The Most Dangerous Game is significant because it anticipates King Kong the following year, in its exotic RKO studio jungle setting, its producer Merian C Cooper and composer Max Steiner, and its female star, Fay Wray. It's short. Hunter Joel McCrea becomes the prey of Leslie Banks.
David Selznick is executive producer.
One thing they could have made more explicit (it was pre-Code) is that when Banks goes over the balcony at the end he is then torn to bits by his dogs.
Considering it's even older, The Criminal Code is rather more interesting. DA Walter Huston sends young murderer Phillips Holmes to prison for 10 years, where he becomes ground down. Intense Boris Karloff, making an early impression, is a cell mate with a grudge. Then Huston becomes the prison warden - there's a great scene where the prisoners who all hate him sound out their protest, and he calmly walks among them smoking his ever-present cigar until they quieten - based on a true story. Lots of good moments, montages, long takes like kid learning his mother's died. Constance Cummings is the warden's daughter.
A Columbia picture, photographed by 'Teddy' Tetzlaff and 'James How', whose very underlit photography is in evidence. Andy Devine is an uncredited convict.
It was improved on Martin Flavin's play by Seton Miller and Fred Niblo.
The prison yard was an MGM set built for The Big House (1930).
This is the film Peter and Boris are watching in Targets.
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