Naked Prey, The: The Criterion Collection (DVD)

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Jean-Luc Godard once quipped that all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun. "The Naked Prey" (1966) cuts its narrative so close to the bone that it proves you don´t even need the girl and the gun.

Simplicity itself is positively complex when measured against this strangest of Hollywood films. Cornel Wilde plays a Man (no other name) who guides a British safari through the African jungle. His skinflint client refuses to pay the proper bribe to the local chieftain, so the tribe attacks the party and kills everyone except for Man. He is stripped naked, and allowed an arrow´s flight head start to escape the tribe. He runs. They chase. People get killed. Chase ends. Movie ends.

Hungarian-born Cornel Wilde had become a Hollywood star of modest proportions on the basis of several leading roles in romances and swashbuckling adventures. Wilde´s greatest asset was his lithe, chiseled physique; a gifted athlete, he was an elite fencer who quit the Olympic team in order to pursue his acting career. By the late 50s, the aging Wilde wasn´t content to watch his Hollywood star slowly fizzle out, and struck on his own as a director and producer. Of the eight films he directed, "The Naked Prey" is, by far and away, his most famous.

It´s hard to believe that Wilde was 50 years old at the time this film was shot. He is covered in rippling muscle from head to toe, and is perhaps the only Hollywood actor of the era who could be believable while outrunning African hunters on their own turf. Wilde doesn´t mess about once the chase begins. For forty minutes, he doesn´t utter a single word of dialogue: not a single smart-ass quip, or even a curse word. He´s too busy running and fighting for his life. The entire chase (which is all but the first 20 minutes of the film) is convincingly staged in almost every aspect. Only the very fake-looking stage blood in some of the hand-to-hand combat scenes breaks the spell.

"The Naked Prey" is an unusual film in so many ways; in addition to the near total lack of intelligible dialogue, the film also treats the African pursuers in a way Africans have seldom been depicted in Hollywood. They are not merely unthinking savages. Unlike Wilde´s character, they talk frequently, but we are never provided with any subtitles. We still get the gist of it though. These are flesh-and-blood men who are far better developed as characters than our nameless Man. They laugh, they argue, they set traps, they cry over their dead. Not that "The Naked Prey" presents an entirely politically correct view of the natives. The film lingers over the grotesque ways in which they torture and execute their prisoners. One hapless man is encased in hardened clay except for a tube that allows him to breathe as he is roasted alive over a fire.