King Kong (1933)

Welcome everyone to my third annual “Halloween Month.” Much like how I did my first year when I started doing “Halloween Month,” I will be looking at different franchises throughout most of the month. Now I think the time is right to review one of the greatest epic masterpieces of all time, the 1933 classic, “King Kong,” which happens to be one of my favorite movies.

Roger Ebert started his review out by saying:

On good days I consider "Citizen Kane" the seminal film of the sound era, but on bad days it is "King Kong." That is not to say I dislike "King Kong," which, in this age of technical perfection, uses its very naivete to generate a kind of creepy awe. It's simply to observe that this low-rent monster movie, and not the psychological puzzle of "Kane," pointed the way toward the current era of special effects, science fiction, cataclysmic destruction, and nonstop shocks.

“King Kong” is the archetype of “Jurassic Park,” the “Alien” films and a handful of other stories where the heroes are scared completely by expert special effects. A movie like “Silence of the Lambs,” where the evil is in a man’s personality, looks humanistic by antithesis.

Ebert admits:

I've seen "King Kong" (1933) many times, most memorably in its re-release in the 1950s, when it did indeed scare me. In recent years I have focused on the remarkable special effects, based by Willis O'Brien and others on his f/x work in "The Lost World" (1925) but achieving a sophistication and beauty that eclipsed anything that went before.

The movie steals every trick in the book to create its illusions, using live action, back projection, stop-motion animation, miniatures, models, matte paintings and sleight-of-hand. That’s not to say that it’s stingy with the effects. After a half-hour of awkward dialogue and hammy acting, the movie gives us Kong and occasionally moves away from parts that need one kind of trickery or another.

When you look at it, “King Kong” is more than a technical success. It is also a curiously touching story where the beast is seen, not as one for destruction, but as an animal that in its own way wants to do the right thing. Unlike the Xenomorphs in the “Alien” franchise, who represent single-minded aggression, Kong cares for his imprisoned human female, protects her, attacks only in defense, and would be perfectly happy if he was alone on his Pacific Island. It is the greet of a Hollywood director that brings out Kong’s anger, and anyone who thinks to showcase the ape on a New York stage in front of a live audience deserves what he gets – indeed, more than he gets.

The movie was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Scheodsack, and produced with David O. Selznick, who was the head of RKO Radio Pictures at the time and was considered a legend. Selzick took a little credit for this film, saying his main involvement was to piece O’Brien’s special effects together with Cooper and Schoedsack’s story ideas.

Despite this has the capacity and feel of a high-budget film, the budget for “King Kong” was a pretty reasonable budget of about $600,000. Ebert mentioned, “Sequences that would take weeks these days--such as when Kong shakes a log to dislodge the men clinging to it--were done in two days, and the giant wall that separates the island villagers from the monster was a set originally built as the Temple of Jerusalem for Cecil B. DeMille's "King of Kings" (1927).” Even though Fay Wray had been in acting since 1923 and was a B-list actress, her male protagonist, Bruce Cabot, was making his film debut after Cooper found him working as the doorman in a Hollywood club.

The story is not complicated. A movie director, played by Robert Armstrong, gets a ship, his female protagonist from off the streets of New York at the last second, and goes to a mysterious Pacific island he heard about in Singapore. The island has a legendary giant ape, which he wants to use as the star of his movie. Fay Wray plays Ann Darrow, Kong’s co-star, and Cabot is the sailor who falls in love with her and saves her from Kong.

Today’s audience will be moving uncomfortably in their seats during the stereotyping of the islanders at a part where a bride is to be sacrificed to Kong (it is rare to see a coconut brassiere outside of a comedy), but from the minute Kong shows up in the movie it basically never stops to take a break. In a surprising outburst of creative energy, O’Brien and his team (including RKO’s legendary visual effects artist Linwood Dunn and sound man Murrary Spivack) show Kong fighting two dinosaurs, a giant snake, a flying reptile and a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Later, in New York, he will climb to the top of the Empire State Building and smack down a biplane with his bare hand.

Here’s what Ebert mentioned about the effects:

The visual techniques are explained by film historian Ron Haver, whose commentary track on the 1985 Criterion laser disc was one of the first ever recorded. He is amusing in describing how some live-action scenes were miniaturized to make the Kong model look larger; searching for the right screen to project them on, the filmmakers hit on a screen made of condoms, to the consternation of a nearby druggist who could not understand their orders for a gross at a time. Haver also observes how Kong's fur seems to crawl during several scenes; the model was covered with rabbit fur, and the fingers of the stop-action animators disturbed it between every stop-action shot. The effect, explained by the filmmakers as "muscles rippling," is oddly effective. (When a DVD of "King Kong" is finally issued, Turner Pictures would be wise to recycle the Haver commentary.)

Ebert goes on to say:

From the moment of its making, "King Kong" fell under the censors' scissors. Cooper himself removed one notorious sequence after the world premiere: The men shaken from the log fell into a chasm where they were devoured by giant spiders, but the effect “stopped the picture in its tracks,” people walked out, and Cooper cut it. Another scene was taken out after the Motion Picture Code came into being. It shows Kong curiously removing some of Wray's clothes, tickling her, and sniffing his fingers. Closeups of humans being crunched between Kong's jaws were also cut for various versions, but now the movie is intact again--except for the spiders.

How terrifying would that have been? Variety’s original 1933 review agreed that “after the audience becomes used to the machinelike movements and other mechanical flaws in the gigantic animals on view, and become accustomed to the phony atmosphere, they may commence to feel the power.” However, the theater Bible Variety complained, “It’s a film-long screaming session for [Wray], too much for any actress and any audience.” Yes, but nobody has forgotten her performance. (Ebert confessed, “At a Hollywood party in 1972, I saw Hugh Hefner introduced to Fay Wray. "I loved your movie," he told her. "Which one?" she asked.)

Ebert mentioned, “Variety then and now was hard to impress, but my guess, based upon my first viewing as a teenager, is that audiences found it plenty scary.” From today’s standards the movie has aged, as critic James Berardinelli looked at it, and “advances in technology and acting have dated aspects of the production.” Yes, but in the very dishonesty of some of the special effects, there is a scare value that isn’t there in today’s professional, flawless, computer-generated images.

In “Jurassic Park” you are more or less looking at a real dinosaur. In “King Kong,” you are looking at an idea of a dinosaur, created by hand by professionals who are working with their imaginations. When Kong fights the large flesh-eating dinosaur in his first huge battle sequence, there is a moment when he tears its jaws apart, the bones crack, blood falls from the gaping throat, and something urgent happens that is hard to copy on any computer.

There are obviously questions we cannot stop ourselves from asking. Haver asked: Why did the natives build a door in their wall, so that Kong could come through? Common Sense asks: How tall is Kong, really? (The filmmakers take sensitive authorization: He’s 18 feet tall on the island, 24 feet on stage, 50 feet on the Empire State Building.) Even giving its slow start, stiff acting and Wray’s screaming, there is something ageless and ancient about “King Kong” that still somehow works.

As I have stated before in my past reviews, if you haven’t seen this movie, you are missing out. I cannot do this film justice by my review, so you should just see the film for yourself. You have to see this film because it’s one of the most classic and one of the best films ever made. Especially with the last line, “Oh no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.” That is one of the best lines in movie history. Stay tuned tomorrow for more “Halloween Month.”