The Most Dangerous Game

This article is about the short story by Richard Connell. For the film, see The Most Dangerous Game (film). For the novel by Gavin Lyall, see The Most Dangerous Game (Gavin Lyall novel).

"The Most Dangerous Game", also published as "The Hounds of Zaroff", is a short story by Richard Connell. It was published in Collier's Weekly on January 19, 1924.

Widely anthologized, and the author's best-known work, "The Most Dangerous Game" features as its main character a big-game hunter from New York, who falls off a yacht and swims to an isolated island in the Caribbean, where he is hunted by a Cossack aristocrat. The story is an inversion of the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.

Synopsis

Sanger Rainsford and his hunting companion Whitney are traveling to the Rio to hunt the fabled big cat of that region, the jaguar. After a discussion about how they are the hunters instead of the hunted, Rainsford hears gun shots, drops his pipe, and falls off of their boat while trying to retrieve it and into the Caribbean Sea. After he realizes he cannot swim back to the boat, he swims to an island, Ship-Trap Island, that is the subject of local superstition. He finds a palatial chateau inhabited by two Cossacks: the owner, General Zaroff, and his gigantic deaf-mute servant Ivan. The General, another big-game hunter, has heard of Rainsford from his book about hunting snow leopards in Tibet. After inviting him to dinner, General Zaroff tells Rainsford of how he became bored with hunting because it no longer challenged him. Thus, Zaroff says, he decided to live on an island where he could capture shipwrecked sailors to send them into the jungle supplied with food, a knife, and hunting clothes to be his quarry. After a three-hour head start, he would follow them to hunt and kill them. If the captives eluded him, Ivan, and a pack of hunting dogs for three days, General Zaroff would let the man go, but no one had eluded him that long thus far. Zaroff invited Rainsford to join him in his hunt but Rainsford, appalled, refuses. Zaroff then tells Rainsford that he will be the next person to be hunted (if he refuses he will be knouted to death by Ivan).

Rainsford lays an intricate trail in the forest and climbs a tree. Zaroff finds him easily, but decides to play with him like a cat with a mouse. After the failed attempt at eluding the General, Rainsford builds a "Malay man catcher" which injures Zaroff in the shoulder, causing him to return home for the night. Next he sets a Burmese tiger pit, which kills one of Zaroff's hounds. Finally, he sets a trap that was a Ugandan native trick with his knife that kills Ivan, but not Zaroff. To escape the General and his approaching hounds, Rainsford dives off a cliff. Zaroff assumes Rainsford has killed himself and returns home. Zaroff locks himself in his bedroom and turns on the lights, revealing Rainsford, who had hidden by the bed curtains having swum around the island. Zaroff congratulates him on winning the "game" but Rainsford decides to fight him, and says "I'm still a beast at bay." The General accepts the challenge, saying that the loser will be fed to the dogs and the winner will sleep in his bed. Though the ensuing fight is not described, the story ends with Rainsford's observation: "He had never slept in a better bed, Rainsford decided," implying that he defeated Zaroff.

Adaptations

Film

The story has been adapted for film numerous times. The most significant of these adaptations (and the only one to use the original characters) was RKO's The Most Dangerous Game, released in 1932, having been shot (mostly at night) on sets used during the day for the "Skull Island" sequences of King Kong. The movie starred Joel McCrea as Rainsford (renamed "Robert" instead of "Sanger") and Leslie Banks as Zaroff, and added two other principal characters: brother and sister pair Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and Martin Trowbridge (Robert Armstrong). (Wray and Armstrong were also filming King Kong on the same sets during the day.)

Zaroff, the owner of the island, shares with Rainsford that he got bored of hunting and discovered the "most dangerous game," which Rainsford assumes is hunting tigers. Eve is suspicious of Zaroff and tells the doubtful Rainsford. A short time after Martin goes missing with Zaroff and his henchmen and during this time Eve and Rainsford go into Zaroff's trophy room to discover a human head. Then Zaroff comes back with the dead Martin and challenges Rainsford and Eve to the game in order to keep their lives. After a series of events including eluding Zaroff and faking Rainsford's own death, Eve and Rainsford escape as Zaroff falls to his death.

The story was adapted three times as a radio play for the series Suspense, on 23 September 1943 with Orson Welles as Zaroff and Keenan Wynn as Rainsford, on 1 February 1945 with frequent Welles collaborator Joseph Cotten portraying Rainsford, and on 1 October 1947 for the CBS radio program Escape. In the first two of these productions, Rainsford narrates the story in retrospect as he waits in Zaroff's bedroom for the final confrontation.

A second movie adaptation, a remake of the 1932 movie and also produced by RKO, was A Game of Death, released in 1945. Directed by Robert Wise at the very beginning of his long and distinguished directing career, the movie was regarded poorly. Footage from the original was recycled, and one actor from the original, Noble Johnson, was cast in the remake. In keeping with events of the time, A Game of Death changed Zaroff into "Erich Kreiger", a Nazi, and was set in the aftermath of the Second World War. In 1956 a second official remake was made, Run for the Sun, starring Richard Widmark and Jane Greer.

List of film adaptations

• The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
• A Game of Death (1945)
• The Dangerous Game (1953)
• Run for the Sun (1956)
• Bloodlust! (1961)
• The Naked Prey (1966)
• The Woman Hunt (1973)
• Mottomo kiken na yuugi (1978)
• Turkey Shoot (1982)
• Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity (1987)
• Deadly Prey (1988)
• Lethal Woman (1988)
• Death Ring (1992)
• Hard Target (1993)
• Surviving the Game (1994) ^[1]
• The Pest (1997)
• The Tournament (2009)
• Naked Fear (2007)
• Taxidermy (2011)

Television

The story has also been the basis for plots for several television series.

• Gilligan's Island - "The Hunter"
• Lost in Space - "Hunter's Moon"
• Get Smart - "Island of the Darned" featuring 99 and Maxwell Smart being hunted in an island by a KAOS hunting enthusiast.
• The Incredible Hulk - "The Snare"
• Logan's Run - "Capture"
• The Monkees - "Monkees Marooned"
• The Critic - one cold opening^[specify] had Jay's boss, Duke Phillips, calling to tell him that he finally got his license to hunt man, and advises Jay to buy some running shoes.
• Dexter's Laboratory - one "Dial M for Monkey" segment had Monkey being abducted by an intergalactic game hunter; the same hunter later had a cameo in an episode of Samurai Jack.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - "Captive Pursuit"
• Criminal Minds - "Open Season" where victims are found in Idaho wilderness after being pursued and killed by two avid hunters.
• Codename: Kids Next Door - "Operation: SAFARI"
• Supernatural - "The Benders"
• The Simpsons - In the "Survival of the Fattest" episode in "Treehouse of Horrors XVI," Mr. Burns invites a bunch of Simpsons characters to a hunting party, but it turns into a Most Dangerous Game hunt when he starts killing everyone in a hunting fashion.
• CSI: Miami - "Hunting Ground"
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars - finale episodes "Padawan Lost" and "Wookiee Hunt." Anakin Skywalker's apprentice Ahsoka is captured by Trandoshan hunters who hunt Jedi younglings for sport.
• Dollhouse - "The Target"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer - "Homecoming"
• Dark Angel - "Pollo Loco"
• American Dad- "The Vacation Goo"- the Smith Family washes up on an island and are then hunted by a group of men, but it turns out the hunters were merely paintball players.
• Star Trek- "Arena"

Real-life parallels

Robert Hansen, a serial killer who was active in the early 1980s, would kidnap women and then release them in the Knik River Valley in Alaska. He would then hunt them, armed with a knife and a Ruger Mini-14 rifle.^{[citation needed]}

In 1976, Hayes Noel, a stock trader, Bob Gurnsey, and author Charles Gaines were discussing Gaines' recent trip to Africa and his experiences hunting buffalo. Inspired in part by The Most Dangerous Game, they created paintball, a game where they would stalk and hunt each other; recreating the same adrenaline rush that came with animal hunting.^[2]

See also

• Human hunting

References

1. ^ Stafford, Jeff "The Most Dangerous Game" (TCM article)
2. ^ Davidson, Steve, et al. The Complete Guide to Paintball, 4–12. Hatherleigh Press, New York. 1999

External links

• Full text at Classic Shorts
• Full text at E-Server
• Watch 1932 film Most Dangerous Game