Deciding to watch the two films back to back illustrated quite clearly footage had been re-used. Game of Death was made in 1945 and released a couple of months after the end of the war. For this piece I’m looking at its legacy and focusing on the first and second remakes of the story. However so much has been written about this film I daresay the recent Eureka release, TV series and yet to be released new version will only go to add so much weight I’d end up becoming lost in the many texts available. Leslie Banks’s performance as the insane Russian hunter “Count Zaroff” is as defining as Bela Lugosi was for Dracula, although by today’s standards it’s a completely over the top performance. The plot followed the book quite closely and set the standard for all future adaptions. The first film adaption arrived in 1932 and featured much of the cast of the yet to be made King Kong along with some of the sets that would get re-used in the monster classic. Or to be succinct, the hunter becoming the hunted. Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game was first published in 1924 and was initially dismissed as pure escapism but at its heart is the one of the most primal instincts of what makes us human: hunting. We are on the brink of celebrating the centenary of a story that has been named “the most popular short story in English”. ❉ Dan Roberts looks at the legacy of 1932 classic The Most Dangerous Game and its two pre-1960 remakes.
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