Product Description

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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13854 in DVD
• Brand: IMAGE ENT.
• Released on: 2008-01-15
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Restored, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 96 minutes

Features

• 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 early 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 clo

Amazon.com
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

Customer Reviews

Naked Does Not Mean Defenseless
Most films which have the basic premise of a white man battling native Africans somewhere in the Dark Continent usually portray these natives as nameless, unmotivated ugga-mugga tribesmen whose only purpose in life seems to be able to toss missionaries into a round cooking pot. Thankfully, Cornel Wilde acts in and directs himself in THE NAKED PREY, a movie that is as astoundingly gripping as any film whose plot revolves around the hero's struggle for survival in a savage environment.
Wilde is a guide whose safari of foolish white hunters antagonizes some ferocious natives, who proceed to kill the hunters in a variety of graphically nasty ways. The natives allow Wilde a head start, then chase him. It is this chase that forms the bulk of the movie. Along the way, Wilde shows the natives (and the audience) that a near naked white man can still be a formidable foe. The pursuing natives, led by Ken Gampu, are a diverse lot, not all of whom are as dedicated to the chase as he is. They have numbers, food, knives. Wilde has only his fierce determination to live. What starts out as a standard chase movie, morphs quickly enough into another sort of chase. This time, though, it is Wilde who starts calling the shots about who is chasing whom. THE NAKED PREY is full of magnificent vignettes of survival on the African plain. This is no jungle movie. It is an engrossing film that allows the camera frequent panoramic sweeps over vast desert plains that are quite capable of supporting life if one only knows how. The natives are astonished that Wilde's knowledge is at least as full as theirs. Along the way, Wilde befriends a very young boy whose family was captured by Arabic slavers, and it is this boy whose very initial helplessness reminds Wilde that vulnerability is a trait that has the practical value of reminding one that arrogance on the plain is a negative survival characteristic. The latter half of the movie is a continuing series of confrontations between Wilde and Gampu. By the end, both the pursued and the pursuer recognize that sometimes the distinction between the two is a muddied affair at best, and the winner is not necessarily the one with a trophy, but with a recognition that all life, even the life of your enemy, has some value during a deadly game of chase.

Where is the DVD?????
Unbelievable. One of the best movies ever made and not even a whisper about a new release. Yet we get releases of TV shows like Full House. SAD.

Calling Criterion...
This is a great film. It grabs the attention from the opening credits and never lets up. I've seen it several times over the years on TV (in a no doubt "cleaned up for TV version"), but now it's time for a DVD, dammit!
This one is worthy of the "Criterion" treatment. I'd happily pay 25 bucks or so for this film if it was released as a Criterion DVD. If someone else releases it, that's fine too... I'll still pay whatever they are asking. I really WANT this film for my DVD collection.... Criterion and/or anyone else, ARE YOU LISTENING???!!!