2,541 words
Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey (1966) is a great movie, as elemental, straightforward, stripped down, and engrossing as it is possible to imagine: fast-paced, riveting, harrowing, savage.
Shot entirely in Africa in Panavision (a widescreen cinematographic process) and lush Eastmancolor, it relates the story of a 19th-century European ivory-hunting safari captured and brutally butchered by natives, and its sole survivor, the guide “Man”—the only identification provided for Wilde’s character—who is stripped naked, given a brief head start, and then murderously pursued as human prey by ten savages across the high, trackless veld, woodlands, and stony hills of southern Africa as he desperately attempts to reach a fort, the remote outpost from which he’d departed days before.
As teenagers, filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen made a version of The Naked Prey on a Super-8 home movie camera.
Director Mel Gibson’s Mayan chase film Apocalypto (2006) is widely recognized as having been influenced by The Naked Prey. And though Apocalypto is good, Wilde’s film is much better.
In Darkest Africa
The movie opens as a handful of white men, including experienced guide Wilde, accompanied by a large retinue of black bearers, leave the fort on an ivory hunting expedition.
From the beginning, the elemental nature of the film is evident.
The financier of the safari is an arrogant, bullheaded, tightfisted white businessman-hunter portrayed by South African actor Gert Van den Bergh. Like some animals, or the movie’s savage black tribe, he enjoys killing for the sake of killing; he shoots elephants even when they have no tusks.
During a pause, the hunters relax. The financier, sipping liquor from a flask, invites Wilde to become a partner in his next venture—a slaving expedition—but Wilde declines, telling him that this is his last safari, and he intends to settle down on his farm.
They next encounter a party of blacks demanding gifts in return for crossing their territory. This is customary, and Wilde is willing to oblige. But, in a perfectly logical, character-driven scene, the obstinate financier, invariably contemptuous of others, refuses to pay tribute.
Despite his superior wilderness knowledge and prudent character, Wilde cannot reason with the man, and the party rudely pushes past the native band. This rash behavior will quickly bring disaster down upon their heads.
The tense meeting between the two groups occurs just 6 minutes into the film.
The elephant hunt commences, and many great beasts are killed in vivid scenes shown in explicit detail.
When the killing is over, the native employees dress the dead animals as Wilde and the financier eat their meal. The financier, flush from the hunt, is mildly intoxicated.
Meanwhile, the hostile warriors stealthily surround the camp. At a signal they ambush the unprepared group, killing many and capturing others, including three white men and numerous blacks. This scene occurs 10 minutes into the movie, illustrating how fast-paced it is.
The captives are taken to the tribe’s village. The substantial contingent of black bearers and workers are not spared, but hideously butchered: the tribesmen skewer some with spears and lop the heads off of others with large blades.
To the merry accompaniment of noisemakers, the expedition’s trade goods, colorful, expensive fabrics symbolic of the well-crafted accoutrements of civilization, are ripped apart and anarchically tossed into the air, reducing everything to junk within seconds.
One man is methodically encased by exuberant villagers in layer upon layer of clay and dung then baked alive.
The boorish financier is tied, prostrate, to stakes in the ground, his head forced upward and backward by ropes, so that a golden cobra trapped in a semicircle of fire in front of him slithers over and bites his face.
The safari overseer, played by South African actor Patrick Mynhardt, is presented to the bare-breasted women of the tribe, who bind his limbs with sticks, adorn him with feathers, and force him to hop humiliatingly about like a chicken as the crowd roars with laughter.
Finally he topples over and the women all converge on his trussed up figure with pointed sticks and begin stabbing him repeatedly. A shot from above shows the womens’ arms raised in unison and then plunging down again and again as they pierce the helpless man.
Men, women, and children all partake merrily in the “fun,” exactly like participants in an American flash mob or an ANC necklacing.
Predators and Prey
Because he had tried to persuade the safari boss to pay tribute, Man alone, after being forced to observe the gratuitous humiliation, torture, and butchery of Europeans and black bearers alike, is temporarily spared.
Stripped of his clothing and weapons, he is given a brief, 10-second head start before being hunted down for sport by ten young pursuers.
To the surprise and consternation of the group, Man kills the first hunter who comes after him with the very spear the man hurled at him.
Man kills several others along the way, pausing only briefly to loot anything he can use from their bodies before continuing his flight.
Leader of the predators, actor Ken Gampu
Two are killed by their own companions as casualties mount and internecine feuds erupt among members of the group.
Gradually, the ranks of Man’s pursuers thin.
In a memorable scene, Man, nearly overtaken by the cold-blooded killers, sets fire to a wide swath of dry brush and tall grass to wall them off from him.
As he watches from a hillside the savages’ desperate, unsuccessful attempts to penetrate the searing wall of flame, he leaps for joy again and again, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Hey you devils! Burn, burn you devils!”
In another scene Man encounters the village of a different tribe. He creeps close, hoping to poach some cooked meat after the villagers fall asleep or wander away from the fire, but is forced to bide his time.
Suddenly, the village is attacked by a large group of slave traders, who proceed to kill or capture the inhabitants. Though the raiding party is led by Arabs, most of the attackers are black.
Man cannot escape without being seen, so he dodges to a superior hiding place, where he encounters a child also hiding, a little girl. (Yes, it is a girl, not a boy.)
As the main contingent of raiders quickly subdues the unprepared villagers, ruthlessly slaying many in the process, a second contingent carefully scours the periphery of the camp, searching for escapees. It is only a matter of time before they will discover both Man and child.
Signaling for the child to remain still, Man darts from his place of concealment into the midst of the turmoil, drawing the searchers after him. There was no other option available.
He lays into the raiders berserker-style, but is quickly overwhelmed. Ultimately he escapes by leaping into a treacherous river. Later he is rescued by the little girl whose life he saved. They strike up a brief, warm friendship before parting.
Although this scene works on a humanitarian level, and is thus frequently cited by liberal critics, it remains consistent with the survivalist theme of the movie as a whole.
And no commentator ever mentions the song Wilde jovially sings to (and about) his diminutive companion—”Little Brown Jug.”
Throughout Man’s extended ordeal we vicariously experience the same gamut of primal psychological and physical stresses he does: hunger, thirst, fierce daytime heat, bone-chilling nighttime cold, exhaustion, sleep, mosquitoes, and continuous threats from deadly animals and human predators.
Although the camera’s point of view during the extended chase sequence moves continuously between Man, his predator-pursuers, the beautiful South African landscape, and shots of wild animals enacting the hunter/prey dynamic—”the pattern of repose, pursuit, sudden death and then repose”—that is a metaphor for the film, the story’s subjective point of view never strays from its protagonist, Man.
Colter’s Run
Every movie presents unique challenges to its makers.
At the extreme, Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat and Rear Window utilized highly restricted sets, and Rope took place in real time, as if shot in one continuous take.
The Naked Prey presented a similar difficulty. Since the cross country chase consumes over one hour of the 90 minute film, the challenge was to make the pursuit different and exciting all the time, so that each section of the chase possessed a different kind of tension, anticipation, and suspense.
Wilde’s direction, the original screenplay by Clint Johnston and Don Peters, and the fast-paced editing superbly meet this challenge.
Johnston’s and Peters’s script, later nominated for an Academy Award, was based on a true story about an early American trapper named John Colter, who was pursued as human prey across 200 miles of trackless wilderness in Wyoming-Montana by Blackfoot Indians in 1809.
Colter, the first American mountain man, had been a member of the Lewis and Clark expedition that crossed the continent to the Pacific Ocean. He may well be the most amazing frontiersman-nobody’s-ever-heard-of, not only because of his run, but because of his entire, colorful life story.
Cornel Wilde learned of it from a radio play adapted from “John Colter’s Escape,” a 1913 account written by Addison Erwin Sheldon. (Here is Sheldon’s account read by an amateur poster on YouTube [4.5 mins.].)
Wilde bought the rights to the story and changed the setting to Africa.
John Colter’s Wikipedia bio is worth reading as historical background for The Naked Prey. Or, if you prefer, simply the short section on “Colter’s Run.”
One of the most common tropes used by anti-white reviewers, including movie critic Roger Ebert in 1966, is that no soft, civilized white man could possibly survive such an ordeal, pitted against tough, brave, morally and physically superior savages in their native habitat. (Ebert, a Negrophile, married a black woman.)
Another widely-used liberal stratagem claims Wilde “humanized” the blacks by showing their displays of grief at the deaths of their companions, while displaying little emotion in his emblematic role as (white) Man.
Both elements, however, were already present in Colter’s original story. Moreover, anyone who knows anything about the history of the frontier knows that whites on many occasions bested natives everywhere on equal, or even disadvantageous, terms. That’s life.
The Auteur
The Naked Prey‘s auteur was unquestionably producer-director-star Cornell Wilde.
Though Ephraim Katz’s The Film Encyclopedia (3rd ed., 1998), like many sources, mistakenly says he was born in New York City in 1915 “to Hungarian-Czech parents,” Kornél Lajos Weisz was in fact born in 1912 in Hungary (now Slovakia) to Hungarian Jewish parents. He came to the US at age 7 in 1920, where his name was Americanized to Cornelius Louis Wilde.
According to most accounts, Wilde attended the City College of New York (CCNY) as a pre-med student and won a scholarship to the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.
He is also said to have qualified for the US fencing team prior to the 1936 Berlin Olympics, but quit before the games in order to join the theater. He reportedly acted on Broadway between 1935 and 1940.
In Hollywood films from 1940 on, Wilde became well-known as a swashbuckler and in athletic action roles (e.g., the trapeze artist The Great Sebastian, “the debonair King of the Air,” in Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth, 1952).
In 1955 Wilde formed his own production company, Theodora Productions (which co-produced The Naked Prey with producer-cinematographer Sven Persson), to make his own pictures, which were mostly shot abroad on limited budgets.
Tall, dark, and with a powerful physique, Wilde was muscular, athletic, and fitness-conscious all his life. When The Naked Prey was filmed in the winter of 1964–65, he was 52 years old and still in tremendous physical shape.
Although Wilde became ill from exhaustion and lost a significant amount of weight during filming, he believed this enhanced the authenticity of his performance.
H.A.R. Thomson’s stunning widescreen color cinematography perfectly captures the African setting.
The film was shot entirely on location at Sibasa, Northern Transvaal; the Kruger National Park on the Mozambique frontier; Bechuanaland; and Southern Rhodesia.
The producers thanked the South African Government “for their whole-hearted cooperation” in the film’s production. The Prime Minister of South Africa at the time was the legendary Hendrik Verwoerd, felled by an assassin a few months after filming was completed.
The Naked Prey is a highly visual film with little dialogue—the dialogue continuity script was only nine pages long. In some ways the movie resembles, or harks back to, silent films.
What little dialogue there is is mostly African, with no dubbing or subtitles provided to translate what is being said. Viewers are thrown back upon behavior, tone, expression, and other subconscious cues to interpret meaning.
A talented linguist and mimic, Wilde had an ear for languages, as evidenced when he converses (or purports to converse) in several African dialects.
The score consists of African music played by Aricans on African instruments. Recorded partly in the field and partly in the studio, the dead-ringer sound was created solely by native percussion instruments.
The authenticity of the music was due to the knowledge and expertise of white South African musical adviser Andrew Tracey, a prominent ethnomusicologist whose father, Hugh Tracey (1903–1977), pioneered the study of traditional African music in the 1920s–1970s.
Edwin Astley, the English composer of well-known scores for British TV shows The Saint and Danger Man, also reportedly played an (uncredited) role in arranging the music.
Although like most scores it operates on a subliminal level, the music provides an effective psychological-emotional underpinning to the story.
The Naked Prey theme song at the beginning of the movie is sung by the film’s principal African warriors.
Idée Fixe: Good Africans, Evil White Men
Needless to say, liberals have problems with The Naked Prey.
Probably the reason the film is not unqualifiedly acknowledged as a classic is because of the race angle. You could critique much of contemporary race psychology by dissecting reactions to this movie.
For example, one commentator wrote:
I almost turned the movie off during the torture scenes, because everything in them seemed to be trying to emphasize the savagery, even to the point of suggesting the natives as quite literally bloodthirsty. It’s ugly stuff, sadistic and unsettling—a person covered in clay and then baked alive is an image I won’t soon forget.
He wanted such scenes shown only after the insertion of others displaying white brutality, thus justifying (in his mind) sadistic black cruelty against whites.
Unacknowledged censorship of selected scenes in TV broadcasts and VHS and DVD recordings has also occurred. In particular, scenes of black savagery against the white hunters have been excised without audiences or consumers being alerted to the bowdlerism.
The Naked Prey is relentlessly Darwinian in its pitting of white man against black in an unflinching, lightning-fast tale of action, adventure, mortal combat, and survival.
It is a stripped-to-the-bone story of man against nature, tested to the limits of his strength, endurance, resourcefulness, and cunning.
The movie can be interpreted as portraying the fierce resistance of the human spirit to the forces of primitivism, darkness, savagery, and disintegration engulfing our world and devouring the heart of Western civilization.
In this light, it is about the primal, unflinching determination of whites to survive by any means necessary against any mortal foe.
13 comments
Really enjoyed reading this review, Mr. Hamilton, as I saw this film only 2 months ago for the first time. It can be interpreted as you say, but I’m sure Cornel Wilde was just looking to tell a great story c/w plenty of action. The DVD we rented certainly did include all those torture scenes you refer to, so I guess we got lucky. By the way, I thought that darling child who saved Man was a boy.
Sure would love to read a review here of Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala. Russia, Russians, snow – and an Asian abo. Directed by a Jap. A fine story.
Dersu Uzala is one of the great survival films.
Derzu Usala is one of my favorite Kurosawa films. I might be able to come up with something to say about it here at CC.
I saw this movie way back when I was 16 on the late night movie channel. After reading the review, I am eager to see it again. Another movie that could perhaps be considered to be in the “pursuit/survival” genre is The Pathfinder (1987), a fantastic Norwegian film taking place in the Viking era, a teen must save his tribe against the predations of an intruding warband.
Mr. Wilde was an interesting and remarkable character. I am tempted to ponder the “Jewish” angle, the anti-Goy theme, which is so prevalent in the film-making world. Were I to do so, I might examine the “ugly South African” character’s portrayal, callous, brutish, and corrupt by nature, can I assume he was blonde(?) But, they can’t seem to help it, its just the way our Semitic friends process the world.
Nevertheless, the theme of the film is an exciting one, a European-looking male struggling for survival, and ultimately succeeding. A male who is masculine, tough and resourceful, someone we Whites can be proud of (a character not so easy to find in this day and age). I think the movie taps into deep emotions of xenophobia, those dark faces alert us to danger in the depths of our brain, and cause us to ethnocentrically identify with our (seemingly European) co-ethnic, making the scenes especially gripping.
The chatter of critics such as Ebert, typically soft, weak, effeminate, submissive males, suggesting that Europeans are incapable of surviving in such circumstances is more a statement of their own survival potential rather than the capacity of the average European. Your average White guy is capable of a high level of physical fitness, which coupled with significantly greater brain power than aboriginal peoples, is an organism with very high survival value, in most cases with a value superior to Africans or Native Americans even without European technology. So FU, Ebert, you little punk!
I just saw a movie entitled Pathfinder that must have been inspired by the one you saw. A Viking boy is the sole survivor of a shipwreck and is taken in by a tribe of Indians. He saves the Tribe when Vikings – portrayed as Monsters – begin to slaughter them.
Thus the boy redeems his humanity by betraying his people. Very subtle.
It occurs to me that the movie might have struck the director as a parable of the Jew among the nations: he is the guide and middleman between one group of savages and another, and when his advice is ignored by the idiot white leader, everything breaks down and he has to run and fight to be a survivah.
But whites would surely see this merely as a movie about racial survival (and the need for better white leadership), messages that we can all get behind.
Fantastic review!
Cornel Wilde was seemingly one of those very un-jewish Jews, like Kirk Douglas, who looks like a Viking.
A great film as well is Cy Endfield’s “Zulu”(1964). A small group of British Whites heroically fights Spartan style against an army of Black Warriors. It would be impossible to remake this today!
One of the most common tropes used by anti-white reviewers, including movie critic Roger Ebert in 1966, is that no soft, civilized white man could possibly survive such an ordeal,
LOL. Mr. Ebert had never heard of ol’ Cabeza de Vaca and his Florida expedition.
Of course he did know of the great Henri Charrière …
My favourite and completely all male cast movie is Valhalla Rising.
He may well be the most amazing frontiersman-nobody’s-ever-heard-of, not only because of his run, but because of his entire, colorful life story. How true. I certainly had never heard of him and I grew up on boy’s adventure comics and John Wayne.
Will Counter-Currents replace the New York Times and become the website of record?
Excellent question! One dares hope along these lines, no? ‘ Has anyone made a film of The Long Walk?
One movie I would like to see Mr Hamilton reviewing is People I Know(2002). A depiction of how jewish power really works in NYC.
Mr. Hamilton, that was really an informative and thorough review of a movie I saw when I was young and impressionable, yet somehow let mentally sink into almost “repression” territory, as if for real I had witnessed unfathomable abuse. I feel that I was nearly struck unconscious over the “encasing the man in mud and cooking him over a spit” scene–my young self had never even imagined such cruelty. Also, I was horrified by how the “good” guy, Man, who had argued in favor of the tribe’s demand, was not simply honored in some way and set free. Instead, he is subjected to a “slow motion” torture and one that the natives certainly don’t expect, or want, him to survive. They played with him the way a cat plays with a mouse. As I write this, I make a connection between that form of “tribal injustice” and some of the events that occurred in Ferguson during those relatively recent riots, where, for example, a misguided and liberal write demonstrator wearing, I believe, a “black lives matter” t-shirt (or maybe it had some other supportive slogan), was set upon by a group of black demonstrators who attempted to beat him to death with a hammer. It didn’t matter that he was outspoken in his support of their cause, he was an enemy to be tortured regardless.
It’s interesting how a movie like that that lodges in ones unconscious can have an affect much later in unknown ways. What popped into my mind reading your review was that concept of paying a “toll” for the privilege of crossing through native territory. I have enjoyed traveling to Pacific Islands, and therefore have been to Oahu and Kauai in Hawaii, North, South, and Stewart Islands in New Zealand, Heron Island in Australia, Viti Levu and several of the Yasawa Islands (which are tribal-controlled) in Fiji, Tahiti, Moorea, Bora Bora, and Fakarava in French Polynesia, Koror, Babeldaob, and several of the Rock Islands such as Ngeruktubel and Mecherchar in Palau. Among the Polynesian islands, Oahu, beyond the heavy-duty tourist areas can actually be dangerous and anti-white due to a Hawaiian separatist movement, Fakarava in the Tuamoto atolls is very friendly but primitive, and there are some dangerous areas of Auckland where a tourist might accidentally stray where there are some angry Maoris. Among the Micronesian islands, Palau was inhabited by headhunters as recently as just prior to World War II, when the Japanese took the islands over to serve as their “aircraft carriers” for prosecuting their war against Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. The Japanese enslaved the Palauans and put them to labor for the Japanese war effort. In fact, the only decent building in their capital town which is currently being used as their Supreme Court was actually the building the Japanese built to be the command headquarters for the war in the region. I wonder if enslaved headhunters, now rid of the Japanese as rulers (but they still have them as hated but economically tolerated tourists), have really lost some of their ancient ways. The poverty is extreme (I was shocked to see families living in discarded cargo containers containing no furniture) and that might put a lone tourist in a isolated area in danger. (However, all my experiences there were very friendly.)
Where I most felt frissons of danger was in Melanesian Fiji, where there was something aggressive about their constantly shouting “bula” to the tourists, which was supposed to be welcoming and yet somehow sounded challenging. It was also in Fiji where I got into a potentially dangerous situation with a customs official in the airport as I and my traveling companion were just about to board our departing airplane. We discovered that I still had on me some amount of Fijian currency greater than the amount they will allow you to take out of the country which I had neglected to exchange away. The customs official whispered to me that if I would slip the money to him, he would help me to “smuggle” it out. Probably all he wanted to do was to keep it, but I didn’t trust that he wouldn’t have had me arrested, so I politely thanked him, said I still had time to rush to the currency exchange booth and get me some Pacific Francs, which I wanted anyway, since our next stop was Tahiti. But that experience really unnerved me.
However, this hasn’t stopped me from wanting to explore into more and more exotic Pacific ocean territory, and so a few years ago, I was planning to a trip to the Solomon Islands, which are Melanesian. However, I read in one of my guidebooks that if you explored beyond Honiara into more outlying areas, or even more so, to some of the other more isolated islands (and going to these places would really be the only reason to even go there at all), don’t be surprised if virtually anybody “k a s t o m” (for some reason, some auto-correct feature absolutely would not let me write the word the way I wanted to, insisting on changing it to “custom”, so I wrote the word with spaces so that the system wouldn’t recognize it), which means living exactly the way they have done since the beginning of time, they may demand some “payment” for you having just kayaked in on “their ocean”, or landed on “their beach”, or are walking through “their jungle” or resting on “their log”, or crossing into “their village”. Well, in a way I can understand that (it IS theirs), but it seemed that the possibilities of this were going to be incessant, and worse, there would be some difficult give and take as to how much to actually pay for these various “uses”. The guidebook recommended going no higher than a few dollars despite the insistence, but then I read elsewhere that there recently had been some kind of very violent inter-tribal war over just that issue of how much to pay for the use of one of the tribe’s assets. I worried that since I would be all alone out there in extremely primitive settings among former, and possibly current, cannibals, why would they even negotiate? Just crash a rock onto my head, take all of my money, and then encase me in mud and cook me for a “k a s t o m” tribal feast. A paranoid fantasy? Perhaps so, but that eliminated my plan to travel to the Solomons. Thanks to Cornel Wilde.
P.S. I always disliked Roger Ebert, first for his nasty arguments against his television reviewing partner when that man was still alive, and later for his clearly rabidly liberal (and also very stupid) opinions. I had no idea that in addition to everything else, he had actually married a black woman.
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