Blu-ray Release: The Naked Prey

Blu-ray Release Date: Oct. 2, 2018
Price: DVD $24.02, Blu-ray $25.99
Studio: Criterion

Glamorous leading man turned idiosyncratic auteur Cornel Wilde (Lead Her to Heaven) created in the 1960s and ’70s a handful of gritty, violent explorations of the nature of man, none more memorable than 1965’s 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 adventure narrative and a meditation on the concept of civilization.

Released on DVD by Criterion in 2008, this new Blu-ray edition contains the following:

* Restored high-definition digital transfer, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
* Audio commentary from 2007 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
* Trailer
* An essay by film critic Michael Atkinson and a 1970 interview with Wilde