Vorlage:Otheruses4 Vorlage:Infobox short story "The Most Dangerous Game" or "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 becomes shipwrecked on an isolated island in the Caribbean, and is hunted by a Russian 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.
- Sanger Rainsford, an accomplished and experienced hunter from New York.
- General Zaroff, a man of pre-Revolutionary Russian aristocratic background. Above middle-age. Utterly fixated on hunting.
- Ivan, Zaroff's large Cossack slave and bodyguard. He is deaf and has no tongue. Ivan is also dumb. This makes him ideal to Zaroff as it is impossible for Ivan to tell anyone of General Zaroff's murders if he somehow escapes the island.
- Whitney, Rainsford's friend who appears briefly in the introduction, wondering what it would be like if he was the hunted instead of hunter.
Summary
Sanger Rainsford, a hunter in the time, and his hunting companion, Whitney, are traveling to the Amazon Rainforest to hunt the fabled big cat of that region, the Jaguar. After a discussion about how they were the hunters instead of the hunted, Rainsford hears shots, drops his pipe, and falls off of their boat while trying to retrieve it. He washes up on an island, Ship-Trap Island, that is the subject of local superstition.
He finds a Palatial Chateau owned by a Cossack hunter named General Zaroff and his Cossack servant Ivan. General Zaroff had heard of Rainsford as he is a big game hunter. Zaroff has read Rainsford's book. Over dinner, General Zaroff explains to Rainsford how he became so good at hunting that he became bored and unchallenged with it. He then decided to live on an island where he captured shipwrecked sailors and sent them, with only food, a knife, and moccassins, into the jungle. Three hours later, he followed them to hunt them. If they eluded him for three days, he let them go, but he had so far managed to kill them all.
Zaroff tells Rainsford that he would be the next person he hunted. Rainsford runs into 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, Rainsford builds a "Malay man trap", which injures Zaroff in the shoulder. Next he sets a tiger trap, which kills one of Zaroff's hounds. Finally, he set a trap with his knife that kills Ivan , but not Zaroff. As the hounds approach, Rainsford jumps off a cliff into the ocean. Zaroff assumes he has killed himself and returns home. Rainsford is there, having swam around the island. Zaroff congratulates him and offers to send him home, but Rainsford decides to fight him, and says "I'm still a beast at bay,".
The last sentence of the book depicts the General accepting the fight, and saying that the loser should be fed to the dogs and the victor would sleep in the master bedroom's bed. Although it has not been stated in the story, it is believed that the General was fed to his hounds because of Rainsford's last words- he had never slept in a better bed.
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:
- Surviving the Game
- Hard Target
- Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity
- Gymkata,
- The Beast Must Die. A deadly game to reveal and destroy a Werewolf hidden amongst trapped mansion guests
- The Pest
- Zodiac
Television:
- the Star Trek episode "The Squire of Gothos"
- the Star Trek: Voyager enemies Hirogen, particularly the episode The Killing Game
- the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Captive Pursuit"
- the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Homecoming"
- the The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror XVI"
- the American Dad! episode "The Vacation Goo".
- the Gilligan's Island episode "The Hunter"
- the Fantasy Island original pilot episode
- the Johnny Quest episode "Shadow of the Condor"
- the Get Smart episode "Island of the Darned"
- the Johnny Bravo episode "Hunted!"
- the Dexter's Laboratory episode "Dial M for Monkey: Huntor"
- the Kids Next Door episode "S.A.F.A.R.I"
- the Incredible Hulk 3rd season episode "The Snare"
- the Criminal Minds episode "Open Season"
- the Supernatural episode "The Benders"
- the Relic Hunter episode "Run Sydney Run"
- the Lost in Space episode "Hunter's Moon"
- the Dark Angel episode "Pollo Loco"
- the Forever Knight episode "Hunted"
- Bet Your Life (TV movie)
Comics:
- The Spider-Man villain Kraven the Hunter (Sergi Kravenoff) was inspired by Zaroff.Vorlage:Fact
- The tagline of DC Comics' Manhunter title was "He hunts the world's most dangerous game".
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.
Zodiac Killer
"The Most Dangerous Game" is also said to have possibly been an inspiration to the Zodiac Killer. Arthur Leigh Allen, the one time primary suspect of the notorious murders since cleared by DNA evidence, told police that he had read the story, which many thought had been referenced in one of the killer's letters.
References
External links
- ↑ Stafford, Jeff "The Most Dangerous Game" (TCM article)