| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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KING KONG
Rating: 
USA. 1933.
Directors/Producers – Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsak, Screenplay – James Creelman & Ruth Rose, Story – Merian C. Cooper & Edgar Wallace, Photography (b&w) – Edward Lindon, J.O. Taylor & Vernon L. Walker, Music – Max Steiner, Visual Effects – Linwood Dunn, Special Effects – Willis O’Brien, Art Direction – Carroll Clark & Al Herman. Production Company – RKO Radio Pictures.
Cast:
Fay Wray (Ann Darrow), Bruce Cabot (John Driscoll), Robert Armstrong (Carl Denham), Frank Reicher (Captain Englehorn)
Plot: Sensationalistic movie producer Carl Denham hires a ship and unemployed starlet Ann Darrow and sets sail to a remote island in search of material for an adventure film. But on the island, Ann is kidnapped by the natives and given as bride to Kong, a forty-foot tall ape. The crew struggle through a jungle, where monsters from the Cretaceous still survive, to rescue her. And then Denham has the idea of gassing Kong and transporting him back to New York and placing him on display. But once in New York, Kong breaks free of his confines and rampages through the city.
What can one say about King Kong? It is perhaps the greatest of all fantasy films, it is certainly the greatest monster movie ever made. King Kong is a template upon which almost all giant monster movies from The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) to Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1954) and Jurassic Park (1993) base themselves to some extent or another.
King Kong belongs to the lost world genre. The lost world genre was a fantasy born of the Great Victorian Age of Exploration (and to a lesser extent the embryonic Victorian sciences of palaentology and Darwinism) and was popularized by writers like Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, Pierre Benoit, H. Rider Haggard and later Edgar Rice Burroughs. The Victorian Age of Empire was a point where parts of Africa, the Poles, even the remnants the American West were still uncharted and being discovered. The lost world was always a borderland world, one that inhabited the outermost fringes of civilization. Lost worlds were worlds that teemed with exotic possibilities – prehistoric life, forgotten cities, lost races, great treasures. Symptomatically the lost world fantasy also began to die away around the end of the 1930s, fairly much the time that it could be said that almost every aspect of the physical world where lost civilizations and races could be hiding had been explored.
Willis O’Brien, the chief architect of the King Kong special effects, was one of the first people to explore the lost world on film. Willis O’Brien had directed and created the special effects for a number of silent lost world films – The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915), an inane light comedy set in prehistory, and other lost shorts featuring prehistoric monster such as 10,000 B.C. (1916), Prehistoric Poultry (1916), Curious Pets of Our Ancestors (1917), Along the Moonbeam Trail (1920), as well as The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1919), a lost film that was considered somewhat of a classic of the silent prehistory genre. O’Brien had then created the effects for the classic silent version of Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1925). Directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsak had also previously made two silent films that specialized in the depiction of real-life social borderland worlds – Grass (1925), a documentary about the nomadic journey of an Iranian herding tribe and Chang (1927), a fictional piece about marauding elephants filmed in Siam (Thailand).
King Kong is a pinnacle of this early lost world genre. In the 1930s, the time that King Kong was made, the USA was at the height of The Great Depression, a time when a substantial number of people had been rendered penniless and dissolute. The lost world genre found a vogue during this time. The spin the 1930s cinema put on the genre was to contrast the lost world as an idealized, almost Utopian realm that was seen in many ways preferable to the attendant worries of civilization. Other films of the era such as Tarzan the Ape Man (1932) and Lost Horizon (1937) both held the view that happiness in life could be found by abandoning civilization and its attendant worries and returning to a much simpler, untroubled way of life in undiscovered parts of the globe. King Kong, like much of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsak’s other work, revels in the primality of cultures living closer to nature. In this primal borderland world Kong is clearly seen to be the king of the jungle and the film spends much time reveling in the primal majesty of his glory. The underlying thesis of King Kong is that civilization corrupts the greatness of the jungle beast. The end of the film where Kong is tragically cut down by biplanes as he tries to climb the then tallest peak in New York City, the Empire State Building, is a paen for such primal majesty being brought down by civilization. (Indeed King Kong has singlehandedly afforded the Empire State an almost mythic status).
Much has been made of the strong sexual subtext of King Kong, most especially a scene cut from the original release where Kong holds Fay Wray in his paw and tears her clothes off – said Robert Bloch: “If Freud didn’t exist before King Kong, it would be necessary to invent him” – although this seems an overly literal analysis of the film. Certainly it is there – what else is one to make of the seemingly quite ludicrous notion of a love affair between a 40 foot ape and a blonde starlet. (There has been enormous amount of comedic speculation devoted to how such a relationship might ever have been consummated). There’s a real dreamy quality to the film. Rather than any overtly sexual metaphors, King Kong hovers on the edge of Beauty and the Beast-like fairy-tale more than it does monster movie. No other monster movie quite succeeded in depicting the relationship between the ferocious yet strangely sympathetic monster and the innocent heroine as King Kong does. In fact few other monster movies succeed in investing the beast with any character, in doing anything other than simply regarding it as a marauding monster.
The quality of O’Brien’s effects is stunning. The level of detail – little touches such as Kong’s mannerisms, shaking his head and rubbing his eyes as he is hit by the gas bombs, or the twitching of the not-quite dead stegosaurus’s tail – is incredible. The incredibly violent battle between Kong and a triceratops that goes on for several minutes is perhaps the finest piece of stop-motion animation ever created for the screen.
Many scenes were cut from the film following its original 1933 premiere. The most notable scenes to go were the ones where Kong peels Fay Wray’s clothes from her and the scene where he attacks the sailors crossing the ravine and shakes them off to their deaths below. There are several other brief shots that were also cut where Kong kills natives. These were later restored in the 1980s, although the cut print is still the one that circulates on tv.
Willis O’Brien, Ernest B. Schoedsak, Merian C. Cooper, Ruth Rose, Max Steiner and stars Robert Armstrong and Frank Reicher returned to make the likably silly sequel The Son of Kong (1933). In the 1960s Japan’s Toho Studios revived Kong to take on their biggest star in King Kong Vs. Godzilla (1962) and then spun Kong off for a solo effort King Kong Escapes (1967). Producer Dino de Laurentiis made the infamous remake King Kong (1976), which is reviled by all fans of the original. De Laurentiis then later made an even worse sequel King Kong Lives (1986). Peter Jackson, director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, conducted a further remake, King Kong (2005), which extrudes all of the elements of the original out into a superb epic.
There were numerous imitations on King Kong. Willis O’Brien, Ernest B. Schoedsak, Merian C. Cooper, screenwriter Ruth Rose and star Robert Armstrong returned to make Mighty Joe Young (1949), a film that is almost as good as King Kong. There were a number of giant ape copycats such as White Pongo (1945) and Konga (1961). Kong has also been spoofed in films such as Flesh Gordon (1972), Herbie Rides Again (1974), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), Queen Kong (1976), The Nutty Professor (1996), Frida (2002), George of the Jungle 2 (2003), Chicken Little (2005) and Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).
Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsak made several other genre films together:– these include the excellent human hunting film The Most Dangerous Game (1932), The Monkey’s Paw (1932), and the miniaturized people film Dr Cyclops (1940). Merian C. Cooper also produced the H. Rider Haggard lost world adaptation She (1935).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1998
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