BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

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Finch
Joined: Mon Jul 07, 2008 5:09 pm
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BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#1 Post by Finch » Thu Jul 21, 2022 11:40 am

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SPECIAL FEATURES

Limited Edition O-Card Slipcase [2000 copies]
1080p presentation on Blu-ray from a 2K restored scan of the original camera negatives
Optional English SDH
Brand new audio commentary with author Stephen Jones and author / critic Kim Newman
Brand new interview with author / critic Kim Newman on the “hunted human” sub-genre
Brand new interview with film scholar Stephen Thrower
A collector’s booklet featuring a new essay by Craig Ian Mann, illustrated with archival imagery

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FrauBlucher
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#2 Post by FrauBlucher » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:00 pm


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tenia
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Re: MoC Forthcoming, Wishlist, and Random Speculation

#3 Post by tenia » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:02 pm

FrauBlucher wrote:
Thu Jul 21, 2022 11:20 am
The details are up for the new releases. The Most Dangerous Game is a new 2k scan from original cam negative.
I suppose it means they're using the master used by Wicked Vision rather than the one from Flicker Alley, which seems for the best.

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swo17
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Re: MoC Forthcoming, Wishlist, and Random Speculation

#4 Post by swo17 » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:06 pm

Yes, it would be. Incidentally, I don't see anything about this being a "new" 2K scan. Where did you see that, FrauBlucher?

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Maltic
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#5 Post by Maltic » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:11 pm

Commentary and interview with Newman. Man, can he talk...

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FrauBlucher
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Re: MoC Forthcoming, Wishlist, and Random Speculation

#6 Post by FrauBlucher » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:14 pm

swo17 wrote:
Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:06 pm
Yes, it would be. Incidentally, I don't see anything about this being a "new" 2K scan. Where did you see that, FrauBlucher?
My bad, I should’ve wrote ‘restored’ instead of ‘new’

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therewillbeblus
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#7 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:22 pm

I love this movie- so glad to see it getting an upgrade. It's maybe the most fun gothic horror setup, swimming in the hangout vibe of character and relationship establishment within the chamber setting, and then having the reveal be an antisocial human horror to boot. Lean, relaxed yet fierce entertainment.

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ryannichols7
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#8 Post by ryannichols7 » Thu Jul 21, 2022 8:45 pm

Maltic wrote:
Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:11 pm
Commentary and interview with Newman. Man, can he talk...
he's on all four (counting the Vampyr standard edition) releases this October, absolutely wild.

thrilled this got a release with the new transfer and seriously awesome packaging. shame they couldn't port Criterion's old commentary with Bruce Eder (who myself, dustybooks, and Chris I know are all huge fans of) but can't complain with how good this is going to look. truly a no brainer title for Eureka that I'm surprised they never did before this

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colinr0380
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#9 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jul 23, 2022 8:52 am

therewillbeblus wrote:
Thu Jul 21, 2022 12:22 pm
I love this movie- so glad to see it getting an upgrade. It's maybe the most fun gothic horror setup, swimming in the hangout vibe of character and relationship establishment within the chamber setting, and then having the reveal be an antisocial human horror to boot. Lean, relaxed yet fierce entertainment.
I'm in the camp that prefers this to King Kong, which The Most Dangerous Game was made as a companion piece to as a smaller scaled, less special effects intensive film and features some of the ideas and elements (plus shared sets, actors and composer) that are interesting to compare with the bigger film. Some of the imagery of the chase of Joel McCrea and Fay Wray through the jungle is highly similar to the race back to the village with Kong in pursuit in the later film. This also has to be in the running for most remade plot of all time, and that probably speaks to its power as one of the most taut thrillers with some of the best action and chase scenes on film even now 90 years on. The way that the editing of the scene where the couple are hunted combines with the score, the horn that Count Zaroff blows and the barking of the pursuing dogs is fantastic in propelling that sequence along.

I love Bruce Eder's comment on the old Criterion DVD that the film has that enormously quick set up of its situation within its first couple of minutes ("I can think of only one movie from this era that contains exposition that runs this fast: Each Dawn I Die with James Cagney") to get through the exposition as fast as possible and onto that island. And I also really like that the theme of the film is about a relatively flippant insouciant hunter finding himself turned into the prey, but never really find out if the character himself actually learns that lesson himself or if it is just left to the audience to discern the moral from the tale. That is also what makes those early discussion scenes so wonderful as well, as Joel McCrea and Leslie Banks kind of connect philosophically as fellow hunters, and even when Banks crosses a line that McCrae will not and he becomes the hunted this respect remains somewhat, giving the chance for Banks to hunt a prey truly deserving of the chase, whilst McCrea puts all of his knowledge of trapping into use. The characters of the girl and her brother are more the true innocent creatures and become the spoils being tussled over but in a beautifully perverse way perhaps the true love story is between the protagonist and antagonist, and maybe that is why the final shots can also be rather moving.

It is interesting to see that MoC have dropped the UK retitling (as "The Hounds of Zaroff") for this edition to go with the original US title. And I presume they are going to keep the shark attack shots in positive (as they were in the Criterion DVD) rather than playing in negative for censorship reasons (as they apparently were in the 1938 reissue)

The Cooper and Schoedsack film that has always interested me but which I have not yet gotten hold of a copy of would be 1935's Last Days of Pompeii.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Jul 24, 2022 3:14 am, edited 3 times in total.

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FrauBlucher
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#10 Post by FrauBlucher » Sat Jul 23, 2022 10:20 am

I would also throw The Island of Lost Souls in as a sort of companion piece. They were both released within a few months of each other in 1932. Throw in Frankenstein the previous year and you get a feeling that a theme in that era was man playing God. This is a simplistic overview, one creates man, one one kills man and one changes beast to man. Granted 2 of the 3 source materials were written in the 1800s. Clearly there was a fascination back then with these type of stories and there were others that I'm respectively leaving out. Maybe on the heels of WWI and The Great Depression helped to create this dark genre.

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jegharfangetmigenmyg
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#11 Post by jegharfangetmigenmyg » Sat Jul 23, 2022 11:49 am

Yeah, this one and Islands of Lost Souls. These are all time greats in my book. I vividly remember going to a late screening of an earlier restoration of this one at Venice. Must have been ten years ago. The build-up, pacing and then the shocking revelation. The dialogue is also on fire, AFAIR. I've never quite warmed up to King Kong, and compared to most of the classic Universals, the unpredictability of these pre-code horrors make them timeless and still hold up a century later.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#12 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Jul 23, 2022 12:41 pm

colinr0380 wrote:
Sat Jul 23, 2022 8:52 am
I'm in the camp that prefers this to King Kong, which The Most Dangerous Game was made as a companion piece to as a smaller scaled, less special effects intensive film and features some of the ideas and elements (plus shared sets, actors and composer) that are interesting to compare with the bigger film.
I feel the same, and always mention that I prefer this to King Kong when I recommend the film to anyone- I'm surprised I didn't say so here since I certainly thought about it going in! As far as I'm concerned, this is my favorite of all of those early pre-code 'horrors'. Great thoughts, as always, colin!

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colinr0380
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#13 Post by colinr0380 » Sat Jul 23, 2022 1:26 pm

Apropros of nothing but I remember getting particularly frustrated a couple of years ago when composer Neil Brand did a series of BBC programmes called Sound of Cinema: The Music That Made The Movies and devoted a section to how unique and out of nowhere Max Steiner's score of King Kong was without mentioning The Most Dangerous Game at all, which felt like an egregious oversight due to Steiner working out a lot of the same themes (particularly in the driving score during the chase sequence) that would later be elaborated on in in the Kong score (even the rising, surprisingly mournful and almost romantic theme over the toppling body of the villain in the final shot!)
FrauBlucher wrote:
Sat Jul 23, 2022 10:20 am
I would also throw The Island of Lost Souls in as a sort of companion piece. They were both released within a few months of each other in 1932. Throw in Frankenstein the previous year and you get a feeling that a theme in that era was man playing God. This is a simplistic overview, one creates man, one one kills man and one changes beast to man. Granted 2 of the 3 source materials were written in the 1800s. Clearly there was a fascination back then with these type of stories and there were others that I'm respectively leaving out. Maybe on the heels of WWI and The Great Depression helped to create this dark genre.
There are also the other Fay Wray films of the period: Doctor X and The Mystery of the Wax Museum. The whole era of pre-Code horrors, as jeghar and therewillbeblus say, is rife with fascinating and difficult explorations of compulsive behaviour if not outright perversity and frank sexuality. Throw in The Mask of Fu Manchu, Freaks and the Fredric March version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde too, which all probably helped contribute to the Hays Code.

This is probably all going to get covered in the Stephen Jones and Kim Newman commentary, but I want to particularly praise the Bruce Eder commentary on the Criterion. I particularly like that he talks about the nuances of the relationship between McCrae and Banks as a comment about two big game hunters who respect their prey and want to test their mettle against them (as the explorers-turned-filmmakers Schoedsack, Pichel and Cooper apparently were sympathetic to) which could contrast against those who hunt purely just for trophies. And that Eder points out that Robert Armstrong's character of the alcoholic brother plays as both an extra pointed aspect for the time due to the film being made and released during the era of Prohibition, but also that apparently Cooper was a very anti-alcohol person which may have resulted in the buffoonish portrayal of the drunkard figure here (as well as how later on drunk characters are responsible for causing the chaos or getting their comeuppances in Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young). Which made him an ironic collaborator with John Ford (the king of the good natured drunk scene) in the late 1940s!

Eder also mentions that The Most Dangerous Game was subject to a lot of RKO's notorious cost cutting to keep the studio afloat whilst Kong was in its lengthy production period (the same kind of situation which occurred a decade later to the films surrounding Citizen Kane) which apparently caused entire characters and scenes to "simply be ripped out of the script" (even before the laboratory/trophy room scene was removed, which is this film's notoriously lost, too extreme for contemporary sensibilities, equivalent of Kong's spider canyon scene), which makes the film run at a breathlessly fast 63 minutes as compared to Kong's 100 minutes. There simply isn't time in this film for any lulls in the action and that brutal streamlining of everything really ends up working to the film's benefit.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Fri Aug 12, 2022 3:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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rapta
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#14 Post by rapta » Sun Jul 24, 2022 2:34 pm

I think I was originally made aware of this thanks to Fincher's Zodiac, where it's specifically mentioned in the plot, and I've been curious to see it since then. Add to that it stars Joel McCrea (who I know best from Sullivan's Travels), I can't help but pre-order this. Well done Eureka, a great slate and this is the highlight for me (although yet another Karloff set is very tempting too).

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FrauBlucher
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#15 Post by FrauBlucher » Thu Aug 11, 2022 4:34 pm

I watched the Criterion DVD last night. I was surprised and impressed with how it looked. The bluray should look outstanding. I've been use to seeing it aired on cable or over the air channels years ago. I'm excited for this release

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FrauBlucher
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#16 Post by FrauBlucher » Fri Oct 07, 2022 3:03 pm

This looks like a terrific edition

Beaver

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Caligula
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#17 Post by Caligula » Fri Oct 07, 2022 3:31 pm

FrauBlucher wrote:
Fri Oct 07, 2022 3:03 pm
This looks like a terrific edition

Beaver
I was hoping for The Most Dangerous, ah, never mind

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FrauBlucher
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Re: BD 269 The Most Dangerous Game

#18 Post by FrauBlucher » Fri Oct 28, 2022 7:12 pm


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