KING KONG A
USA (100 mi) 1933
d: Merion C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
And the Prophet said,
‘And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.
—Old Arabian Proverb quoted at the opening
—Old Arabian Proverb quoted at the opening
The ultimate special effects movie, often copied, never
equalled, an enduring masterpiece that touts nothing less than the Eighth
Wonder of the World!! Fay Wray stars as
the platinum blond goddess who’s kidnapped by the natives of Skull Island to
appease a towering 50-foot ape. What
would Sigmund Freud have had to say about this monstrous sexual fantasy,
perhaps the ultimate anxiety dream? The
film’s epic climax, in which the giant beast battles fighter planes from atop
the Empire State Building is fondly remembered as one of the most exciting
moments in cinema screen history. Few
films can compete with the longevity of this film, as popular today as when it
was released, and then re-released like Disney films for each successive
generation in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1952, and 1956 when the film was eventually
sold to television, where it had to contend with different cuts of the film as
various scenes had been cut out of the original prints, as stricter censorship
practices existed following the 1933 release.
However an uncensored 16mm print was found in Philadelphia in 1969,
restoring the original running time to 100 minutes. Today a digital restoration was completed by
Warner Brothers in 2005 adding a 4-minute overture. The film has had a revolutionary impact on
the making of movies, where ironically, like Buster Keaton’s SHERLOCK JR.
(1924), it’s also one of the earliest films about making a movie, one of the
first where the director will stop at nothing and foolishly do whatever it
takes to get the picture he wants, even endanger his lead actress and
crew. In fact, Carl Denham (Robert
Armstrong) is so humorously over-the-top as the movie’s reckless adventure
filmmaker, he wants to make the most extravagant picture ever made, “It’s money
and adventure and fame! It’s the thrill
of a lifetime!” According to Peter
Jackson, who made a remake of the film in 2005, “I think as a film, [Kong]
inspired more people to become filmmakers than any other film ever made. I’m absolutely certain of that fact.” It may be this film that we have to blame for
opening the Pandora’s Box of special effect movies in Hollywood, but at the
time, released in the heart of the Depression, it went on to break all previous
box office records and saved RKO from certain bankruptcy, where without Kong, there would have been no CITIZEN
KANE (1941).
According to an old Mike Royko article (King
Kong Confounds Freud . - Google News), Freud might have speculated the
movie represents a myth about aboriginal man living in small hordes, where the
strongest male had as many wives as he could, jealously guarding and protecting
them from other men. Freud’s oedipal
complex explains how the sons left the horde at an early age, only to return at
a later date to kill their patriarch father, inheriting his clan. Members of the clan might be upset about
their slain leader, so to insure the spirit does not seek retribution, some
animal was chosen as a tribute, where the animal’s life would be protected and
treated as sacred. Eventually both the
animal and father would become enjoined as a tribal god, enduring long afterwards
through an inseparable myth. On Skull
Island, native women become human sacrifices to the god. Once Kong
reaches Manhattan Island, however, the god son becomes the sacrificial
object himself, whose martyrdom is meant to atone for the original collective
sin against the father. In death, he
reveals mankind’s relationship to the primal father and the evolution of his
religion. In this evaluation, Kong represents at different times the
primal father, the substitute totem animal, and finally the son, where
multi-faceted symbolism is typical in mythology, where King Kong becomes fable,
dream, and religious allegory. Based on
a book called King Kong Cometh by
Paul A Woods, there are multiple psycho-literary essays on the Freudian
resonances of the film. One chapter
depicts Kong as climbing “the tallest
penile structure in the city … straddling its tower and placing Ann within the
silver pouch inside its foreskin.” Kong,
we are told, is a manifestation of the id in us all. Or, other views suggest he exemplifies “all
the contradictory erotic, ecstatic, destructive, pathetic and cathartic buried
impulses of ‘civilized’ man.” King Kong
is a colossal prehistoric freak of nature who can pick a man up off the
sidewalk and chew on him as if he were an hors d’oeuvres. The original Kong may be naughty, but never evil, where Jean-Jacques Rousseau
understood that the savage creature, unlike the civilized men who attack him,
is just being true to himself.
While the origins of Kong may have originated in Paul Du
Chaillu’s book Equatorial Africa about
a hunt for a wild gorilla in Africa, directors Cooper and Schoedsack befriended
one another during World War I, both sharing a passion for nature and
adventure, exactly like Denham, while traveling the globe shooting nature
documentaries, usually facing the dangers of wild animals and an uncertain
reception from natives. While this idea
stemmed from Cooper’s obsession with the book, meeting visual special effects
pioneer Willis O’Brien in 1931 sealed the deal, as RKO combined O’Brien’s
unfunded project called CREATION about a shipwrecked crew landing on an island
full of dinosaurs with Cooper’s giant gorilla movie. While the screenplay was written by
Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth Rose, who fell in love with Schoedsack aboard a ship,
just like the Driscoll-Darrow affair she would write about, they used the
massive jungle sets from THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (1932). But the real genius behind Kong was the visual conception of
O’Brien, whose stop-action animation techniques were first developed for his
earlier film THE LOST WORLD (1925).
Cooper realized that by using O'Brien's techniques, Kong could be made without costly location shooting in Africa,
where the majority of the work would be provided by stop-motion puppets, some
18-inches for jungle scenes, while others were 24-inches for city scenes. The puppets were made of a steel,
ball-and-socket skeletal framework covered with a sheet of latex rubber and
bear fur. They were also equipped with
wires to control facial expressions, and an inflatable diaphragm to simulate
breathing, where he could express emotion and react to the situation around
him, becoming the first feature film to use stop-motion to create a continuous
character. When you watch Kong, he appears more lifelike when his
hair is bristling throughout the film, an unintentional side effect of O’Brien
moving the puppet around. The process of
animating Kong one frame at a time
was a labor intensive operation, where at a work rate of 10 frames an hour,
requiring 1,440 frames for every minute of film, it would take animators 150
hours just to get a minute of film.
Several methods were used to combine the stop-motion Kong footage with the live-action shots
of the actors, which included shooting on the same piece of film twice, but
only exposing different portions of it, loading two strips of film into the
camera at once, combining a montage of images, and it’s the first ever use of
miniature rear projection, projecting live footage into miniature
settings. According to Martin Scorsese,
“There’s something about the way the special effects work in King Kong himself,
the way he moves, that made him very life-like, and still for me, of course I’m
older, but I still prefer that movie over the digital movies. It gave him a soul.” While O’Brien never received the credit he
was due, his invention was revolutionary in the movie business, sparking the
interest of a young special effect wizard named Ray Harryhausen who contacted
O’Brien after seeing the film at age 13, eventually becoming partners, working
together on MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), while Harryhausen’s own legendary works
include JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981).
While the film takes awhile to get going, many young
children won’t have the patience to stick through the relatively slow paced opening,
as it’s a Depression era movie where a ship sits in New York Harbor ready to
leave on a mysterious adventure, where the director Carl Denham is famous for
shooting pictures in exotic locations, but for this film, he needs a girl,
suggesting “If this picture had romance, it would gross twice as much.” He scours the city hoping to find the right
girl, searching the Mission district, happening upon Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), a
poor woman wandering the streets caught stealing an apple, which opens the door
to a new world, offered a job described by Denham as the adventure of a
lifetime, but first and foremost it’s a job, something to get her out of her
depressed existence, with the hope that it might even bring her fame. Heading out into the high seas, the
destination is so top secret that even the captain and crew are not told where
they’re going. Adding to the monotony is
the flat, one-dimensional character of the first mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce
Cabot in a wooden Charlton Heston style role) who openly tells Ann there’s no
place for women onboard as they just get in the way. Of course, he soon becomes her love interest,
especially when intrigue builds from the curiosity surrounding cases of dangerous
bombs contained in the cargo deck and a photoshoot on deck where Denham eerily rehearses
Ann with the chilling instructions, “Throw your arms across your eyes and
scream, Ann. Scream for your life!” These blood curdling screams have become
synonymous with actress Fay Wray, as at this point she still had no idea what
to expect. When the ominous destination
is revealed to be the mysterious, fog enshrouded Skull Island, where some
large, prehistoric beast is believed to be living there, the entire look of the
film suddenly turns into an exploration of the exotic. When the sound of native drumbeats can be
heard from the ship, piquing the curiosity of Denham and his men, they
immediately bring their cameras onshore and discover a native dance ceremony in
progress, “Holy mackerel, what a show!” where Denham’s brazen attitude is to
throw caution to the winds, immediately exposing the crew. When the chief confronts them, what draws his
attention is Ann, the only white woman they’ve ever seen, where he offers to
exchange six black women for her. When
this doesn’t work, the natives wait until nightfall and kidnap Ann off her own
ship, and sacrifice her to a giant beast living on the other side of a massive
security wall. Denham and his team
arrive too late, but when King Kong, a 50-foot ape sees Ann, who is screaming
to the high heavens, both hands tied to giant columns, he doesn’t eat her, but
instead brings her back to his mountaintop perch with Denham and his men in hot
pursuit.
While this section of the movie was all shot on a studio
lot, the exotic backdrop is dripping with intense atmosphere that couldn’t be
more riveting, as Kong encounters
other prehistoric dinosaurs and is forced to set the screaming Ann gently down
to the ground on a safe spot while he faces mortal enemies in battles to the
death. Denham and Driscoll follow the
giant footprints left behind and soon realize other giant creatures inhabit the
island, where initially they encounter an enraged Stegosaurus, emptying their
rifles, but despite killing the enormous dinosaur, in this world humans are
seen as powerless and puny creatures compared to the giant Kong, little more than annoying gnats who can be swept away with
one simple gesture. The real interest is
watching Kong in his fanatical quest
to save Ann while fending off other dangerously terrifying creatures that try
to attack her, including hand-to-hand combat with a Tyrannosaurus Rex which is
nothing less than enthralling, eventually retreating to a cave at the summit of
Skull Mountain with a panoramic view overlooking the entire island. The visual splendor of a Lost Paradise is largely unparalleled, where this exotic jungle
landscape feels like a time warp and conjures up memories that stick with the
viewer for a lifetime. Despite losing the
entire rescue team except for Denham and Driscoll, the you-are-there intimacy
provided by Cooper and Schoedsack is precisely what Denham hoped he could
capture, where this little escapade into another world feels like a film within
a film, where the viewer’s sympathies soon turn to Kong, who is so protective of Ann and obviously means her no
harm. When he playfully tickles her with
his massive fingers, it’s a genuinely tender moment, where the romanticism in
an action picture is again exactly as Denham hoped. Driscoll’s perseverance is heroic, rescuing
Ann at the summit, where a dive into the river far below gives them time to
escape back to the village, where now its Kong
in pursuit hoping to retrieve his prize.
Despite closing the massive gates to keep the creature out, Kong is able to break through sending
the villagers into chaos. Despite the
loss of his men and barely getting back alive, Denham is not done and
recklessly pursues what he came for, hurling a gas bomb at Kong, temporarily knocking him out, where his response is to shout
victoriously, “We’re millionaires, boys! I’ll share it with all of you! Why, in a few months, his name will be up in
lights on Broadway! Kong! The Eighth Wonder of the World!”
Nothing is quite as captivatingly spectacular as the action
on the island, but the return to New York with Denham’s prized possession in
tow turns into a display of arrogance, greed, and human hubris. Showcasing this mighty animal held in chains
to be ogled by Western audiences for high priced tickets at a spectacular formal
dress gala event turns into a freak show at the circus, where one has to
question who is the real freak of nature?
When the curtains open and the photographer’s blinding flashbulbs create
a furor similar to an attack, Kong becomes
enraged, despite being shackled, especially at the sight of seeing Ann again,
believing she may be threatened, where he breaks free and rampages through the
city streets in search of her, leaving nothing but utter mayhem in his
wake. Anyone who has seen the GODZILLA
(1954) movies from the last 50 years (ironically inspired by a fictional
character created by animator Ray Harryhausen in the 1953 sci-fi movie THE
BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS) or even the SPIDER-MAN (2002, 2004, 2007) series has
seen a similar emphasis on panic and pandemonium, where mass destruction in a
heavily populated urban environment leads to chaos on an unprecedented scale. The human instinct to kill and destroy this
creature feels a bit overwhelming, but it’s a response to hysteria and
confusion. Kong’s instinct, on the other hand, is to climb the highest
skyscraper, where inside Ann sighs with relief in her hotel apartment believing
she has escaped the beast, where her fiancé Driscoll portentously exclaims
“We’re safe now, dear.” At that very
moment, who’s giant face should appear out the window in a macabre game of
peek-a-boo, but Kong’s, adding a delirious
touch of humor when he smashes his fist inside, knocking out Driscoll, and
grabbing his love interest Ann, carrying her safely while climbing to the top
of the Empire State Building in an iconic image that’s pretty hard to top as
one of the great and enduring moments in cinema. A squadron of military biplanes is ordered to
shoot him off the ledge with machine gun fire, so long as they could get off a
shot without endangering the girl, but little thought is given to the impact a
giant 50-foot creature would cause falling to the ground. Setting Ann down to safety, Kong manages to knock one of the planes
out of midair, but the others are too much for him, with Cooper as the pilot
and Schoedsack as the gunner who ultimately shoots Kong down, knocking him off his perch in a devastating moment when he
tumbles down to his sad and tragic death, where a cynical policeman can be
heard saying “Well, Denham, the airplanes got him,” but the film ends with Denham’s
famous reply, “Oh, no, it wasn’t airplanes…it was Beauty killed the
Beast.”
One of the first mythic films in history, King Kong can be
seen as a parable of modernism, specifically a look at humanity handed down by
its nineteenth century intellectual forefathers, born of scientific
rationalism, conscious deliberation, and cold philosophical abstraction, where Kong climbs to the top of the Empire
State Building, only recently completed just two years earlier when this film
was originally released, a Babel-like tower that represents the edge of heaven,
much like Kong’s high throne on Skull
Island, where he is literally a god in his world, but unlike his home island,
his natural world has been replaced by materialism, where instead of flying
Pterodactyls there are fighter planes, where the power and destruction of
man-made flying machines triumph his natural strength and mythical
godliness. It’s interesting that we are
allowed both a sympathetic view of Kong
as a noble beast, a special effects character capable of carrying the entire film
with its performance, but also an unsympathetic portrayal, where Kong is exhibited much like Sarah
Baartman, the Hottentot Venus who was nakedly placed on public
display throughout Europe in the early 19th century as an example of a savage black
race, supposed scientific proof that the white race was superior, an example of
racial prejudice and exploitation colonialism, as portrayed by Abdellatif
Kechiche’s Black
Venus (Vénus noire) (2010). While
the film resembles a B-movie, the actual cost was $672,254.75, where Fay Wray
was paid $10,000 for her 10-week shoot, black actors and extras were paid half
as much as their white counterparts, and no Academy Awards were awarded to this
film, as there was no Special Effects category until 1939. The sound department headed by Murray Spivak
ran dozens of tests to find the right sound coming out of Kong, one that was unlike any other creature on earth, where his
roar was a combination of lion and tiger sounds slowed down and played
backwards, where the tone was designed to match the musical soundtrack. The film is also one of the first times an
entire musical score was written for a movie, where composer Max Steiner
synchronized his music with the action.
Wray recorded all her screams in one afternoon session during
post-production. On the film’s 50th
anniversary in 1983, one New York theater held a Fay Wray scream-alike contest
in its lobby, while two days after her death on August 8, 2004, the lights of
the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in her memory. It was Wray who humorously quipped “Mr. Cooper (one of the directors) said to me
that he had an idea for a film in mind.
The only thing he’d tell me was that I was going to have the tallest,
darkest leading man in Hollywood. Naturally,
I thought of Clark Gable.”
