Cornel Wilde's always been a bit of an interesting guy - of his previous work, I loved him as an actor in classic noir THE BIG COMBO and as a director on the grim post-apocalyptic drama NO BLADE OF GRASS (a DVD release would be nice, please). Add to that a passing interest in the history of colonial Africa and I became curious when reading about this Wilde vehicle in forums (including right here) when it was first announced.

Having caught my eye, the DVD release then popped up again in the pages of Sight & Sound magazine, where Tim Lucas's review made it sound just too fascinating not to see, so I added it to one of my recent transatlantic DVD orders despite never having heard of it until now.

How can I never have heard of this magnificent film? I am astounded.

The plot, in brief: Wilde is part of an expedition in 19th-century Africa which upsets a tribe. The tribe take gruesome revenge on everyone else in the party except for the sympathetic Wilde, who is instead stripped naked, released into the wild and then hunted by the rest of the tribe. An anti-TARZAN? Colonial variation on PREDATOR? JUNGLE HOLOCAUST by way of the arthouse cinema? I could try and come up with all manner of snappy summaries of this movie but none of them would do it justice and all of them would fail to account for what an immaculately made piece of cinema it is.

A few minor details may have dated - the hero of the movie decides that killing for sport is wrong, but for ivory is okay; the bright red blood that lights up some otherwise sickening violence; the occasional moment of sped-up film - but there are some things that will never age. A stripped-down but gripping story; nail-biting tension; an incredibly effective score built around indigenous African sounds and instruments; a powerful performance by Wilde in a film almost devoid of dialogue; the brutal savagery of not just the human characters but of the animals too.

That latter detail may make it difficult for some to watch, with animals popping up to kill each other with alarming regularity. However, it's this violence that forms part of an integral theme that runs through the film - man is just another animal. There are parallels between both beast and man, but furthermore Wilde continues to draw parallels between the so called civilised man and the alleged primitives. Just as Wilde descends into savagery to survive, so too do we see the tribesmen become far more recognisably "human" (there are a couple of terrific scenes where, despite not understanding what they are saying, we can still recognise ourselves in their slowly-disappearing patience and petty bickering as Wilde continues to evade them). It's one of the more sympathetic portrayals of African tribes I've seen, particularly given that the film is not exactly recent.

Few films have captured Africa in all its simultaneous beauty and savagery and that is helped no end by the other gobsmacking aspect of the film that I've not mentioned yet, which is the jaw-droppingly gorgeous widescreen location photography. There are few instances I can recall of natural environments being so impressive on film outside of nature documentaries and a handful of westerns.

On that front, Criterion have done a bang-up job of the film. It's an amazing transfer of an amazing film. If there is any disadvantage, it's that a few minor flaws are perhaps more apparent, such as the naked Wilde clearly not being naked and a fight between two animals clearly showing another person running around in the background (these are the two I spotted, but you can find more on the IMDb). Such trivial detail however is a small price to pay for such a stunning release of an incredible film.

Okay, sorry, I've rambled on for a bit longer than anticipated and there are plenty of better writers than me who will do justice to the film in half as many words and be twice as eloquent. But if I didn't have at least one outpouring of my thoughts on this masterpiece I might just burst. Perhaps I'm in a minority and you're all sitting there thinking "God, has he only just heard of that film now?" but if there are any other people out there who, like me, were totally unaware of this gem, do yourself a favour and buy it right now.

Incredible movie, incredible experience. I think I can start compiling my "best DVDs of 2008" list already.

If you like his NO BLADE OF GRASS and THE NAKED PREY, you should also check out Wilde's World War II film, set in the Pacific, BEACH RED, which I'm sure Terence Malick and Steven Spielberg would admit, influenced their WWII films.

. . . another excellent film directed by Wilde is SWORD OF LANCELOT/LANCELOT AND GUINEVERE (1963) - hard to find in the States, it might be easier to see in England since it was, I believe, a British movie . . . sad to say, the recent R1 DVD of BEACH RED (1967) was letterboxed, but non-anamorphic - still very much worth getting as it is probably the only presentation we will have for, well, a long time . . .

Of course, Destructible Man is the final judge.

Unfortunately, SWORD OF LANCELOT is a British film that has apparently gone PD. I've seen it released on at least ten different el cheapo DVDs, none of which are widescreen. I'm sure that Universal will never rescue it from PD Hell, which is a shame. In Seattle, it opened as the co-feature to KISS OF THE VAMPIRE.

Aside from Spielberg and Mallick, I'd opine that BEACH RED also influenced Eastwood's LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA.

Disappointingly, having expected to be wowed by THE NAKED PREY (a film I'd only been dimly aware of at best) after all the breathless enthusiasm expressed over Criterion's admittedly excellent DVD, I found myself feeling rather underwhelmed by the experience when I excitedly sat down to watch it...a case of a marginal title being over-hyped, maybe (a hopelessly subjective value judgement, of course).

My real problem with the film lies with Cornel Wilde's sometimes-clunky, rough-and-ready directorial style (a suspicion confirmed by a subsequent viewing of NO BLADE OF GRASS), which the disc's commentator accurately pegs as reminiscent of Sam Fuller's, another director I've never really felt at ease with. Both Wilde and Fuller share a similar bull-headed, hard-boiled, unpolished style that I find off-puttingly crude, giving an impression of gifted but impatient amateurs with plenty of guts learning the job on the spot. Many viewers no doubt relish this lack of polish, but for me it lends their films an awkwardness and inauthenticity that draws me inexorably out of the action...

Which is not to say I found THE NAKED PREY actually poor, but something about it just doesn't quite gel for me...whether it be Wilde's naive directorial style (that scene where he's jumping for joy as the veldt burns around him is either a brilliant evocation of child-like primitivism...or just primitively child-like, I'm not sure which), the jarring intrusion of stock-footage wildlife inserts, or the reductively simplistic approach of jettisoning every inessential narrative element in favour of its brutal Pursuers-versus-Pursued survival theme...but some intangible quality of the film just refuses to allow me to become immersed in its perhaps-too-cartoonishly-gritty atmosphere. You can see its influence on subsequent filmmakers, of course - where would Ruggero Deodato be without it? - but the later films seem to have adopted Wilde's savage credo while somehow achieving a greater verisimilitude...

And onto NO BLADE OF GRASS, a film I'd been dying to see for years as it seemed to embody every quality I could possibly want from a post-apocalyptic survival story: a credible near-future catastrophe resulting in a gradual breakdown in civilized values, all ruthlessly described with glorious post-Peckinpah cynicism. A huge fan of Terry Nation's BBC series SURVIVORS, which seemed on paper to share many of the grimly plausible elements with the John Christopher novel on which Wilde's film was based, I was looking forward to more of the same chilling end-of-the-world stuff, albeit with ramped-up sex and violence obviously precluded from the TV show - the best of downbeat British SF, in other words, married to the carnage levels of STRAW DOGS...

What the viewer actually gets from NO BLADE OF GRASS is anything but credible, involving or rewarding in any sense. Any hope of subtlety or sophistication is dashed within seconds of the (absolutely awful) opening theme song’s closing notes. Beginning with a dreadfully portentous voiceover (Wilde himself?) intoning dire consequences for the human race of our despicable polluting ways (while an illustrative montage of belching chimneys and gushing sewage plays endlessly in the background), the film lurches clumsily from one jaw-droppingly clunky situation to the next. (One example: a TV news broadcast of starving millions is ham-fistedly intercut with grotesque close-ups of fat-cat Westerners feeding their faces in a fancy restaurant, a scene which seems to go on and on as if the director can’t trust his audience to get the message.) The decay of civilization is very poorly conveyed indeed, rioting crowd scenes failing utterly to convince – you can’t actually hear them yelling “rhubarb!” but it’s a close-run thing. What should have been a chillingly inexorable descent into chaos is instead depicted in an abrupt and arbitrary fashion, as if Wilde can’t wait to get to the Good Stuff and thinks his audience shares his impatience. Scene after scene is slathered with drippy-hippy oh-but-what-about-the-flowers muzak. Crude over-exaggeration plagues every scene, killing the drama stone dead. When tragedy occurs, it is met with a Biblical wailing and gnashing of teeth. To Cornel Wilde, less is most definitely less. One imagines him barking out direction through clenched teeth, shirt hanging in tatters from bulging pectorals. NO BLADE OF GRASS plays out like one of the leeringly crude sinny-films familiar from the Ludovico Technique, all shrill bombast and amateur theatrics. Too many bangs, and not enough whimpers.

With the honourable exception of the great Nigel Davenport (who isn’t given much to do with his character beyond acting as a stoic mouthpiece for Wilde’s survival-at-all-costs mantra), performances are uniformly flat and indifferent, and unforgivably the End of the World simply comes off as ill-thought-out and unconvincing. Davenport initially seems so ruthlessly well-prepared that it’s dismaying to see him fall for simple-minded ambush tactics time and again as his motley band struggle their way up the country, a fault either of poor screenwriting or poor direction, or both. The much-criticised editorial technique, wherein oh-so-innocent throwaway lines (e.g. Lynne Frederick’s dopily virginal “I want you to make me a Woman”) prompt an hysterical red-tinted, solarized flash-forward to some overcooked brutality or other, becomes hilariously funny after the first half-dozen times. It’s been compared to Argento’s superficially similar editorial style in CAT O’NINE TAILS, but don’t be fooled; while Argento uses the technique to gift his audience with a preternatural sensory prescience, as if to illustrate the heightened sensory capacity of Karl Malden’s blind protagonist, Wilde is just primal-screaming into your left eardrum.

I haven’t yet seen BEACH RED, but I’m imagining THE BIG RED ONE with extra blood’n’guts and a crudely over-emphatic anti-War message. Am I close? ;)

Interesting that you make the Sam Fuller comparison, Steve. It just so happens that as I sat down to watch The Naked Prey, I'd been in the process of working my way through a bunch of Fuller films too, so perhaps I was in the right mindset - I've certainly been enjoying my scattershot exploration of Fuller's filmography too. (Just how great is The Crimson Kimono?)

And to the rest of you, thanks for the recommendations for further viewing - I'll keep an eye out.