NAKED PREY, THE (CRITERION)

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 and Technical Specs:

• 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 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
• PLUS: An essay by film critic Michael Atkinson and a 1970 interview with Wilde
• Optional English SDH subtitles for the main feature