King Kong (1933)

(213th - 7.8 - 7-Classic)

The thing about King Kong is that it is still an awe-inspiring sight today, over seventy years after it first reached the big screen. We all knew the plot, even before Peter Jackson's 2005 remake, about how the adventurous showman discovers the giant ape on Skull Island and fetches him back to New York, only for him to break loose and cause mayhem before finally being toppled from the Empire State Building. I know all this too but still every time I rewatch the film I'm stunned; and there's a lot that jumped quickly to my mind when I rewatched this time around with a more critical eye.

Most obviously, there's the scale. Everything is done on such an awesomely grand scale, huge even to eyes that have got used to modern day blockbuster effects. The caves and trees and cliffs and ravines and walls and whatever else aren't just big, they're that big, along of course with Kong himself (really an 18" tall model) and the giant adversaries he has to face in the interior of Skull Island. Then there's the Empire State Building which was only two years old in 1933. It was the tallest building anywhere in the world and would remain so for another 21 years. Where else could be more fitting for Kong's final scenes? Scale was almost a trend at the time in itself. While RKO was making King Kong, Universal were making their string of classic horror films. While the sequels were still to come, Dracula and Frankenstein had already thrilled audiences, and in 1933, the year of Kong, they were showing The Invisible Man. All of these films shared the same awesome scale, something picked up on admirably by the recent Universal horror tribute movie, Van Helsing.

Beyond the huge size of the film, there's much more. There's leading lady Fay Wray, who was told she'd be working opposite the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. She took quite literally the words, 'Scream, Ann, scream for your life!', in the process becoming cinema's original scream queen: her frequent shrieks and subtle disrobing set the stage for the enhanced antics of Linnea Quigley and Brinke Stevens and all the other scream queens that dominated the straight-to-video horror genre in the 1980s. In Wray's autobiography she talks about Kong as if he was a real person, going as far as writing her prologue as an open letter to the giant ape. She had ideas for a sequel film which sees Kong rise from underneath Fifth Avenue, where he has been resting for so long after being toppled from the Empire State Building. Attitudes towards him have changed over the years and he is helped back to his home on Skull Island. Maybe that's not such a bad idea.

There's Robert Armstrong, who became the human face to watch in giant ape films. After his starring role here as showman Carl Denham, he returned the same year for the direct sequel Son of Kong, and again in 1949 for the original Mighty Joe Young, a gorilla only a mere ten feet high. Discounting The Most Dangerous Game, which was shot back to back with King Kong, I've only recently managed to see him in something that didn't have him upstaged by a giant ape. Unfortunately in the superb 'G'-Men he was upstaged instead by James Cagney, a fate that befell many actors back in the thirties.

And there's Kong himself, the eighth wonder of the world, and all the other magical creations of the first great Hollywood special effects master, Willis O'Brien. By sheer coincidence I rewatched King Kong just after the original silent version of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, made eight years earlier in 1925 with Wallace Beery as a memorable Professor Challenger. By far the most memorable thing about that film though was Willis O'Brien's stop motion animation work. Cinema audiences of the 1920s must have fainted in the aisles at the sight of living dinosaurs just as they did to the very first stop motion effects invented for film by the French genius Georges Melies around the turn of the century.

King Kong owes a lot to The Lost World which worked as a proof of concept for Hollywood, making it possible to shoot such films. There are even a few scenes that made their way from one to the other, especially the end where Kong escapes from his chains and rampages through New York. For The Lost World it was one of O'Brien's brontosauruses (brontosauri?) that escaped while being unloaded from its ship and proceeded to stomp part of London. This cinematic departure from the original novel paved the way not just for Kong but for Godzilla too and the entire monster movie genre.

It's also notable that while, as is to be expected for a seventy year old film, some of the other special effects are noticeable. Sometimes it's obvious that the actors are being filmed in front of a screen which carries the rest of the action, a process called rear projection, but it's also notable that King Kong pulls the trick off far better than some of the later Hitchcocks that I've been watching recently, such as The Birds or Marnie, both of which were made over thirty years later. Most of the technologies, with one notable exception, were already known and had been used in films before, but this was the first time they were all really brought together. Rear projection itself was reasonably new but its junior cousin, miniature rear projection, had never been done before. This was the technique that put a tiny Fay Wray into gargantuan backgrounds for Kong to play with, and it's a huge achievement that such innovative technology could be so well implemented on the first attempt.

What's more there were other innovations too. Max Steiner wrote a very modern soundtrack, and Murray Spivak's sound effects were deliberately tied in to that soundtrack, a unique approach for the time. Spivak also created Kong's roar in a very clever fashion: it is a combination of a tiger's roar backwards and a lion's roar forwards played together. Director Merian C Cooper went on to pioneer colour (Technicolor) and widescreen (Cinerama), as well as stereophonic sound and a whole host of other technologies. Cinerama wasn't just the pioneer for widescreen but also for IMAX and Omnimax and all those documentaries that immerse us in fabulous surroundings.

I've seen King Kong many times over the years, making this the place I know Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong and others from, but I'm also a fan of another picture that was shot at the same time. To defray costs, the directors made two films instead of one: Cooper filmed scenes for Kong during the night and his colleague Ernest B Schoedsack shot The Most Dangerous Game during the day. This was the original 'man hunting man' film, released to screens first in 1932, and it's a particular favourite of mine even though it pales in direct comparison with Kong. Armstrong and Wray feature in both films, though the latter without her striking blonde hair. While I recognise both of them, and many of the jungle sets used, I didn't notice other costcutting recycling such as the repetition of some of the sound effects. Apparently the screams of the sailors as the ship sinks at the beginning of The Most Dangerous Game are the same as those of the sailors in King Kong as they are shaken off a huge log by the giant ape.

Such antics became much more common in decades to come, to the degree that people like exploitation maestro Roger Corman would write, cast and shoot entire pictures in a couple of weeks purely to take advantage of leftover sets from other productions. It still happened back in the golden age though, as demonstrated well by the huge gates on Skull Island that kept Kong apart from the natives. They were a leftover from Cecil B De Mille's King of Kings and were eventually destroyed as part of the burning of Atlanta in Gone with the Wind.

King Kong holds a much more solid place in cinematic history than just a really great film that went on to entertain generations: it singlehandedly saved a fledgling studio. RKO was the smallest of the five major studios, constantly on the brink of bankruptcy; budgets were so low that the sound effect engineer worked out of the former stable of Tom Mix's horse. RKO literally owes its continued existence to the giant ape; to David O Selznick who gave the film the green light and its title (previously The Eighth Wonder of the World, still its subtitle today); and to Kong's directors, previously filmmaking explorers who made exotic documentaries like Grass.

Long term adventurers who wandered the world in search of new and exotic experiences, including living a year in the jungles of Siam (now Thailand) while filming Chang, Cooper and Schoedsack had a lot of knowledge from which to draw the story of Kong. Originally Cooper wanted to take live gorillas from Africa to the Komodo islands to fight the large lizards there, and turn this into a film with special photographic effects. Only when he saw the work of Willis O'Brien did he realise it had to be done instead with stop motion animation.

Cooper and Schoedsack also feature in their own movie. The character of Carl Denham is not a long way removed from that of Cooper himself; and Schoedsack is similarly John Driscoll, the second mate. Beyond that, they couldn't resist their own cameos: Cooper and Schoedsack are respectively the pilot and machine gunner who finally topple Kong from the top of the Empire State Building.

Which brings us to the end, one of the truly magic endings to ever come out of Hollywood. Many endings are touching, but this one is especially so as we really care for the monster, something almost unheard of in monster movies. We may cheer for Godzilla or Mothra or other famous monsters of filmland, but we never really care for them and so only show our support or disdain on the level of professional wrestlers. We know they'll never really die but come back for another sequel, just like we know Hulk Hogan will never retire. Kong was different because 'It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the beast.'