King Kong (1933) People attending movies in the first part of this century often were the audiences to have certain genres presented to them on the screen for the first time. Slapstick, westerns, period pieces and romantic dramas were among the most popular films of the silent era. With the invention of sound in film began the exploration into a new genre that would prove to leave audiences at the end of their seat and coming back for more: Horror films. With sound, there could be whispers and screams in the dark, and growls coming from monsters not of this earth. Monsters, large clumsy creatures and blood-sucking vampires seemed more life like with their ability to shock the audience before attacking with large roars, cries and moans. There was one monster who could roar louder and wreck more havoc than the rest, and he dominated horror and fantasy films. King Kong remains the true landmark of the Horror film around the world alongside Dracula and Frankenstein. Others have tried to match his size and strength, but none have had the lasting impression King Kong has earned. Suffering from a plethora of sequels, spinoffs and wrestling matches with other large animals, King Kong's first introduction to movie audiences in the 1930s remains the best. King Kong, released in 1933, is an adventure film filled with dinosaurs thought to be extinct, romance on the ocean and an ape with an appetite for blondes. The special effects and the impact the film had remains a legend in Hollywood. "King Kong truly was the stuff for which movies were made, a logical extension of the works of Melies, Porter, Griffith and every other film maker who sought to record on film ideas beyond the scope of any other medium." (Goldner 7) The making and history of King Kong is as interesting as the film itself. Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO-Radio Pictures, the film was released at the perfect time, as RKO was on the verge of bankruptcy. The film was in its very early pre-production stages in 1931 when David Selznick had just left Paramount for RKO to take over as production chief. Cooper showed Selznick a test reel for a film titled Creation, which "combined live action footage with animated footage of prehistoric creatures in the fashion of The Lost World, a silent film that had been a hit a few years earlier." (Erb 37) Willis O'Brien was put in charge of the special effects and bringing King Kong to life. Another test reel was shot to get the RKO executives to back the project. Selznick gave the green light, and Cooper worked with British author Edgar Wallace to write a script centering around a giant ape. Wallace died soon after finishing a rough draft, and Cooper started production. Cooper was not satisfied with the rough draft, and later said of Wallace, "Actually, Edgar Wallace didn't write any of Kong, not one bloody word. I'd promised him credit, so I gave it to him." (Turner 59) James Ashmore Creelman was brought in to finish the script and RKO bought the writes to Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, as the script resembled the novel too closely. Willis O'Brien designed an 18-inch model that would represent the 50-foot King Kong on screen. Stop-motion effects, rear projection, miniature sets and a precise special effects crew presented a jungle world that movie audiences only had read about in books. Several dinosaurs were designed to inhabit the jungle and wrestle with King Kong through out the film. A gigantic hand was designed for scenes when Kong reaches into a cave and when he holds the Fay Wray character. "By means of projected backgrounds, the hand and Miss Wray appeared to by nearly a thousand feet in the air when Kong examined his captive while perched atop the Empire State Building." (Turner 94) A gigantic head, chest and shoulders of Kong was designed for close-ups. In a documentary on the filming of King Kong, it was noted that the infamous roar of King Kong was "taken from the reversed roar of an alligator mixed with the regular roar of a lion." (It was Beauty) O'Brien later said that the hardest scene to shoot was when Kong is fighting a flying creature called a Pterandodon, who is trying to steal Fay Wray's character on the mountaintop. The sequence took seven weeks to shoot. "O'Brien has been accused of putting a mouthful of sharp teeth in the jaws of a creature known to have been toothless in real life. Some Paleontologists insist that Pteranodons could not fly but merely glided down from high crags to skim over Kansas' inland seas to capture fish." (Turner 139) Cast in the lead parts was Robert Armstrong as the leader of the film crew making a film in the jungle, Bruce Cabot as the captain of the ship and Fay Wray, as the blonde girl Ann, who wins the heart of many in the film. Cooper directed most of the technical shots, while Ernest Schoedsack directed the live action shots. Schoedsack was directing the film The Most Dangerous Game at the same time he was directing his parts of King Kong, and using the same sets. Two of King Kong's main stars were in The Most Dangerous Game as well, Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray. Fay Wray, who in real life was a brunette, wore a blond wig for Kong. King Kong went through several more screenwriters during production, and a woman writer by the name of Ruth Rose put the final touches on the script. In an interesting production fact, the gigantic gate that separates Kong from the outside world was a set piece from Cecil B. Demille's King of Kings. The gate was used again in Gone With The Wind during the "Burning of Atlanta" scene. Filming of King Kong wrapped at the end of 1932, and the executives who had backed the project until then refused to fund a newly composed score for the film. Cooper, who knew a fresh score was necessary for the tone of the film, financed the music himself and hired Max Steiner to do the job. The film opened on April 7, 1933, in New York City as the first film to play two of the biggest theaters in the city at the same time. After the film opened, the rest is cinema history. King Kong opens with the talk of a grand voyage into the jungle by a film crew headed by Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) as the director and John Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) as the captain of the ship carrying the crew. The film crew realizes they need a woman this time to make their jungle adventure more appealing to the masses, so Carl hunts down Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). Carl tells her the trip is "money, adventure and fame. It's the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o'clock tomorrow morning." Ann agrees, and ends up on board with Charlie the Chinese cook, Iggy the Monkey and a ship full of dirty sailors. They find their destination, and they arrive on land to find a tribe doing a ceremony dance in front of a grand wall. "Holy Mackeral, what a show!!" The film crew is spotted and kicked off the island by the tribe after they won't trade Ann for six women from the tribe. Later that night, the tribe kidnaps Ann from the ship and gives her as a blond hair surprise to King Kong. The sailors and film crew run into the jungle to hunt down their actress, despite the warning from the tribe. Several wrestling matches occur for a good part of the rest of the film, and it's all for the sake of Ann as even the dinosaurs want a piece of her. Eventually Kong catches the bad end of some gas bombs, and lands a one way ticket to New York City as the new freak show attraction in town. In one of the most famous endings in cinema history, King Kong ends with our good friend falling from the Empire State Building after being shot down by fighter planes, one of which is flown by Cooper and Shoedsack. "It was beauty that killed the beast." Actually it was the directors. A ironic ending to a fabulous film. King Kong was a financial success for RKO. "King Kong proved an immediate hit at the box office, returning $5 million in North American rentals on a $650,000 investment. The film went on to become a classic of its genre and part of American culture and folklore." (Katz 288) King Kong was the first film to ever by re-released in theaters. The re-release had several scenes taken out due to the Production Code. "No longer was Kong eating people or stepping on people. No longer was he taking the dress off of the Fay Wray character." (It Was Beauty) In 1952, the film was re-released again and was named by Time magazine as "Movie of the Year," twenty years after being made. The film was followed by a sequel in the same year called The Son of Kong, which proved to be unworthy to its father figure. Several more sequels and spinoffs followed, but none matching King Kong in appeal. The impact that King Kong had on the popular culture of the 1930s is one for the history books. "It is probable that as a folk hero the titular character today is known to more persons of all ages than Paul Bunyan." (Goldner 211) It was one of the first in a long trend of horror films in the 1930s. No film had ever covered so much in terms of special effects with a giant animal to that date, even though the jungle drama was already a popular theme in films at the first part of the thirties. The two directors of the film were already associated with the jungle film before Kong was made. "King Kong's links to the jungle tradition thus resulted in part from the established reputations of the filmmakers, but this genre frame also developed from a coincidence between King Kong's release date and a cycle of jungle films that grew up in the wake of two MGM jungle hits, both directed by W.S. Van Dyke: Trader Horn (1931) and Tarzan, the Ape Man (1932)." (Erb 56) The film garnished, in my opinion, so much popularity in that it contained elements that appealed to a great number of movie patrons: romance, adventure, horror, drama on the ocean, fantasy, big-city life as well as exotic jungle life, and historical drama thrown in with the dinosaurs. "A continuing sign of King Kong's cultural currency has been its capacity to inspire dozens (perhaps hundreds) of parodies in all manner of media- plays, cartoons, short stories, poetry, television skits, film citations, advertisements, comic-book stories, political cartoons, magazine covers, and more." (Erb 159) King Kong was everywhere after its release and became a icon of the horror genre of the 1930s. Many people have called the film racist, and too conservative in its text. "King Kong stands as one of the most familiar popular dramatizations of the ethnographic encounter in American visual culture. Although reductive and 'kitschy,' the King Kong story nevertheless stands as an important popularized account of cultural contact- of a transaction accomplished between an arrogant white explorer and an exoticized other." (Erb 15) Watching the film for this analysis for about the fifth time in my life, my attitude towards the film seems to change with each screening. As a kid, I was most likely taken away by the action and adventure of the film. But as I've grown into an adult, I like to compare it in my mind with horror and fantasy films of today. I would much rather see the jerky motions of the mechanical Kong than a CGI monster. Some of the wrestling sequences between Kong and the dinosaurs are fun to watch and have a life-like quality to them if you keep an open mind while watching. For a film coming from the 1930s, you have to expect bad dialogue and bad decisions by the characters in the film. I find the film fascinating in that it never takes itself too seriously, and no battle is too dangerous for man or beast. For as much time spent in the jungle, I felt the film should have dealt more with bringing Kong back to the city and how he reacts to the people who live there. All we really get is Kong terrified by the people in the audience, and breaking out and wrecking havoc. The jungle scenes themselves seem to drag on towards the middle, and it seems like a museum showcase of dinosaurs attacking Kong after awhile. There seems to be a lesson in the film that might not be taken as literal today as in the 1930s. When you take a man or beast out of its environment, and put him in a foreign atmosphere there will be confusion that most likely will be negative. I think the biggest lesson to learn from the film is when you have a 50 foot ape in your possession, don't put him in a room with 500 dinner guests. Maybe next time they should leave the blond at home instead of making her come to the ape show. Pauline Kael says of the film, "Kong is a stunt film that is trying to awe you, and its lewd underlay has a carnival hucksterim that makes you feel a little quesy. " (Kael 710) None the less, King Kong remains an important figure in film history. Controversial at times and seen with compassion by some, the giant ape hanging off the Empire State Building will always remain a King of the movies.
Bibliography Kael, Pauline. For Keeps. Penguin Group: New York, 1994. Katz, Ephraim. The Film Encyclopedia. Harper Perennial: New York, 1994. Erb, Cynthia. Tracking King Kong. Wayne State University Press: Detroit, 1998. It Was Beauty That Killed The Beast. Dir. Scott Benson. Warner Brother, 1993. Goldner, Orville and Turner, George. The Making of King Kong. A.S. Barnes and Co., Inc. Cranbury, N.J., 1975. |
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