The Naked Prey (The Criterion Collection)

Glamorous leading man turned idiosyncratic auteur Cornel Wilde created a handful of gritty, violent explorations of the nature of man in the sixties and seventies, none more memorable than The Naked Prey. In the late nineteenth century, after an ivory-hunting safari offends an African tribe, the colonialists are captured and hideously tortured. Only Wilde s marksman is released, without clothes or weapons, to be hunted for sport, and he embarks on a harrowing journey through savanna and jungle and back to a primitive state. Distinguished by widescreen camerawork and unflinching savagery, The Naked Prey is both a propulsive, stripped-to-the-bone narrative and a meditation on the notion of civilization.

SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES:

New, restored high-definition digital transfer

Audio commentary by film scholar Stephen Prince

John Colter s Escape, a 1913 written record of the trapper s flight from Blackfoot Indians which was the inspiration for The Naked Prey read by actor Paul Giamatti

Original soundtrack cues created by director Cornel Wilde and ethnomusicologist Andrew Tracey, along with a written statement by Tracey on the score

Theatrical trailer

PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by film critic Michael Atkinson and a 1970 interview with Wilde

Actor-turned-director Cornel Wilde (The Best Years of Our Lives) released this fascinating fever dream of a thriller in 1966, basing its terrifying story on the legendary escape of trapper John Colter from Blackfoot Indians. Wilde plays a laconic, big-game hunter (the script refers to him only as "Man") managing an ivory-gathering safari for an arrogant loudmouth who refuses to pay tribute to a local chief. The chief's tribe takes exception to this slight, capturing the hunters and subjecting them to sundry, nightmarish tortures. (The worst, arguably, is the baking of one poor fellow inside a head-to-toe clay suit.) Wilde's character is stripped bare and given a bit of a lead before being pursued by a party of spear-wielding men. For the next few days, the Man lives by his wits in the most violent surroundings, never far from the predator-prey cycle in the animal kingdom and even saving a boy from an attack by slave-traders on his village. Horrifying as the Man's journey becomes, there is something redemptive about Wilde's jaded character going back to nature in a radical fashion. Wilde the filmmaker expertly mingles stock footage of jungle beasts with his own bold images of a savage Eden, though nothing gets under one's skin quite like some of those torture scenes. --Tom Keogh