic film The Most Dangerous Game was how much of a post-Great War/Depression-era/class allegory can be read into its bizarre goings-on. In Richard Connell’s famous short story, from which the film was adapted, and to which it hews closely in plot, Zaroff is a Russian military officer who combines blood sport with upper-class tastes (humming a bit of Madama Butterfly while tracking his prey). The movie ups Zaroff’s status to the nobility, making him an aristocratic refugee from the Russian Revolution who still affects patrician hauteur; he enters the film faultlessly clad in white tie and tails, one hand balancing a six-inch-long cigarette like a martini glass. He could just as easily be a refugee from a Noel Coward play, or maybe P.G. Wodehouse’s Blandings Castle, ready for a brace of cocktails and some bracing repartee. Instead, Zaroff amuses himself with the finer details of his ghoulish hobby: having set up a deliberately misguided buoy system on his island’s shores, he waits for the shipwrecks and an opportunity to “stock,” as he puts it, his game supply, consisting mainly of sailors and other lower-class riff-raff. When one drunken guest (Robert Armstrong) behaves in too proletarian a fashion for the Count’s refined sensibilities, the unfortunate fellow also becomes fair game, in more ways than one.
As embodied in Leslie Banks’ amazing performance, Zaroff is an effete savage. Banks alternates between exhausted ennui, sadistic teasing of his guests to guess what his “new animal” is (“You found one?” asks a visitor; “Yea-ya-sss,” Banks replies, dragging the word out to several syllables’ length and trailing it off in a hiss), and bug-eyed mania when hot on the chase. But he also endows the Count with a touch of womanish hysteria; in moments of intense excitement he’ll pass a febrile hand over a forehead scar, like a panicked hostess whose nervous tic of smoothing down that unruly curl surfaces whenever faced with social stress. Banks was a British stage actor who saw action in the First World War; a bad injury left his face partially paralyzed, and the filmmakers—Ernest B. Schoedsack, Irving Pichel, and Merian C. Cooper—take advantage of this disfigurement, often shadowing the paralyzed side so as to split the Count’s face between the benign and the sinister. The effect is like one of those photographic images that present two different views of one picture, depending on how you angle it; it only needs a tilt of the frame to see the brutish Darwinian ancestor behind the cultured descendant.
Opposing the Count and his macabre pastime is Joel McCrae’s Bob Rainsford, a fellow big-game hunter forced into playing Zaroff’s game Zaroff’s way. Against Banks’ aristocratic thug McCrae comes across like an old-fashioned college football hero: a healthy, fresh-thinking innocent, with a gee-whiz outlook on life—his shipwrecked comrades were “the swellest crowd on earth,” he says—and with no idea, at first, of what nasty pleasures the Count keeps hinting at. He also doesn’t recognize class distinctions; covering a trench with leaves and branches to trap his foe, he notes that “when Mister Zaroff falls down there, he’ll be all through hunting.” The film pits post-War good, clean all-American muscle against 1920s Euro-trash decadence, as seen in the climactic hand-to-hand battle between a grimly vengeful Rainsford clad in torn shirt and khakis and the Count wrapped in a silk dressing gown. It’s the New World versus the Old, with the victory not in doubt.
Upping the ante is the presence of Fay Wray as Eve, another shipwreck survivor who becomes the contested prize between the two men. Wray’s character was not in the original Connell story; but her addition sharpens the testosterone-fueled clash: “Hunt first the enemy, then the woman,” Zaroff declares, salaciously adding “kill, then love–when you have known that, then you have known ecstasy.” Wray does more than provide the requisite romance for McCrae; she also grounds the plot in real feeling. Connell’s story clinically describes a competition between matched combantants (both men are expert hunters). But now our interest in whether Rainsford wins or loses is bound up with a gut-twisting dread of what’s in store for the fragile Eve should the Count kill Rainsford. Her possible fate is foreshadowed in the huge tapestry that hangs on the chateau’s wall above a sweeping staircase, depicting the mythological battle of the Lapiths and the Centaurs, its imagery dominated by a figure of a lust-ridden centaur carrying off a helpless female. The Old World represented by the Count is very old indeed.
However, there’s nothing old about The Most Dangerous Game. Though made over eighty years ago, the film is still exhilarating to watch, particularly in its pacing of the hunting scenes; the point-of-view camera shots, racing through the jungle, build like a crescendo to its startling finish. It’s also gorgeously photographed, mist shimmering off flesh and foliage in scenes in a foggy swamp, evoking both dream and nightmare. As many viewers may know, Schoedsack and Cooper were filming Game between set-ups for their following, even more famous film, King Kong, using the same jungle sets and two of the later film’s stars (Wray and Armstrong). Everyone who’s seen Kong remembers its central character; but we think Banks, and his portrayal of Zaroff, is just as memorable. Many of the actor’s line readings will stay with you, such as his answer to Rainsford’s inquiry as to what happens when someone wins: "To date I have not lost.” Banks doesn’t trumpet the words; he enunciates them evenly, but edges them in acid; it sounds as if he’s speaking through bared teeth. The membrane separating beast and human is thin indeed, and Banks keeps us aware of how tenuous that barrier is. Although Game has been filmed many times since, in varying degrees of fidelity to its original story, this one remains the best. Required viewing.
