Naked Prey, The (BLU-RAY)
Glamorous leading man turned idiosyncratic auteur Cornel Wilde created in the 1960s and ’70s a handful of gritty, violent explorations of the nature of man, none more memorable than The Naked Prey. In the early nineteenth century, after an ivory-hunting safari offends a group of South African hunters, the colonialists are captured and hideously tortured. A lone marksman (Wilde) is released, without clothes or weapons, to be hunted for sport, and he begins a harrowing journey through savanna and jungle back to a primitive state. Distinguished by vivid widescreen camera work and unflinchingly ferocious action sequences, The Naked Prey is both a propulsive, stripped-to-the-bone narrative and a meditation on the concept of civilization.
SPECIAL FEATURES
- Restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Audio commentary from 2007 by film scholar Stephen Prince
- “John Colter’s Escape,” a 1913 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
- Trailer
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Atkinson and, for the Blu-ray edition, a 1970 interview with Wilde
Cover by Michael Boland