Adventure on Film: The Naked Prey
Loincloths: love ’em or hate ’em, it’s a fact that Tarzan and Conan weren’t the only 
musclebound men to model the style. For proof, we need look no farther than The Naked Prey (1966).
But first, let’s time-warp back to 1980. Required reading in my junior high meant immersion in Richard Connell’s short, “The Most Dangerous Game,” in which humans are both predator and prey. It’s an old idea, but rarely presented quite as starkly as in this story, wherein a big game hunter in the Colonial tradition seeks one final thrill before hanging up his boots. As in a few Dame Agatha novels and a great many summer camp slashers, the hunter’s weekend guests become his targets.
What we teen readers were supposed to glean from “The Most Dangerous Game,” I have no idea, and I might well have forgotten the entire piece had it not been for my stumbling onto The Naked Prey a few years later. Watching this celluloid take on man hunting man transported me sharply back to the Connell story and even, if my failing memory serves, prompted me to re-read it.
In The Naked Prey, Cornel Wilde’s wily explorer-hero is actually credited as “Man.” If he has another name, we never learn it. He doesn’t really need one, although a nickname might be helpful. If I were his parent, I’d call him Determination Personified.
One of the oddest, most esoteric regrets in my life is that I long ago gave away my collection of the now defunct American Film magazine. Most of these, purchased primarily from sidewalk vendors in Manhattan, I do not care to recover; but I would give a great deal to have again the October issue from 1986. It contains a dialogue with film producer David Puttnam, and one small paragraph in that interview taught me more about collaboration than any other single event I know.
Just as an older generation recalls with perfect clarity where they were when they heard of Kennedy’s assassination, I know precisely where I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975): perched on the floral-print sofa in my parent’s house, watching the film on a poor, weather-impacted PBS broadcast. I also remember falling right off that sub-par couch in paroxysms of laughter when the animator saved King Arthur’s band by conveniently suffering a heart attack.
I didn’t know it at the time, but back when I was ten and surfing through horrendous Tarzan movies on rainy Saturday afternoons, The Horseman On the Roof (Le Hussard Sure le Toit, 1995) was the film I was actually hoping to see. Not that I would have understood much of what was going on, but the kinetic energy of it –– the film’s unswerving certainty that these events matter –– would have transported me right out of my seat.
Once upon a very suspect time, a human being by the name of Terry Pratchett conjured up a space-traveling sea turtle by the name of A’tuin, and proceeded to make a sizable fortune from the disc-shaped world he emplaced upon her. In Pratchett’s Discworld novels, magic of the most unpredictable kind is the norm, and so it should come as no surprise that, eventually, somebody had to commit his unique brand of literary lunacy to celluloid.