100 films: King Kong

[pryor15]

starring: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, and Frank Reicher
written by: James Creelman and Ruth Rose, from the story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace
directed by: Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
NR, 100 min, 1933, USA

Film director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) discovers on the eve of his voyage that his film is lacking a love interest, so he rescues Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) from a shoplifting charge and recruits her for the production. They sail to an island where they encounter Kong, an gigantic ape who falls in love with Darrow. Kong is captured and taken to New York, where he escapes and scales the Empire State Building in one of the signature scenes in the history of cinema.

It doesn't take a whole lot of searching to see the fingerprints of King Kong in modern cinema. The film moves a bit slowly until we meet Kong, but from there on it's non-stop action. Once he meets the girl of his dreams, he's forced to battle two dinosaurs, a giant snake, a flying reptile, and a Tyrannosaurus rex. And that's before he even gets to New York. The other creatures seem to be attacking at will, going after the crew and Darrow with little to no provacation[1], but Kong fights solely as a means of defense, either of himself or his girl[2]. Once in New York he is startled by the reporter's flash bulbs and believes that Darrow is being attacked, so he rips himself free from his restraints and goes on his rampage of the city. He knocks down walls, rips apart an elevated train, and knocks down a bi-plane with his bare hands. He is so focused on his goal of protecting Darrow that when he accidentally grabs another girl, he drops her without a thought to her safety once he discovers his mistake. If he weren't so concerned with his girl, he could have lived a long, if not miserable, life as a Broadway attraction, but he cannot stand silently while she appears to be in danger, and this is what proves to be his downfall. As Denham points out, "It was beauty killed the beast."

King Kong was, and in many ways still is, a technical marvel on several levels. Kong himself is a model brought to life by stop-motion animation. He looks exactly like the Abominable Snowman in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964), only it's 30 years earlier and not in color. The filmmakers use a litany of techniques over the course of the film, most prominently a good deal of rear projection that ensures we see Kong in the frame with the humans. It would have been easier, for sure, to show Kong in a closeup and then cut to a matching shot of a human and let our imaginations put them in the same jungle, but this film takes the extra time to show them in the frame together, bridging that gap and further adding to the realism of the scene.

And despite how primitive the effects look, there is a great deal of realism in the proceedings. It's obvious that Kong is a model and that he's knocking down model buildings, but the effects are done with such a sense of artistry that we get the full effect of the real thing. The destruction of New York rivals any number of big-budget CGI sequences that look almost real because the action in King Kong feels almost real in a way the computers struggle to match. If the upcoming remake is half as exciting as the original[3], it will be a real treat. I doubt, though, it will recapture the intangibles that made Kong the icon he is today.

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[1] One of the dinosaurs that eats a crew member is, I believe, a herbivore. At least, that's what I remember from when I was a kid and used to think dinosaurs were cool.

[2] He risks his life for her over and over, yet she still can't stop screaming whenever he's around. Once again proving that women can be impossible to please.

[3] And from the footage I've seen, it looks like it will be pretty good.

[Blarg]

I am looking forward to the restored scene in the new one of the guys falling off the log into the spider pit.

[whiskeytown]

ya got it backwards...

the restored scene with them falling into the pit WAS redone by Peter Jackson and the WETA team, but it's an add-on to the release of this CLASSIC version on DVD that came out a couple weeks ago-

I posted on it...info is at Retrocrush

interesting observation - the guys at WETA wouldn't tear apart one of the old models cause it was an heirloom practically, but they x-ray'd it - what surprised them were modified bellows for simulated breathing....they didn't expect to find that kind of special effects technology in it since it was supposed to work like a claymation device - LOL.

RB

[Blarg]

It's not being put into the movie released in theaters? Ah, dang.

I wouldn't be surprised if the director of the original was right about it in a way that would apply to Jackson's remake, though -- something that cool would stop the movie dead in its tracks. At least, if you thought that the momentum needed to stay that focused on Kong.

[diebitter]

Yeah, I thought that scripted sequence was also in the new film, but I have no idea why I think that.


Anyway, cool review of a truly great and awesome film.


I think the sequence starts tickling her and peeling away her clothes is very, very interesting, and it's hard to believe they got away with it - glad they did [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

Kong is so allegorical of many things - some authors have called it an allegory of black slavery and its outcome in the US, some have seen it as a more general allegory of the dynamic of man and nature, or the more internal struggle of primal function and higher brain function, and so on.

I think these ideas just show how mythical the whole story is, and how deeply appealing this myth is, of the master of one world being diminished by being taken to another, but then prevailing again...


Whatever, it kicks ass, even after all these years.

[Blarg]

I always just thought of it as being about a big monkey.

I should rent the original and watch it once for fun and then maybe again to see what kind of thematic things it makes me think about. It's too late and I'm too sleepy to do any thinking about it now. [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img]

[pryor15]

[ QUOTE ]
I think the sequence starts tickling her and peeling away her clothes is very, very interesting, and it's hard to believe they got away with it - glad they did [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

for a long time they didn't. the censors cut that scene and it was put back in later on.

[Dominic]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I think the sequence starts tickling her and peeling away her clothes is very, very interesting, and it's hard to believe they got away with it - glad they did [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[/ QUOTE ]

for a long time they didn't. the censors cut that scene and it was put back in later on.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's because the Hayes code was new then, and still not as effective as it later became.

Hayes code

Before the Hayes Code, in the 20s and 30s, it was not rare to see drug use, nudity, etc in movies.

[John Cole]

[ QUOTE ]
The use of firearms should be restricted to the essentials.

[/ QUOTE ]

I wonder what the interpreters of the Code made of this injunction?


Part of the fun of the Code was seeing how screenwriters and directors attempted to dance around it.

[Blarg]

There was no shortage of gunplay in gangster flicks and westerns.

Maybe they meant, "Make sure the good guy wins."