This was the case in The Most Dangerous Game and Run for the Sun, as well as more recent films following the same script such as Beyond the Reach. It’s also the case that many such films have the prey being a hunter himself, or guide, who experiences the tables being turned. I guess first among these would be the descendants of The Most Dangerous Game, a movie Wilde said he’d been inspired by that counts as the forefather of the “hunting-humans” genre. The other archetypal quality the film has can be seen in the way it suggests so many other stories and genres. I don’t see how this qualifies as a great screenplay. The concept isn’t terribly original, and it’s basically just a long chase film. Aside from the lack of dialogue, there really isn’t much to it. I do question the quality of the script here, however. Dialogue, however, is only part of the screenwriter’s art. And let’s face it, they probably could have cut half of that. Despite the script being only nine pages long. While I’m on the point I’ll mention that the screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. This is a story of survival that takes everything down to the essentials. He’s simply credited as “Man.” Not only that, he has scarcely any lines. It’s the fact that he has no back story or character or even name. It’s not just that Wilde’s white hunter is run off into the bush without any clothes (though his skin-coloured shorts are pretty obvious). I don’t think there’s any questioning how stripped down The Naked Prey is. When I say archetypal I mean a couple of things: (1) a story stripped down to its bare essentials, and (2) a story with a large footprint. What Thomson is getting at, however, is the archetypal nature of Wilde’s storytelling, especially in his films The Naked Prey, Beach Red, and No Blade of Grass. I also don’t think we can speak of him as a naive or primitive filmmaker, for some reasons I’ll mention in just a bit. This is a messy judgment, not least because the first films ever made don’t have any of the qualities of Wilde’s work. ![]() In his entry on Cornel Wilde in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, David Thomson likens Wilde’s films to the Dordogne cave paintings, saying “there are moments where one has the illusion of watching the first films ever made.”
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