RETRO ACTIVE: The Naked Prey (1966)

What's new is always old, and in this recurring column, I'll be taking a look at the classic genre movies that have influenced today's new releases. In honor of Joe Carnahan's Liam Neeson-vs.-wolf actioner The Grey, this week it's Cornel Wilde's seminal 1966 stranded-man saga The Naked Prey.

No tears, no pity, no mercy—Cornel Wilde imagines a world of desperate violence and frenzied anxiety in The Naked Prey, in the process not simply inventing the “man in the wilderness” cinematic subgenre but, more powerfully, delivering an enduringly caustic vision of life as hard, inflexible, and painful. Working from an apparent true story, director/star Wilde—the dashing leading man who, beginning with this film, became an auteur of idiosyncratic masculine fables—does away with all but the bare necessities for his tale about a safari guide known only as Man (Wilde) leading an arrogant, boozy fat cat (Patrick Mynhardt) through Africa. Encountering a local tribe, Man's employer refuses to pay the minor levy that the locals demand for passage through their land, a mistake which leads to the white interlopers' capture at the hands of a cheetah pelt-adorned chieftain, who in a prolonged sequence tortures his captors and their African employees. Wilde shoots this episode with stunningly stark, nonjudgmental brutality that immediately conveys his work's unsympathetic worldview—images of an African caked in mud and then roasted on a spit, of Mynhardt's European tied belly-down to the ground in front of a cobra slithering about a circle of fire, and of another man chased and stabbed to death by a mob of screaming, cheering women all express the filmmaker's blistering opinion of the wild as a kill-or-be-killed battleground.

The legacy of colonialism naturally informs both this intro as well as the subsequent saga in which Man, because of his kindness to the tribe, is given a sporting chance to live via his expulsion into the land, in the nude, to be hunted à la The Most Dangerous Game. Yet The Naked Prey is less a political polemic than a portrait of man's primal animalism, as bleak as a Stanley Kubrick opus on the subject and yet as blunt as a dime-store pulp novel. Wilde isn't after symbolic subtlety in either performance or aesthetics, his cast supplying turns of swift, striking gestures and reactions, and his camera moving with a similar alacrity that captures the inhospitable heat and hardness of the African landscape. The beauty of the environment (Wilde shot on location mostly in South Africa) is inextricably knotted up with its Jack London-ish cruelty, all sizzling sun in the blue sky, bushes full of brambles, and wildlife clashes to the death between snake and bird, lion and antelope, cheetah and baboon. The director's copious, deftly integrated footage of animals in the throes of do-or-die combat provide the context for Man's own transformation, begun when he kills his initial pursuer and assumes his loin cloth garb and spear and blade, and continuing throughout his flight across the land, which soon becomes a journey back to a more primitive state of survival in which his hunters already exist.

Man gradually learns to eat, to kill, and to endure through forced-by-circumstances instinct, and the bare-bones nature of The Naked Prey's plotting—defined by its breakneck progression and disinterest in nuanced twists or complexity—is amplified by the Oscar-nominated script's almost total lack of dialogue. Silence is its own form of reversion here, as the nameless Man morphs from a social creature into a primordial one driven only by need and fury, and Wilde's strapping frame and darting eyes forcefully get at the underlying base nature of civilized humanity. That said, there's no censure or condescension in the film, with Wilde's stance toward Man's increasing beastliness as detached as is his treatment of the tribesmen, who—far from being simply bloodthirsty savages—are defined by familiar, universal characteristics: vengefulness, pettiness, callousness, respect and honor. Africans, Europeans and wild predators are equated without prejudice, though not simplicity; rather, what Wilde strives for, and achieves, is a circle-of-life saga that embraces, in its stark snapshots of men impaled by spears and lions dragging their prey across the plains, the basic, brusque viciousness of self-preservation.

That Man doesn't just eventually triumph but, shortly before that, becomes a surrogate father for a child left orphaned by tribal warfare, does infuse the closing segments of The Naked Prey with a bit too much white-patriarchal arrogance, replete with respectful nods in defeat from his adversaries. Still, there's almost never a sense throughout this sinewy adventure tale that Wilde's intention is to place Man on a pedestal, especially in light of the callous strength and regality of the African hunting party's imposing leader (Ken Gampu). From the sight of Man leaping around, spear raised, as he thwarts his would-be killers' progress with fire, to his cat-and-mouse slaughter of his opponents, the film is all straightforward, no-delicacy propulsion. A tangle of fear, anger and borderline madness—epitomized by the way Wilde ruthlessly slashes another man's neck (the blade's contact with flesh cannily obscured by a tree trunk) or spits out the inedible food he finds along his hardscrabble path—it's a work of undiluted philosophical and emotional immediacy that embraces the kindness and cruelty of man equally, and with a gnarled, pedal-to-the-metal potency that its legion of genre offspring have yet to fully match.

Posted by ahillis at January 26, 2012 1:24 PM