No name for the protagonist, almost no clothes for main characters, and little to no dialogue – the subtraction of these elements in Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey (1965) created a raw adventurous feel in the story of a white man on the run for his life from a local tribe of barbarians in Africa.
Set in the 19th-Century South Africa, Wilde stars as a safari guide whose group of visitors including a rich investor offends the local tribe by refusing to tip them for walking and hunting in their territory. The offended African tribesmen wage a war on the visitors, capture them, and torture them to death. The guide, however, gets a chance to run for his life. And thus becomes the titular naked prey.
Lots of jungle adventure integral to the plot comes with select scenes of wild animals engaging in predator-prey game that is actually the main plot of the story with the guide and his African hunters. The Naked Prey shows the parallels between the two by mixing scenes of animal predation and savages from the African tribe hunting down their visitors. Viewers get the message, which is further illustrated in the scene of another African tribe coming under the raid of Arab slavers.
The Naked Prey has scenes of torture and animal killings, some by humans and some within the wildlife itself. So it’s not for viewers who are allergic to seeing brutality including the red in tooth and claw nature. Production info says that Wilde took a lot of care in preventing harm to animals during the filming and even got injured in trying to save the lizard from the python in a scene.
Both a thriller and jungle adventure, The Naked Prey brings the refresher that nature’s first rule is survival and if we are not running for our lives, we’re already living in luxury.
