King Kong (1933) Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. Screenplay by James Creelman and Ruth Rose. Starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, and Bruce Cabot.
As I sat down to watch this week’s film, I realized a couple of things.
The first was that I had never actually seen King Kong (1933) in its entirety. I had seen clips from it—especially that famous last line—and I had watched Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake (which I found to be pretty boring, to be honest). But I’d never watched the whole movie beginning to end, which I realized around about the time the Stegosaurus was charging.
The second thing I realized was that I had absolutely no idea where King Kong had come from.
That is, I knew it was a Depression-era pre-Hays Code film from RKO Pictures with revolutionary stop-motion animation. But I didn’t know why it existed. And I wanted to. I wanted to know what peculiar alchemy of history and art combined such that the filmmakers looked around in the early 1930s and thought, “You know what the world needs? The world needs a giant gorilla to kidnap a pretty woman and fight dinosaurs and fall off the Empire State Building.”
The kernel of inspiration, it turns out, is very simple:
Once upon a time there was a boy who was really, really fascinated by apes.
We’ll get to him in a moment. First let’s take a little trip back to the early days of Hollywood.
In the 1920s, as film production became more and more centered in Los Angeles, a handful of large studios (MGM, Paramount, Universal, you know the names) began buying up the dozens of smaller production companies, theaters, and distributors, leading to the vertical integration of the studio system that would dominate Hollywood until the late ’40s. Feature-length films were becoming extremely popular, and they showcased movie stars that everybody loved: Douglas Fairbanks, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Greta Garbo, Rudolph Valentino.
Silent films were already beloved, but movies as a cultural force really exploded with the advent of “talkies” in the last few years of the ’20s. That’s generally cited as the start of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
It can be a bit difficult to conceptualize just how popular movies were during this time, but here are some numbers anyway. By the end of the ’20s, there were somewhere around 22,000-23,000 movie theaters in the U.S.; that’s about one for every 4,500 people. It’s estimated that in a U.S. with a total population of just over 120 million, about 85 to 100 million people were attending the movies each week. Movies were everything and everywhere, and everybody wanted to be a part of them.
That included the Radio Corporation of American (RCA), which looked around and thought, hey, movies with sound are all the rage, and we already have some relevant technology. We should find a way to use it! So they did what other companies were doing: they grabbed up some smaller theater, production, and distribution companies to form the movie studio RKO Radio Pictures, which launched in early 1929.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Hmm, it’s been a long time since I studied history in school, but didn’t something else happen in 1929? Something kind of important?”
Ah, yes. RKO was in business for less than a year when the U.S. financial markets crashed. The Great Depression began in the U.S. but soon spread around the world (in large part due to how badly the U.S. government handled it), and the film industry was affected along with everything else. Movie viewership dropped by almost half, and a third of American movie theaters closed. People turned to radio for their entertainment instead. People still wanted movies, but they couldn’t afford to see as many as they had before.
The newly-formed RKO spent a huge amount of money to churn out picture after picture. Some were successful, but most faded pretty quickly. In an attempt to establish more of a name for itself, RKO brought on producer David O. Selznick in 1931. Selznick is now one of those genuine Hollywood legends, one of the most influential and respected producers the movie business has even known. That legacy comes not just from the films he produced—including Gone with the Wind (1939)—but also from the changes he made to how movies were produced. During his brief time at RKO, Selznick developed the “unit” production system in which individual producers were given a great deal of freedom, rather than requiring everything to be developed under a single, central producer.
One of the men Selznick brought into RKO as part of this change was filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, who very much wanted a studio to take on a specific project he had in mind. A project that would be risky, expensive, and honestly a little bit bizarre.
A project involving a very large ape.
Cooper’s real life was pretty wild even before he made King Kong. He was a fighter pilot in World War I and later in the Polish-Soviet War, during which he was shot down and held in a Soviet POW camp for several months. He escaped, was recaptured, and escaped again. After he returned to the U.S., he became a reporter with The New York Times, but he was bored so he started traveling and writing exploration pieces for the magazine Asia.
Exploration was a big deal among white men at the beginning of the 20th century. Yes, the very concept of “exploration”is fraught with colonialist and racist assumptions, but at the time Europeans and Americans were very much enamored of the idea that there were places in the world they could go out and discover, places that had been lost or forgotten or never visited. The fact that people already lived in many of these places was not seen as terribly relevant, because the people and their cultures were also viewed as something to discover and showcase. Central Asia and Tibet, the North and South Poles, the Amazon basin, Egyptian tombs, the Himalayan peaks—breathless reports from these places filled American and European newspapers.
It was during his work as a travel and exploration writer that Cooper got into filmmaking. He met cinematographer Ernest Schoedsack during his travels, and together with reporter (and spy!) Marguerite Harrison the two men would make the film Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life (1925), a documentary about nomadic tribes in Persia. Ethnographic documentaries were a new thing at the time; Robert J. Flaherty’s extremely popular Nanook of the North (1922) was the first. Grass was a film in a similar vein: a feature-length look at a people and culture that most 1920s Americans would never encounter, blending genuine documentary film practices with staged pseudo-documentary scenarios.
Cooper and Schoedsack went on to make Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), a documentary about a farmer in northern Thailand, which was also very well-received by critics. It has the honor of being one of only three movies in existence to have been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture, an award that existed for the very first Academy Awards in 1929 but was immediately discontinued afterward. (Chang didn’t win; the prize went to F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise.)
For their next film, Cooper and Schoedsack ventured into fiction with The Four Feathers (1929), a silent war movie that takes place during the Madhist War in Sudan. What little information I’ve found about the filming of The Four Feathers is honestly pretty disturbing. Parts of the movie were filmed in Tanzania and Sudan, and it seems like Cooper and the rest of the crew treated both the local actors and the animals very poorly.
In addition to footage for the film, Cooper brought something else back from Africa: a rekindled interest in large apes. He had been fascinated by these animals since childhood, when he had read Paul Du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa, which includes descriptions of massive gorillas who will carry away unlucky women. During the filming of The Four Feathers, he apparently spent so much time observing a family of baboons that he filled hundreds of pages of notes and came up with a shiny new idea.
I don’t lie to you in these columns. I try very hard to make sure that everything I write about is sourced properly. And I promise you I am not making this up: Merian C. Cooper’s shiny new idea was to make a film about a gorilla fighting a Komodo dragon.
Cooper, like so many other Hollywood men, had a tendency to mythologize his own genius when he looked back on his life, so it’s hard to accurately trace the genesis of the idea. But it’s maybe not quite as random as it sounds. Jungle movies, and in particular jungle adventure movies, were very popular at the time. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes had been adapted in an extremely popular series of silent films that filled movie theaters from 1918 until 1929. Silent film icon Lon Chaney starred in West of Zanzibar (1928), a brutal revenge movie set in what is now Tanzania; the film was considered so shocking it played a large part in the push to enforce the Hays Code. Even Mickey Mouse went to the jungle.
We’re getting closer to an answer to my question of where King Kong came from. The final detail to bring it all home is fact that King Kong is a movie about making a movie, and more specifically about making the very sort of film that Cooper and Schoedsack had made before. Cooper apparently went so far as to tell screenwriter Ruth Rose (also Schoedsack’s wife) to “Give it the spirit of a real Cooper-Schoedsack expedition.” The character of Carl Denham is meant to be a version of Cooper, and Jack Driscoll a version of Schoedsack, and I am valiantly not drawing any conclusions about what Ruth Rose thought about the men in her life.
So we’ve finally arrived at King Kong, a movie about an filmmaker’s expedition to explore a faraway place inhabited by mysterious natives and magnificent creatures.
The film’s version of Cooper, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), is a famous filmmaker who wants to make an adventure movie about a massive, mythical beast named Kong, said to live on a remote island somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The ship Venture, under the command of Captain Englehorn (Frank Reicher), is going to take him there; the captain and crew are curiously blasé about the fact that they have no idea where they’re going. Before they set sail, Denham hires Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) to play a beauty opposite the mysterious beast. The film’s only acknowledgement of the Great Depression is the fact the Denham finds Darrow by wandering around New York shelters at night looking for a young woman desperate enough to sail around the word on a whim. Along the way, Darrow develops a romance with the ship’s first mate, Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot).
When they arrive at the island, which has a prominent mountain that looks like a skull but is never actually named Skull Island, they find the islanders performing some sort of ceremony as they prepare to gift a young woman to the mysterious Kong.
And, look, this is something we all know and acknowledge, but it must be said anyway: this movie is super racist. There’s the painful caricature of the ship’s cook Charlie (played by Chinese-American actor Victor Wong), the dismissive way Denham and the ship’s crew insist the islanders could never have built the protective wall, the offer the islanders make to trade six of their women for Darrow, and of course the deeply unfortunate imagery of a huge black gorilla obsessing over a petite blonde woman while flinging her around like a ragdoll—it’s all so outrageously racist that there are moments when the only reasonable reaction is to just stare at the screen blankly.
Critics, film scholars, and audiences have always talked about race in King Kong and the entire Kong franchise; it’s been widely discussed and studied for decades. I’m not going to get into it in depth, because I don’t have anything to say that far smarter and more knowledgeable people haven’t already said.
But I do want to draw attention to Noble Johnson, the actor who plays the unnamed island chief, who was an incredibly prolific and successful character actor with roles in over a hundred films. Many of those small parts were uncredited, but not all of them; he shows up in some of the biggest films from the silent film area, including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1923) and Raoul Walsh’s The Thief of Baghdad (1924), and he worked alongside Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney (who was a good friend of Johnson’s; they went to school together in my hometown).
Before his Hollywood career got too busy, Johnson and his brother, George, founded the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, which was the first Black-owned film studio in the country. Their goal was to make films about Black characters who weren’t stereotypes or caricatures, specifically for Black audiences, telling the kind of stories that were ignored or suppressed by Hollywood studios, segregated theaters, and white audiences. The Lincoln studio only lasted for a few years and made a handful of films, and very little of what they filmed still survives. You can watch a few minutes from By Right of Birth (1921) on YouTube.
I share this because it’s an interesting part of film history, but also because I think it’s important to remind ourselves that when we see something egregiously racist in old movies, it’s almost never true that nobody was thinking about or concerned about such problems. The white guys at the top might not have been thinking about it, but sometimes there are people right there on the screen who were very aware, very concerned, and very much involved in trying to change things for the better.
That being said, we all know the real reasons we’re still talking about King Kong more than 90 years after its release, and those reasons have nothing to do with its politics or even the story itself. It’s all about the spectacle of the production, which becomes apparent when Kong finally makes his appearance.
The villagers kidnap Darrow to offer her to Kong, Kong accepts their offer and steals Darrow away into the woods, and Driscoll and the others race to rescue her. What follows is a breathtaking, relentless series of action sequences that showcase a wide range of complex, innovative, and impressive special effects that forever expanded people’s ideas about what kind of stories could be told in the movies.
Because the movie really is stunning to look at. It was filmed at the RKO studios, often using the same sets, crew, and cast as The Most Dangerous Game (1932), which was being filmed concurrently with much of the same cast and crew. Those dense, layered jungle scenes are a result of life-size sets made of plaster, wood, and live plants, miniature sets, and matte paintings.
One of my favorite uses of matte paintings in the film, which is usually credited to Mario Larrinaga and Byron L. Crabbe (art credits are a bit hazy; it’s not always apparent who did what), is the iconic, memorable scene where the men are crossing the fallen log over the ravine. The layers of light and dark, the depth of perspective, the claustrophobic feel of the trees leaning inward—it’s a stunning sequence that combines several layers of paintings on glass to create a wonderfully immersive scene.
And then there are the monsters, whose appearance and fights are so very exciting, frightening, and sometimes shockingly violent. So violent, in fact, that after the Hays Code began to be earnestly enforced in Hollywood in 1934, King Kong had to be edited and cut several times over the years to remove some of the more violent scenes. (Those scenes were put back in; the movie was fully restored over the years and a complete version is what’s now available online. Another cut-and-restored scene is the one in which Kong removed Darrow’s clothes and sniffs her, which… honestly, it’s technically impressive, but they could have left that one out.) One scene—in which the men who fall into the chasm were torn apart by giant spiders—was deemed too violent even before the film’s release and is now lost.
Now, you might be wondering: So… why are there dinosaurs in this movie?
Aside from the obvious answer, which is that every movie is improved by the inclusion of dinosaurs, it’s a fair question. Nothing about a film crew traveling to an island where a giant gorilla kidnaps a pretty lady suggests dinosaurs.
Once again: I cannot stress to you enough how so many of Cooper’s decisions were driven by his cherished goal of making a giant gorilla fight a Komodo dragon. So he looked around for a way to make that happen, and what he found was a man hard at work in the RKO studios on an unrelated project. A man who loved dinosaurs even more than Cooper loved apes.
That man was Willis O’Brien, the artist who pioneered the use of stop-motion animation in live-action films.
O’Brien also had a pretty exciting life that could (and should) be its own Hollywood film. He spent his youth as a cowboy, fur trapper, and mountain guide. It was while guiding a group of paleontologists around Crater Lake that he fell in love with dinosaurs—a love that never faded. He was also a talented artist who worked as a sculptor and draftsmen (and briefly a professional boxer, because why not). He began using his sculpting skills to create animation, and that’s how he got the attention of people who wanted to make short, animated dinosaur films—including Thomas Edison, who at the time was also trying to sue the rest of the nascent film industry into oblivion, but that’s a whole other topic.
Those short dinosaur films landed O’Brien a job on the production of Harry O. Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925), an adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel of the same name. For the next few years O’Brien worked on some more dinosaur-themed projects that were never finished. That included an RKO production called Creation, which was going to be another movie about discovering dinosaurs alive in the modern world. But Creation was taking too long and costing too much money, so Selznick and Cooper scrapped it.
The suddenly-unemployed stop-motion dinosaurs weren’t Komodo dragons, but they offered a chance for Cooper to finally make his gorilla-fighting dreams come true. Cooper folded the island of dinosaurs and several other ideas from O’Brien’s Creation into his own giant gorilla project. That’s why King Kong has dinosaurs.
Kong, the dinosaurs, and the other creatures are all animation models; they are articulated metal skeletons covered with fabric to soften the lines, containing air bladders to allow the appearance of breathing, and finally encased in rubber or fur. There are two 18-inch Kongs in the film; you can actually tell their cute little faces apart if you look closely. As with all stop-motion animation, filming the creature sequences involved painstakingly moving the models step by step while carefully controlling the lighting; the fight between Kong and the Tyrannosaurus reportedly took seven weeks to film.
The miniature animation model Kongs weren’t all the film needed. The crew also created an enormous head, hand, arm, and foot for certain scenes; the head would have a few men inside it of it, operating its different moving parts. The arm was designed to grip Wray and lift her up while she struggled and screamed; it’s also used in the scene in which she is snatched from the hotel room. (Throughout her life, Wray was charmingly baffled by how beloved she was for her role in King Kong and being Hollywood’s first scream queen. She could, in fact, do a lot more than scream; it’s just that her most famous role doesn’t show much else.)
The real cleverness in King Kong’s special effects come from the combination of the stop-motion animation with the live action scenes. The movie uses several techniques to achieve this; this is a good video explaining them. The simplest one is rear-screen projection, in which the actors are filmed in front of a screen onto which the animated sequence is projected; examples of this in the film are the scenes involved the Stegosaurus and the scene in which Darrow is watching the Kong vs. T. Rex fight from a tree.
The film also uses a reverse version of rear-screen projection with the miniatures. In this technique, it was the filmed live-action scenes that would be projected behind the stop-motion animation. This would be done frame by frame, because stop-motion animation requires that sort of pacing. And, in some cases, two separate live-action scenes were projected at the same time, such as when Darrow and Driscoll are both on screen while Kong fights a creature inside the cave.
A couple of the other techniques they employed were the Dunning process and the Williams process, both of which involve using lighting to separate the live-action foreground before “bipacking” that film with the background, or loading two strips of film into the camera to create an in-camera overlap.
It’s the combination of all these different techniques, and the filmmakers’ willingness to use anything they could, that makes those battles in the jungle and that climb up the Empire State Building so fantastic. The painstaking work that went into creating Kong, his dinosaur neighbors, his island home, and his eventual demise only gets more impressive the more you dig into it.
King Kong is very much a labor of love, one where a truly incredible amount of work went into bringing these impossible scenarios to life. Yes, it’s a dated movie with a lot of very serious problems. And, yes, it can look jerky and awkward to our modern eyes (although, truth be told, I have very little patience for those who dismiss it on those grounds). It’s still a marvelous sight to behold.
Even though it’s been 91 years, it’s not that hard to imagine going to watch this movie in 1933. Times are tough, wonders are hard to come by, and who can blame Ann Darrow for seizing a chance at adventure? Because that’s what it is. It’s an hour and a half of tension, action, danger, and romance. It was never meant to be realistic; verisimilitude is not necessarily the goal of special effects, then or now. The film’s goal is to transport us and take us on adventure. What King Kong was always meant to be was astounding.
The world didn’t need a movie about a giant gorilla fighting dinosaurs. It is, in truth, a very silly premise. (I say that with love.) But the world got that movie anyway, and when it did it also got proof that movies can show us anything, tell any kind of story, take us on any kind of journey. Movies can be anything at all—and some of the very best things they can be are fun, imaginative, and willing to carry us away into the impossible for a little while. That’s why King Kong is still so beloved after all this time.
This brings our giant monster month to a close! What do you think about King Kong? Thoughts on its special effects, its development, its place in film history? Did anybody else feel really sorry for the Stegosaurus? I just felt really sorry for that fellow.
I can’t believe it’s August already, but that means it’s time for something new.
Let’s Skip Ahead to the End (of the World)
August always makes me want to fast-forward to autumn, so how about some time travel? There are many types of time travel movies (time loops, fixing or fouling up history, solving crimes across time, etc.) but the ones we’re watching this month all involve glimpsing some version of a future in which things have gone a little bit awry for humanity.
August 7 — The Time Machine (1960), directed by George Pal
Let’s jump into our Victorian contraption and visit the distant future to see how humans have evolved.
Watch: Amazon, Apple, Vudu, Microsoft, Spectrum.
View the trailer.
August 14 — Aditya 369 (1991), directed by Singeetam Srinivasa Rao
Let’s jump into our early ’90s contraption and visit both the past and the future to chase an art thief in India’s first time travel film.
Watch: Amazon looks like the only subtitled source. It seems both the Telugu-language original and the Hindi dub are floating around on YouTube or other upload sites, but I don’t think any have English subtitles.
View the trailer, which also doesn’t have English subtitles.
August 21 — La Jetée (1962), directed by Chris Marker
We’re simulating the psychological whiplash of time travel by following up a madcap Tollywood adventure with a bleak, experimental, French arthouse film that is only 28 minutes long.
Watch: Criterion, Amazon, Apple.
View the trailer.
August 28 — Twelve Monkeys (1995), directed by Terry Gilliam
This is what you get when Terry Gilliam and Chris Marker reinterpret La Jetée in the ’90s.
Watch: Apple, Vudu, Microsoft, YouTube, Google.
View the trailer.
Sometimes, the only response to make is one used on the Key & Peele show, where the eulogy for a beloved community activist included a screening of his early Hollywood audition pieces, that unnervingly included every horrible African-American stereotype, leading one mourner to stand up and yell, “Oh, HELL no!!”
Racial issues included, watching King Kong in 1933 must have been an unnerving experience, as it still touches us, even with all of our movie technology exposure. Maybe seeing it when young, as many of us now do, brings back some of the startlement of the first-time showings.
Random thoughts regarding other Kongs:
King Kong ’76: Dishwater dull, but when you look at Jeff Bridges here and then watch The Big Lebowski, you can see what could be called Adventures of the Young Dude.
King Kong vs. Godzilla: The first movie I ever saw as a child. Sad to say, however, this Kong looks like a silly man who needs a shave and wears a fur coat.
King Kong Escapes: Released the same year as You Only Live Twice, which was partially filmed at Toho Studios. Both movies also featured Mie Hama in understandably different parts.
King Kong 2005: It can be boring; it’s also overstuffed and tends to go off on weird tangents (the second mate and the cabin boy discuss Conrad’s Hearts of Darkness). But Naomi Watts is a most impressive Ann Darrow.
Kong: Skull Island: My favorite movie in the Monarchverse franchise.
Oh, yes, K:SI is easily the best of the MonsterVerse films, the only one that really stresses character and message over spectacle. I wish they’d done more in that vein instead of getting dumber and dumber with each sequel.
And yes, I do remember Watts being pretty impressive in the Jackson film.
King Kong vs. Godzilla isn’t bad in the original Japanese cut, though the American re-edit is terrible. But the following year’s Mothra vs. Godzilla was a far better execution of essentially the identical story.
King Kong Escapes was a co-production of Toho and Rankin-Bass and was actually a loose adaptation of R-B’s King Kong animated series.
Speaking of Rankin-Bass, Kong makes an appearance in Mad Monster Party. Apparently, due to licensing issues, he was billed as “It”.
I honestly don’t think King Kong is a particularly good movie, aside from the visual effects. It’s an archetype of the category of movie that prioritizes spectacle over writing and character. Although I guess you could read a message into it about the folly of exploiting nature for the sake of entertainment, though I might be back-projecting the message from the Mothra movies.
Aside from the innovative VFX, King Kong was the first non-silent feature film in American history to have a full original score, because before then the technology didn’t exist to mix more than one audio track together on film. (Earlier films could only have music in the title sequences, or if it was played live on set during filming. That’s why Frankenstein doesn’t have incidental music but Bride of Frankenstein does.) Max Steiner’s contribution to the film is as much of a breakthrough in its way as Willis O’Brien’s.
So Du Chaillu was the inspiration? Ugh, I hate Du Chaillu. He manufactured the myth of the savage, man-eating gorilla because “I shot these rampaging beasts that would’ve killed many people” made him sound more manly and heroic than “I murdered these placid herbivores so I could turn them into trophies.”
Really, though, because O’Brien didn’t understand gorilla anatomy that well, Kong comes off less as a gorilla and more a sort of Giganto-gigantopithecus, a distinct and undiscovered species with a more upright body plan like a hominin. Most subsequent versions, from Toho to DeLaurentiis to Legendary, stick with that more humanlike shape for Kong. It’s really only Peter Jackson’s version that looks and acts exactly like a scaled-up gorilla.
I’ve often wondered if it would be possible to create a fan edit combining scenes from King Kong and The Most Dangerous Game into a single, reasonably cohesive narrative, consolidating the characters played by the same actors and the scenes using the same sets. I don’t have the skills to do it myself, but I’d like to see someone try.
As for Peter Jackson’s King Kong, it wasn’t bad, but even while I was in the theater, I kept thinking, “Every single scene of this movie is 20 percent longer than it needs to be.” Still, it’s better than the Dino DeLaurentiis remake from the ’70s. That’s probably the weakest of the four American versions, but I’m fuzzy on the details. It tries a bit too hard to be topical, and if I recall, its excuse for getting Kong to climb the World Trade Center in the climax is rather contrived. It’s the film debut of Jessica Lange, for what it’s worth.
It had a sequel a decade later called King Kong Lives, with Linda Hamilton. It’s not well-regarded.
I think that some critics/scholars/etc do try to sort of back-project a deeper meaning onto King Kong, but it’s really not there. It is 100% spectacle. Which I think makes it fun to watch as a piece of craft and as a part of film history, but as is probably obvious I found the details of how and why it was made to be the more interesting aspect.
Your Mothra mentions makes me wonder how much of that re-interpreting King Kong as having a deeper message comes from its later association with the Toho kaiju movies.
And, yes, the main thing I learned from looking into what inspired Cooper is that his inspirations were usually terrible, to the point where the way he wrote/spoke about his own life and choices makes him sound like the very worst caricature of turn-of-the-century adventure guy.
I would totally watch that fan edit of King Kong and The Most Dangerous Game. Somebody with the necessary skills should do that!
Not just Toho. Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature basically recapitulate the King Kong story outline in two parts.
This has always been one of my favorite films, and one that I credit for kickstarting my love of movies when I saw it on TV as a kid. One thing I always found funny is that they’re all so dead set on bringing back the giant ape, and never bat an eye at all the FREAKING DINOSAURS they could capture. Wouldn’t those have been way more fascinating creatures to show off back home? Maybe it’s just me.
I thought exactly the same thing! Why aren’t they more excited about the dinosaurs???
Seems to me more like knowing their limits. Given a choice between a giant ape and a T. rex, which one are they more likely to be able to capture without getting themselves killed?
Where would they have kept the dinosaurs? Some sort of Mesozoic-themed entertainment complex? Needs a snappier name.
Adding this to my list of unlikely crossovers I need somebody to write for me on AO3.
Ok, but now I want a movie where Jurassic Park is built on Skull Island
Bob Newhart having just passed away, I feel the need to point people to his take on King Kong.
Thanks for posting this!
I’m still hoping to see Candy Apple Island.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention ‘Ingagi’, the 1930 sexploitation blackface film about a tribe of gorilla worshipping women that convinced RKO there was a market for movies featuring sexual tension between a woman and a gorilla.
I did look into that, but that bit of Hollywood lore is surprisingly difficult to verify/source beyond second or third-hand mentions? Or at least to verify quickly. I did some digging around but mostly found “people say that ___” kind of references. There might be more details out there, but I didn’t have time to look too far into it!
This was the first movie I ever saw. I was probably five-years-old and my mom let me stay up past midnight to watch it on Flint’s weekly horror movie show hosted by a guy who went by the moniker “Christopher Coffin” (it was the tail-end of the monster kid era). Even though the film seemed a bit creaky and clearly the product of the seemingly far distant past I was blown away by it and to this day can still watch it with the same sense of wonder.
It really is the textbook example of how to do an adventure and/or fantasy film which is to go at it with chutzpah, unflagging sincerity and all the resources and formidable craftsmanship of a Hollywood studio at the height of the golden era. Selznick had a profound appreciation of the art of cinematic illusion and how to marshall the resources of RKO to create it be it through the extensive use of matte paintings and miniatures, stop-motion animation, process photography and bi-packing along with the judicious use of a few massive sets. There were many far more lavishly produced spectacles than “Kong” (particularly those at the peak of the silent era) but none quite evoke the dreamlike world of skull island or the nightmarish image of Kong battling biplanes from atop the Empire State building. The only other films that come close to it for my money are Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast” and 1935’s “A Midsummer’s Nights Dream” (which, both being fantasy films, are particularly deserving of being reviewed here). “Kong” is indeed astounding, both for its time and all time.
There is a reason that movies from this era have lost none of their raw power and that Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and Cooper’s Kong are such enduring iconic images. It’s because the people who created them understood an audience’s hunger for the fantasy of flickering images on a screen in a darkened room. Most people alive now may still find themselves absorbed watching moving images on a television or in a multiplex but the experience is fundamentally different than the collective one of being in a packed neighborhood theater with an audience that went to the movies weekly to escape the dreariness of real life. Still, if you open yourself up to watching these films with anything like a pure, unburdened sense of wonder you can still experience a lot of what people have felt watching these movies when they were new and it is worth the time and effort.
A few last random thoughts:
Max Steiner’s phantasmagoric score wasn’t the first wall-to-wall score of the sound era but it was the first one to fully demonstrate the powerful narrative synergy of music with moving pictures and was pretty much the template for non-diegetic film music for generations. There are several recordings of the score out there and I highly recommend listening to it on its own.
Several scenes were cut from the movie shortly after its release and were lost until the eighties when they were found and finally restored to the film. As I recall they largely were the shots of a rampaging Kong stomping on villagers and a few seconds of Kong disrobing Wray.
A rumor persisted for generations of a lost “spider pit” sequence where members of the expedition were graphically killed by an assortment of giant insects and other beasties after Kong shakes them off from the giant log. People searched obsessively for the footage for decades and others insisted in the pages of semi-professional film magazines that they remembered seeing the scene during the movie’s first release. It has been since conclusively since that the scene was scripted but never filmed although Peter Jackson did take some of the millions Universal gave him while remaking “Kong” to create the sequence on black and white film with stop-motion monsters.
Selznick set the massive wood wall from Skull Island afire to impressively depict the burning of Atlanta in “Gone With the Wind.”
The less said about “Son of Kong” the better but “Mighty Joe Young” warrants viewing if only to see how much more O’Brien was able to polish his art just a few years later.
Stop-motion animator David Allen lovingly recreated Kong in color for a 1972 Volkswagen commercial. It’s on YouTube and well worth a watch.
“Chutzpah and unflagging sincerity” is such a good way to put it!
Thank you for mentioning the score and its place in film history–that’s one of the things I didn’t have time or space to really look into.
“Mighty Joe Young” comes up in just about every article/book/reference I have encountered about special effects, so I should definitely check it out. I will say I never even considered watching “Son of Kong” because, by many accounts, even many of the people who made the movie didn’t think it was worth watching.
I seem to remember reading that Max Steiner’s score was the first entirely original movie soundtrack score. Up until then, movie music had most often used classical-music themes and excerpts (e.g., Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” used as opening music for “Dracula.”
Seconding Cocteau’s BatB. That movie is *astounding.*
Adding this to my watch list on these two recommendations!
Thank you for mentioning the rather blatant racial issues this film has. I honestly don’t remember this film being so culturally outdated until I watched it tonight.
I sort of knew about the terrible race issues when I went to watch it, but even so my eyes kept getting wider and wider all through the first half of the movie because, damn.
Someone elseweb pointed out that real gorillas do interact with primates that are about as tiny in relation to them as any human is in relation to Kong. A silverback gorilla, Bobo, has been photographed during a peaceful interaction with a galago that entered his group’s enclosure at the Ape Action Africa Mefou Primate Sanctuary in Cameroon. Galagos are tiny, big-eyed, big-eared, fuzzy, fluffy, and cute. The galago fearlessly explored Bobo and the nearby area while Bobo protected it from the too-close attention of the other gorillas in the troop. Then he walked it over to a nearby bush and gently put it onto a branch.
So there’s a motivation for Kong in the next remake: he has been entrusted with the care of this cute and alarmingly tiny primate and is trying to fulfill his bounden duty.
The idea of Kong seeing humans and thinking, “Oh gosh, these cute lil guys with so little hair are really going to get into trouble, I better help them survive this forest!” is adorable and I would love to see it.
King Kong also has an unusual fanbase among New York City transit buffs, who intently study the scenes of Kong wrecking a portion of the IRT Sixth Avenue El (e.g. the closeup of the motorman slamming on the brake handle is an accurate shot of the control and brake stand in a “Lo-V” car control cab). It was also “topical,” since in 1933 it was known that El was scheduled for demolition in 1938, to be replaced by the IND Sixth Avenue subway.
This is a delightful detail and I thank you for sharing it!
Peter Jackson didn’t solve any of the race issues either. His natives are even worse- they look like aboriginal zombies.