![]() (He's also heard as the narrator in the present film, and performs a similar function as a radio voice in No Blade Of Grass). ![]() Like Fuller, Wilde produced and directed, but also scored and acted in two out three of his best works. Wilde, too, often wears his message unashamedly on his sleeve - most obviously in the weaker No Blade Of Grass, or in some of the regretful soliloquizing of Beach Red. Fuller is the more assured stylist, with his tabloid-inspired contemplation of events. Both forge personal cinema with an own, urgent vision. Some critics have compared Wilde's cinema to that of Sam Fuller. In Beach Red this environment is lush and dangerous, full of both natural and human perils (at one point the director gives a litany of killer flora and fauna), but one where the greatest threat to man is Man himself. Typically in Wilde's work, a stricken or unforgiving world reflects back the straits in which the main characters find themselves whilst any final resolution is, at best, ambivalent. Beach Red sees soldiers face up to their innermost fears and regrets during the bloody battle for a Pacific island. In No Blade Of Grass a party of English refugees and survivors have to navigate a post-catastrophe landscape. Thus in The Naked Prey a European is pursued by relentless natives across a bleak African wilderness. ![]() Each concerns a journey of one sort or another, in which men must differently face up to the primitive impulse within themselves as the comforting supports of civilised society stripped away. From the mid 1960s onwards Wilde made a remarkable trilogy of work in quick succession: The Naked Prey (1966), Beach Red, and No Blade Of Grass (1970), which are the films upon which his directorial reputation rests principally today. Although not a fully mature work, it still suggested some of the themes that would inform Wilde's later films: a concern with man confronting the elemental, whether externally or internally, and a fondness for extreme situations. Of greater interest still is Wilde's career as a director that, with the tense drama of Storm Fear, started the same year as Combo. A fair screen performer, Cornel Wilde occasionally appeared in more interesting fare, such as the cult B-noir The Big Combo (1955), a title held today in greater esteem these days than his other mainstream successes.
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