The Most Dangerous Game

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This article is about the short story by Richard Connell. For the novel by Gavin Lyall, see The Most Dangerous Game (Gavin Lyall novel).
"The Most Dangerous Game"
Author Richard Connell
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Short Story
Publication date 1924

"The Most Dangerous Game" or "The Hounds of Zaroff" (1924) is a short story by Richard Connell.

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 becomes shipwrecked on an isolated island in the Caribbean, and is hunted by a Russian aristocrat. The story is about a sardonic and ironic gothic inversion of the big-game hunting safaris in Africa and South America that were fashionable among wealthy Americans in the 1920s.

Contents

[edit] Characters

  • Sanger Rainsford, an accomplished hunter from New York.
  • General Zaroff, a man of pre-Revolutionary Russian aristocratic background. Utterly fixated on hunting.
  • Ivan, Zaroff's large Cossack slave and bodyguard. He is deaf and has no tongue. This makes him ideal to Zaroff as it is impossible for Ivan to tell anyone of General Zaroff's murders if he escapes the island.
  • Whitney, one of Rainsford's boatmates who appears briefly in the introduction, wondering what it would be like if he was the hunted instead of hunter.

[edit] Adaptations

The story has been adapted for film numerous times. The most significant of these adaptations (and apparently 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: Eve Trowbridge (Fay Wray) and Martin Trowbridge (Robert Armstrong), who are brother and sister (Wray and Armstrong were also starring in King Kong on the same sets during the day).

The story was also twice produced as a radio play for the series Suspense, on 23 September 1943 with Orson Welles as Zaroff and Keenan Wynn as Rainsford, and on 1 February 1945 with frequent Welles collaborator Joseph Cotten playing Rainsford. In 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, 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 German Nazi, and was set in the aftermath of WWII. In 1956 a second official remake was made, Run for the Sun, starring Richard Widmark and Jane Greer.

Other versions include Bloodlust! (1961), The Woman Hunt (1973), Turkey Shoot (1982) and Surviving the Game (1994).[1]

The concept of The Most Dangerous Game has been reused in numerous works of fiction, including:

Films:

Television:

Comics:

[edit] Influences

The character of General Zaroff may have been influenced by the character of Prospero in William Shakespeare's The Tempest. Both characters live on isolated islands, and cause shipwrecks in order to bring unsuspecting sailors there, where they manipulate them to their own ends.

[edit] Zodiac Killer

The Most Dangerous Game is also said to have possibly been an inspiration to Arthur Leigh Allen, the one time primary suspect of the notorious Zodiac murders.