I’d been endlessly postponing my inevitable encounter with Cornel Wilde’s THE NAKED PREY. Last night I watched it, and it was immediately clear why I’d delayed. It’s a “WOW — but YEESH!” kind of movie.
Wilde is kind of like Mel Gibson as a filmmaker — a popular leading man who, as director, enjoys a fascination with violence and cruelty that ought by rights to place him outside the bounds of successful mainstream cinema. I mean, sure, we know violent films are popular, but each era has its own constraints, which can be pushed only so far, and usually audience’s demand that their ration of mayhem be delivered alongside at least some variety of other elements, to make it seem that the photogenic suffering has some kind of point to it. With Gibson and Wilde the suffering IS the point.
Wilde also has an interest in sex which Gibson doesn’t really share — a fascination with showing men going down on his wife (in the Wilde-produced BIG COMBO and again in SWORD OF LANCELOT). But violence is his main thing. He shows relatively little cinematic imagination except when it comes to showing people getting hurt or killed.
The difference with NAKED PREY is that it’s a very effective film.
Wilde plays a safari guide in Rhodesia some unspecified time in the past. On an elephant hunt, the obnoxious hunters he’s with refuse to play the local tribe for hunting rights, and are captured, horribly tortured, and killed. The natives decide to hunt Wilde for sport.
The obscene tortures — one man is caked in mud and roasted over a fire, screaming through the funnel jammed in his mouth — are almost as shocking as the documentary footage of massacred elephants. I feel like this movie has to have inspired the Italian cannibal mondo-type movies. What makes the movie impressive as well as just offensive is the way it spends a whole hour with no English dialogue. The African characters discuss things among themselves, but are unsubtitled.
The distasteful xenophobic aspect — the “savages” act like twisted children — is mitigated by several things: the Africans are clearly behaving with more justification than the hunters invading their land; Wilde’s character is sympathetic to the Africans and deplores slavery; the whole film is shot on real locations; Wilde uses African actors, an African artist for the title sequence, and African tribal music for his score, an unprecedented move at that time.
Other Wilde movies I’ve seen are just not good enough to make their sadism feel like part of a coherent strategy with a sensible purpose. Despite major technical flaws, this one basically all works. Wilde running along in flesh-coloured trunks is completely unconvincing; the animal cruelty always comes with a change in film grain, which at least reassures us that the production didn’t murder elephants; casting the same actor in two different villain roles is insane; and it’s not really clear why Wilde is better at spear-fighting than the natives, and how he can outrun and outfight them on their own turf. The curly black hair and beard he’s given himself may be a hint that his character has some African ancestry. But still…
The challenge, or a major one, would be to keep the interest going for one feature-length dramatic situation with relatively little variation. The scenery helps, and the script, by Clint Johnston (BLOODY MAMA) and Don Peters, does come up with different challenges for Wilde a long the way (keeping warm, finding food, escaping crocodiles and snakes as well as his pursuers). A few more well-worked-out showstoppers, as in WAGES OF FEAR, where the various obstacles are brilliantly dramatised, would have been nice, but the movie copes. When there’s finally someone for Wilde’s character to show sympathy for, and to receive kindness from, it’s unexpectedly rather moving.
It’s a film I found myself constantly making allowances for, and never being sure that I SHOULD. But I can’t not support the idea of a truly non-verbal action movie. Now I guess I need to try BEACH RED.
shadowplay 