The Most Dangerous Game
At one point in Trail of the Jaguar, while evading a hostile force on Tiburón Island, Clayton Porter mentions feeling “like Sanger Rainsford on Count Zaroff’s Island.”
The line references a classic 1924 short story by Richard Connell, an author, journalist, and screenwriter who contributed prolifically to The Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s, among others. He wrote over 300 short stories, but the most famous by far is The Most Dangerous Game.
The tale begins with two friends on a yacht in the Caribbean, on their way, coincidentally enough, to hunt jaguars in the Amazon. The two fall into an evening conversation about being the hunters versus the hunted—the former being the natural state of Man. Late that night, smoking his pipe on deck, one of the men, a well-known hunter named Sanger Rainsford, hears a gunshot in the distance and, looking out over the dark sea trying to determine the source of the noise, manages to fall overboard (not, one would think, the mistake of an experienced outdoorsman). Swimming to an island the yacht had been passing—and, rather obviously, whence the shot had come—the next morning he finds a “palatial chateau,” inhabited by a Russian count, General Zaroff, his huge deaf/mute Cossack servant (named—what else?—Ivan), and a pack of hunting dogs.
The general, while entertaining Rainsford in lavish style in a room filled with hunting trophies, compliments him on his writings about the pursuit of dangerous game—and then boasts that he hunts “the most dangerous game” right there on the island. Rainsford is mystified until the general reveals (over a glass of fine port) that he baits ships to wreck on the coast of his island, then hunts down their passengers. Furthermore, he exclaims with delight that in Rainsford he has at last found a worthy foe.
Much to his, shall we say, consternation, Rainsford is given a knife and a three-hour head start—just as were all the previous unfortunate visitors—with the stipulation that if he can evade Zaroff for three days he will “win,” and be given a ride to the mainland. And . . . well, if you haven’t read the story you’ll need to do so to discover what happens. You can download it copyright-free here.
In 1932 a suitably melodramatic film version of The Most Dangerous Game starred Joel McCrae as “Bob” Rainsford, an utterly perfect Leslie Banks as Zaroff—and a pre-King Kong Fay Wray, introducing a female complication not present in the original. The movie was directed by Ernest B. Schoedsack and produced by him and Merian C. Cooper. The pair would direct King Kong the next year; in fact The Most Dangerous Game was shot on the jungle sets being constructed for that film.
Cooper, incidentally, led a life more adventurous than any of his fictional movie subjects. A DH4 bomber pilot in WWI, he was shot down and captured by the Germans, later volunteered for the Polish Air Force, and, on returning stateside, got a job on the night shift at the New York Times and began writing articles. He traveled with Schoedsack to Ethiopia, met the future emperor, Haile Selassie I, and narrowly missed being killed by pirates. Cooper and Schoedsack then joined Marguerite Harrison on an expedition to Persia, following migrant herders to produce the masterpiece Grass, a pioneer of ethnographic documentary filmmaking. (Around this time Cooper became a member of the Explorers Club, also referenced in Trail of the Jaguar). Cooper then directed The Four Feathers, another masterpiece, filmed on location in the Sudan and employing as extras several tribesmen who had participated in the actual Sudan conflict 40 years previously.
In 1933 came King Kong, the idea for which Cooper said came to him in a dream, and which made him a legend. Rather than resting on fame, however, in WWII he re-enlisted as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force, served as the logistics liaison for the Doolittle Raid, bombed the Kowloon Docks at Hong Kong, was promoted to brigadier general, and was on board the USS Missouri to witness Japan’s surrender. He went back to enjoy more success in Hollywood. Cooper died in 1973 and his ashes were scattered at sea with full military honors.
