Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1966

The Contenders:

Blow-Up
The Fortune Cookie
Khartoum
A Man and a Woman (winner)
The Naked Prey

Run for Your Life

Films: The Naked Prey
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

There’s a difference between a screenplay and a script. Nowhere is that more evident than in a film like The Naked Prey. There’s clearly a screenplay here, but for most of the film’s running time, the only dialog is in a southeast African Bantu language without subtitles. There’s a bit of English at the start and in the final few minutes, but the bulk of the film is done without any speech from the unnamed main character. Remade today, The Naked Prey would be a 90-minute monologue instead of focusing on the survival of the main character.

The man (played by director Cornell Wilde) is a safari guide leading a hunting expedition through an unidentified part of Africa. The man paying for the expedition (Gert van der Bergh) is the epitome of a colonialist, the sort of person who would be easy for the audience to hate on sight even in the mid-1960s. The bulk of his dialog is about how much he’s enjoyed shooting elephants and how he’d like to get started in the slave trade. It’s not too surprising then that when the hunting party meets a group of natives who expect gifts for their chief, the hunter snubs them despite being warned.