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The Naked Prey [1966] (REGION 1) (NTSC)


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Cornel Wilde is `Man,' and Man is The Naked Prey
Review date: 2008-07-25 Rating: 10 out of 10

`A hundred years ago, Africa was a vast, dark unknown. Only a few explorers and missionaries, the ivory hunters and the infamous slave traders risked their lives on its blood-soaked trails. Gleaming tusks were the prize and sweating slaves, sold by their own kings and chiefs in the ceaseless tribal wars or seized by slavers. The lion and the leopard hunted savagely among the huge herds of game. And man, lacking the will to understand other men, became like the beasts, and their way of life was his.'

Cornel Wilde is `Man,' and Man is The Naked Prey. How tough is Cornel Wilde? Not only could he star in a film that sees him chased across a hostile environment by murderous tribesmen but could direct it as well in a primitive location in terrible conditions while seriously ill. While not the world's greatest actor he's the right physical presence for the part: there's something primal enough about him to convince as the kind of man who, when spattered with the blood of an enemy, just rubs it in rather than brushes it off. Indeed, Wilde was even planning to make a sequel decades later while dying of cancer.

Based on John Coulter's escape from Blackfoot tribesmen during the Lewis and Clark expedition and originally intended as a Western before South African tax breaks prompted a change of locale, it's a simple story well told. Wilde is leading an ivory hunting safari that, thanks to callous employer Gert Van Der Berg, falls foul of Ken Gampu's tribesmen, who later attack them and deal out various imaginative tortures and deaths to all except Wilde, who shows no fear. Reasoning that because he looks like a lion, he deserves a lion's death, they give him a chance: stripped naked and completely unarmed, they'll give him a head start before chasing after him and killing him. Only their prey is far more resourceful than they imagine, and what was intended as a quick kill becomes a long manhunt through a savage landscape.

It's not a new story, even in 1966: the manhunt movie had been a sporadic staple since The Most Dangerous Game and the same true story it was based on had served as partial inspiration for Run of the Arrow ten years earlier while in more recent years its done service in First Blood and Apocalypto. Yet it's rarely been done this well. It's also surprisingly ahead of its time, anticipating Peckinpah in the village children play-acting each of the executions and, most surprisingly, avoiding much of the racial stereotyping of the day. The tribesmen aren't supermen - they run out of breath as well, get thirsty, argue among themselves and even want to go home. And while the tribe do delight in (probably) invented tortures, it's not without cause, and Wilde isn't that far removed from them. Allan Quatermain in all but name, the film clearly sets `Man' apart from his white business partner - he only kills for ivory, not for sport and isn't interested in going into the slave trade for easy money - and just before the attack, Wilde makes a direct link between Wilde's sense of hearing and Ken Gampu's sense of smell. Both men rely on their senses for survival, acutely aware of their surroundings in a story where it's survival not just of the fastest and the fittest but also the one who can adapt most to their environment - and their environment is not a pretty picture here. Its depiction of nature as a savage and unsentimental battlefield where its kill or be killed today seems like a pre-emptive two fingers to Terrence Malick's recent work

Pared down to the bone - there's no characterisation as such - and played in deep focus throughout, it may not be the greatest adventure film ever made, but it's a damn good one.

The extras on Criterion's DVD aren't that plentiful but are good: soundtrack cues, a reading of an account of John Coulter's real-life escape, original trailer, booklet including an interview with Wilde and a good audio commentary despite the odd mistake (The Most Dangerous Game wasn't made in 1936). The 2.35:1 widescreen transfer is especially good and, unlike the TV prints, the film is uncut.

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Reviews


Go Wilde in the Country
Review date: 2008-04-24 Rating: 8 out of 10

`the Naked Prey' is the story of one man's battle with the wild and the wilderness, with nothing but his wits as a weapon. Not a very complex plot, but it's simplicity is one of it's (many) major strengths. There's no secondary characters, no sub-plots, no asinine, pointless romances, just a visceral, survival-at-any-cost chase to the death, through the jungles and plains of undiscovered Africa.
Directed with some energy by former matinee idol, Cornel Wilde, 'NP' is a rugged, belligerent story of one mans will against apparently insurmountable odds.
Briefly, it's the tale of a safari leader, who, having seen his expedition ritually slaughtered by a delighted tribe, is given a chance for freedom. He's stripped and given a head - start before chosen warriors give chase, with the sole intention of running him through with eye-wateringly nasty spears.
To survive he must become as savage as his pursuers, and this is his greatest disadvantage - savagery comes natural to them.
It's not a perfect film. It's main flaw is the casting of Wilde himself as the lead. His is a suitably intense performance, not without vital humour, but, after a solid first hour, gives way to typical Hollywood cop - out. He rescue's a native child from some splendidly swarthy Arab type slave traders, and then is saved from a river by another child whom he befriends. The film goes off at a complete tangent here, when it should press on to it's climax. He's the only person with any respect or understanding of the natives, so it's hardly a turnabout when one of them helps him. It seems contrived to calm the film down a bit, lessen the impact of some of the brutality we've endured. To dampen the prevailing effect of the matter-of-fact death that we've been relentlessly exposed to.
The ending is a surprise, albeit with echoes of Rourke's Drift, but again it comes across as a mite forced, slightly studio induced. Or maybe they just couldn't think of one. I expected some wonderful metaphor or paradox, some redemption, some hope for the future of the fighting human spirit. I got none of that. It's not particularly bad, it's just at odds with what's gone before.
A lot of what's gone before though, is simply magnificent. Potent, bloody savagery. People are burnt alive on spits, stabbed, slashed, fed to snakes, chained up, clubbed, coshed, slit, bitten, chased by lions and shot.
There's a lot of distressing animal death. Inflicted by other animals in day-to-day survival contests, as well as the inexcusable smiling death dished out by Wilde's hunting party, who slaughter whole families of elephants, young and old, for `sport'.
The film has relentless pace, it plays like an acid-trip Tarzan adventure with gore and sadism. The soundtrack has tribal drums thumping and cracking, and it's effectively filmed. You get a good sense of the cloying heat (you could get a tan just watching it) and I've never seen Africa looking better in a film. (not even in `King Solomons Mines' with Stewart `mad sideburns' Granger (!) )
Like a reverse `Walkabout' with testosterone instead of oestrogen, a burly male landscape despoiler, instead of divine earth-mother Jenny Agutter.
`Nature red in tooth and claw' is a clichéd maxim, but it sums up `the Naked Prey' perfectly, and this Criterion dvd release (at last!) gives this raw, superb film, the snarling respect it deserves.




An exciting chase film from Cornel Wilde with something of a message, but beware of all those auteur-loving critics
Review date: 2008-02-08 Rating: 8 out of 10

"Certainly one of the wildest, most original, and most instinctive movie stars turned auteurs in the Hollywood annals, Cornel Wilde made procedurals of uncivilized survival, in a visual syntax that ranged from comic-strip splat to outright gut punch." Poor Cornel Wilde, to have to carry that burden of ripe writing.

Wilde was a limited actor who managed to make it to the big-time in the mid-Forties, only to see his status as a star slip down the ladder starting at the end of the Forties. He always wanted to direct, so he took what remained of his bankability and parlayed it into a handful of movies he produced and directed in the Fifties and Sixties. It turned out, in my view, that he was just as sincere a director as he was straightforward and without guile as an actor. He brought a kind of naive directness to his films (and without the awful French accent he sometimes employed in an acting role). As a director, he knew what he wanted, but he had very limited financing to get the job done, Says the same overwrought film critic quoted above, "Wilde remains an unexhumed artist, a scattershot brother to delirious genre god Samuel Fuller..." I can only say, "Oh, brother!"

The Naked Prey is a simple story that takes place in colonial South Africa. Wilde, identified in the credits only as Man, has been hired to lead a small safari on the hunt for elephant ivory. Along the way the man who is paying for the safari manages to offend a group of warriors they encounter. Wilde tries to intervene, but to no effect. Not much later the safari is attacked. The white men are captured and brought to the native camp. All the captives are killed in ingenious and humiliating ways, which the men, women and children of the tribe think is hilarious. Wilde, however, is recognized as the man who attempted to give the warriors their due. So he is condemned to an honorable death. He will be set free, naked and without weapons, and at a specified point a group of warriors will chase after him. They will kill him when they capture him. It will be death, but a brave death. The Naked Prey is the story of the chase, told without English dialogue or subtitles. Wilde the director cuts away frequently from the chase to show us pictures of the struggle for life in Africa, everything from big cats chasing baboons to baboons chasing big cats, to toads eating other toads, to scorpions getting ready for a face-off, to a lizard and a snake in combat, to a disemboweled elephant being butchered for food, to a snake biting a man and a man eating a snake, to slave traders attacking a peaceful village.

Wilde does not give his character any nobility, and he makes no effort to portray Man's pursuers as either noble or simplistic. We've seen that Man is a decent fellow and he remains one. In his exhausting struggle to keep ahead of the warriors, he is able to kill a few. This gives him no pleasure, nor does it give us pleasure. The fact of the matter, Wilde shows us, is that the pursued and the pursuing are equally decent men.

The man also is not particularly ingenious or brave. He is simply desperate, but he also is knowledgeable and experienced. The message Wilde gives us, I think, is that life is struggle, and that man's struggles are not so far removed from all other creature's struggles. This is a message of no great depth, even for 1967, but it's presented in an exciting and well-constructed package.

Wilde seems to be in the process of becoming the latest darling of the auteur-loving film crowd, energized in part by the Criterion release of The Naked Prey. This release looks just fine, with lots of African scenery to go along with the story. Among the few extras, Criterion includes a commentary track by Stephen Prince, identified as a film scholar, and a booklet which features an essay by Michael Atkinson, identified as a film critic. Atkinson's writing style is as fervid as his enthusiasm for Cornel Wilde (and Sam Fuller).

Product Details/Specifications


Actor(s):
Gert Van den Bergh
Bella Randles
Patrick Mynhardt
Ken Gampu
Cornel Wilde

Creators:
Cornel Wilde (Primary Contributor)
Cornel Wilde (Producer)
Gert Van den Bergh (Primary Contributor)
H.A.R. Thomson (Cinematographer)
Roger Cherrill (Editor)
Sven Persson (Producer)
Clint Johnston (Writer)
Don Peters (Writer)

Director(s):

Recording label: Criterion
Manufacturer: Criterion
EAN: 0715515027328
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, Restored, Widescreen, NTSC,
Release date: 2008-01-15
Universal product code (UPC): 715515027328
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Region code: 1
Running time: 96 minutes
Theatrical release date: 1966
Language: English (Original Language)

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