by Robert Hornak
Opening note: More so and forever a fantasy-adventure film before it’s a science fiction film, I can still find a way to live with it on this list if I think hard about its theme of modern technology (of the time, gas bombs and biplanes) overtaking the absolute epitome of natural strength – that is, for the movie to be science fiction, it has to be seen as nature’s final bow at the hands of what is the unstoppable wave of the future. But that’s difficult for me. As you’ll see, I’m beyond emotionally ensnared by this film, and as long as the movie’s had its grip around me, I’ve only ever enjoyed it as the greatest of all monster-on-the-loose films, many of which are clearly science fiction, but this one’s not so obvious. I happily invite anyone in the comments to describe the movie’s relation to the genre at hand – I want to learn – but this paragraph will have to count as my only nod to that branch of the discussion.
King Kong, the debated but still perversely entertaining 1976 remake, is the only movie that I can’t remember not knowing about. Meaning, one of my earliest memories of life is seeing a TV commercial for its theatrical release when I was a little squib of 5 years old. The cracking trees, the writhing woman bound to posts, and the horrible animal scream of the giant gorilla had me so irrevocably hooked on the idea of a giant gorilla that it’s never left my brain. I must’ve thrown a fit, cause my parents actually took me with them to see it. I still have a sort of chest flutter/muscle memory sort of feeling when I think about seeing that huge creature on that huge screen. After that, I drew gorillas incessantly. I imagined I was a gorilla, loping around the house, an action figure in my hand (or maybe my sister’s Barbie). I used to climb on top of fire hydrants and roar while swiping at invisible aircraft. I think I stopped doing that about my sophomore year of college. A year or so after the movie, though unrelated to the movie (so I thought), I bought my first book with “my own money”: Jeff Rovin’s 1977 From the Land Beyond Beyond, detailing all of Willis O’Brien’s work and all of Ray Harryhausen’s stuff up to his then-most-current movie, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (with a quick sentence-long teaser for something in the works called Perseus and the Gorgon’s Head). Of course, I got the book because of the monsters I saw on every page, unaware at first that one of those movies was a very different version of my beloved King Kong. I essentially learned to read so I could read that book. When I finally understood it, over the next few years, I got to love stop-motion with a depth eclipsed by nothing else.
The book is still in my possession, now in three pieces, and it’s sitting right next to me as I write this. There’s a long and thorough chapter on O’Brien and one on that other King Kong, the original, and I’ve read them a million times. I read all about the original before I’d ever even seen it, which I finally did at some point during those years, probably on the weekly Saturday afternoon monster movie on TV (“Screaming Meemies Flicks”, San Antonio, TX, anyone?), and I was hooked all over again. This original version was something else, though – something that the new one wasn’t. I didn’t have the vocabulary then to describe what it was. It wasn’t just that it was black and white, or that it was airplanes instead of helicopters, or that one famous building was swapped for another. It wasn’t a superficial thing. It had something to do with atmosphere, feelings. Growing up, when they’d play the 1976 on TV, there was something like a harsh, real-movie, real-world quality to the experience. Like I was watching one of my parents’ movies. Real people talking about a real ape and what to do about it. When I’d watch the 1933 – usually on WTBS, as it was called then, and as it was labeled in the TV guide that I’d scour like a scientist for any and all monster movies playing anywhere on the dial that week – it was like watching a dream. I suspect many of you know what I’m talking about. But I’m getting ahead of myself. All I’m driving at is simply: I love this movie, and I don’t really know how to talk about it. It’s like someone told me to write a thousand words about my right arm. It’s so personal, so close, so attached. At the risk of over-sentimentalizing (further), let me just jump in. I think for some semblance of structure, I’ll give a quick run-down of the historical facts that most of us here probably already know by heart, then follow that with some observations on a couple of my favorite scenes.
King Kong is the perfect creative confluence of two very different visionaries, adventurer-filmmaker Merian C. Cooper and special effects technician Willis O’Brien. In the early ’30s, the world was still a place where rumors of exotic animals and savage tribes wafted in on trade winds, gripping the imaginations of explorers, adventurers, and glory seekers. If a man had the right connections and could wrangle some cash, he could be on his way to Borneo or Sumatra or India, pushing through the unbroken branches of a mysterious virgin world, perhaps returning with first-won evidence of some forgotten or never-before-known animal. This was the air Cooper and future producing partner Ernest Schoedsack breathed. They traveled together, gathering filmed images of what they saw, bringing it back for the lecture circuit and some major bragging rights. And it was amongst these adventures that Cooper, already hooked on gorillas from childhood, first hatched his story idea of capturing a giant one and bringing it back to a disbelieving civilization.
Meanwhile, O’Brien was busy perfecting life, 1/24th of a second at a time. He earned his chops making short films with crudely built stop-motion dinosaurs in the lead roles for no one less than Thomas Edison, later teaming with a young sculptor out of Otis College in L.A. named Marcel Delgado with a similar affinity for Charles R. Knight’s beautiful renderings of day-to-day prehistoric life, and made a team effort out of the Arthur Conan Doyle story The Lost World. It was a big hit, and O’Brien and Delgado pivoted that success into a new project at RKO called Creation… but it was not to be. A certain explorer-turned-studio money watchdog saw how much of RKO’s cash was dropping into one project, and he put the kibosh on it. That man was Merian C. Cooper. I don’t have the documentation to prove it (someone show me, and I’ll be vindicated!), but I can’t help wondering if he purposely buried Creation to make room for the giant ape story burrowing into his skull – knowing that O’Brien and company had the magical means to make his own dream come true. In any case, Cooper, now with the backing of RKO and O’Brien’s knockout bag of tricks, had the snare he needed to bring his giant ape home for the world to see.
Over the next year, these two visionaries colluded on some of the greatest cinematic smoke-and-mirrors the world had ever seen. So many techniques were combined in a new way, or just outright invented, to create the effects desired, the project evolved into a bona fide paradigm shift in what film artists could do and what filmgoers could expect. In this way, I like to think of the Cooper-O’Brien relationship as not unlike what Welles and Toland had on Citizen Kane, constantly asking how to make something work, and then actually achieving a new and exciting look. And like Citizen Kane, there are moments in Citizen Kong – you were thinking it, too – that are so well done and perfect for their moment in the story, despite their surface, trapped-in-1933 markers, that they’ve yet to be bested. And the story they created, with the masterful shaping of a series of gifted writers – Edgar Wallace, James Creelman, and Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth Rose – along with the interweaving of Max Steiner’s groundbreaking music, was a rousingly dense amalgam of popular pulp elements, jungle movies, horror, comedy, pathos, and spectacle, and all framed by a recurring “beauty and the beast” refrain that lent the end product the quality of an unshakable American myth, a story that feels like it’s always been there, at once ancient and vital.
Instead of rolling out the whole plot, one we all know, allow me to expound a bit on some specific scenes:
THE TYRANNOSAURUS FIGHT
The preamble to this scene is, of course, the log roll. Men scramble to return to safety, crossing a huge fallen log that straddles two cliff-top edges of a deep, dry ravine. Kong expresses a robust simian glee – I’d not call it anger at this point – a kind of pranksterish delight in hefting the log into his grip and gently rolling it. We can see he’s got the strength to simply lift the thing and drop it into the ravine, killing all in a single move, but he chooses to torment the poor sailors. This is our introduction to the dark joy of death lurking in the heart of the beast. With whimsy, he twists and turns the weight of the fallen tree, watching as the men grasp at any protruding knot or twig for their very lives, then observes them falling one-by-one into the craggy pit. The fact that we get a ground-level shot of the men hitting the rocks, with suddenly stifled death screams, their bodies twisting into bent corpses, shows the morbid fun the filmmakers were having, too. Kong’s macabre sense of humor was not the result of an actor’s choice – it was Cooper’s and O’Brien’s. The thudding shock of those men hitting the stone gully must’ve been a new one to most who saw it in 1933.
After some to-do with Driscoll and a strange, two-legged lizard, Ann’s screams summon Kong back to her side. There’s some hesitation in Kong, a very human male dilemma: can I keep fiddling around with what I’m doing, or should I check on my girl? In any case, he arrives to find an interloper in the midst: an amazingly-crafted and beautifully-articulated Tyrannosaurus sniffing about the jungle floor. While Ann watches from her high vertical perch, Kong protectively engages the dinosaur in an all-out battle of brute strength. I will never get tired of watching this match-up. I’m not the first, and will never be alone in saying that it’s among the greatest special effects scenes ever created. The fact that the creators were starting with nothing – no filmic precedent or effects reference point but O’Brien’s own – is merely the foundation for appreciating what we’re seeing. The easy thing to do would be as few shots as possible, but what O’Brien commits to is a series of progressive angles, each lining up with Ann’s perspective, that taken together drum up as much engaging action and suspense as any live-action fight scene might. We experience several wide shots, still effectively from Ann’s POV, where we see the creatures in full, not just going through the stop-motions, but through a clearly choreographed dance that includes punches, bites, leaps, and flips – these opponents are thinking, taking their time between moves, circling, feeling out the other. Here in these wide shots, we have the visceral breadth of the fight played out through the leafy proscenium of the jungle, in the middle distance between Ann and that deep, decorated background. We’ve lived in that near-3D environment for twenty minutes of story, saw it used so well to enhance the charging ferocity of an oncoming Stegosaurus, but now the world of Skull Island is cinched together by the curdling savagery of its fiercest predators. Interspersed with the wide shots are pop-ins, still behind Ann’s head, but closer, the creatures right in front of her, highlighting just how close and how large they are. But amongst even these, the two shots that sell the reality of it all are 1) the felling of Ann’s perch – Kong’s back bumps the tree and it plummets, the camera fixed on Ann’s screaming terror all the way down, providing the sensation of falling with her into the foliage, and 2) before that, a single, one-second shot from atop Ann’s tree, looking down past her to the ground below, where Kong falls backward with a deep trembling of the earth – he gathers his wits and rises again, and we cut back to a wide shot. The payoff of that extra full day of animating is our yet-deepening realization of Kong’s great size. We know she’s high above the ground, Kong enters, landing on his back, but he still fills the frame. The movement, the thunderous reverberating of the ground, and the framing past the back of Ann’s head, all work to give us the jolt of shocking scale. It’s a moment of genius, a 35-frame glint of extra detail to show us that O’Brien had an understanding of what an audience needs to feel connected, invested, and entertained. But we’re not done yet. Once Ann is ground-level, so are the rest of the shots, retaining the vantage point of our audience surrogate until we’re at last past the moment of the dinosaur’s ultimate bone-cracking demise. I can talk all day about Kong’s playful curiosity re: the lizard’s crushed jaw, but I’d rather point out in the context of all of the above, the quick shot of Ann pulling away from Kong’s reaching hand – it’s a push-in on her face. I’m not encyclopedic on this movie, but is there another push-in anywhere else in the running time? I suppose if there were to be just one, that’s a perfect place for it, and, coming off the thoroughly organized, deeply effective scene that precedes it, it’s only further proof that a genius is manning the animation table.
VILLAGE RAZING / DOWNTOWN RAMPAGE
The Manhattan rampage gets all the press, but the squashing of the Skull Island village is rightfully terrifying in a way the New York finale isn’t. When Kong arrives to retrieve his stolen love, it’s a somewhat safe leap to assume these villagers may have never seen the monster upset before. We don’t know how old Kong is, but his legend has at least been around long enough for a huge wall to get built and a veritable worship liturgy to be well-established in his honor – what to offer the god, how to present that gift unblemished, what to pray to beckon him to come. I like to think this generation of natives has lived in relative peace by these well-observed rituals, and that the enormous gate latch has been there since before the current chief was a twinkle in the medicine man’s eyes. Why else would they, when Denham announces Kong’s approach, run toward the gate to get a look-see? Their deity’s looming rage was outside their experience. What must those poor villagers have thought moments later as they saw Kong ripping their homes apart? To them, this primal melee is a supernatural event, a righteous rebuke from the lord of the jungle to never let outsiders futz with the legalism, a thunderbolt of wrath for their insipid complacency. Those who survived to assay the damage, while picking through the damage left behind after the departure of the meddling visitors, must have questioned their complicit hearts, must have judged themselves unworthy: not only must they have botched their offering, but their god was stolen away to boot, never to return. Without their wild god to appease, who will protect them from the rampaging prehistoric monsters still slithering through the jungle? One can assume that none of these questions passed through the minds of the New Yorkers witnessing a similar rampage down 5th Avenue. Though they were getting stomped and chewed, too, there’s no mythic dread or spiritual component, no sense that this is something that was brought down upon them by their own sin. If anything, Kong’s presence at all, and certainly his streak of destruction, is a highly unsettling re-penetration of untamed nature into their steel and stone world, their bow-tied palace of self-sufficiency. For the natives, the new absence of a god to worship is a problem; for the New Yorkers, the entire ordeal is a living passion play that ultimately re-asserts the religion of aggressive technology over primitive unruliness. Denham’s final comments over the defeated Kong are said, if you’ll notice, with a bit of a shrug, implying not so much a mournful “God is dead” but perhaps a relieved “finally, noblesse oblige is dead”, and the modern world is safe again to build glass spires unto itself.
Also, while both the city and village scenes document a creature unhinged, the village scene especially should have wiped away all sympathy for the beast, as his destruction is so wanton, so deliberate, and less justified by fear. The village is Kong tearing through the house looking for his lost set of keys, not Kong tearing through the city, a wounded animal trying to find some familiar respite. The village razing is the first we see of Kong shoving terrified people into his maw. It’s horrifying, and yet… there’s a weird quality in Kong’s demeanor in these moments, almost like he’s doing this for the first time, trying it out, seeing how hard he has to clench his jaw to crack a human back before spitting the person out into the mud. That experimental edge to his behavior lends it a sort of “toddler puts dirty dog toy in mouth” vibe. There’s something innocent about it. I point this out not to prove Kong is guiltless, but that it’s awfully strange and amazing that Cooper and O’Brien (but let’s be honest, mostly O’Brien) created a character that can do such horrible things, like eating people or crushing them into the earth with his feet, and still generate strong feelings of loss once he’s been dispatched by a hail of bullets. When Kong’s in his death throes atop the skyscraper, lashing out, inspecting wounds, holding Ann one final time, I’m never not a roiling mix of sad, impressed, nostalgic, and… bemused – that O’Brien made a puppet move in a way that expresses more about loss and love and sacrifice and death than a thousand “real” actors over a hundred years of cinema.
Instead of writing all that, I could have just linked to Lee Price’s great look at King Kong at his site “21 Essays” and called it a day. Everything worth talking about, he covers, and with bounteous scholarship and love. Here’s the link to the first of his 15 essays. Please follow through and read all 15. It’s worth the time:
http://21essays.blogspot.com/2012/03/dawn-on-skull-island.html
A great film (and accompanying essay to boot), one whose pioneering use of miniatures still reveals tricks and techniques for the careful eye and set guidelines for action films that still influence and wow (watching it now, I’m amazed by the fluidity and swiftness of the story-telling; it does more in 100 minutes than Peter Jackson was able to tediously manage in 187). That the entire subtext of it has a clear racist bent—that is somehow completely avoided above!—makes it interesting cultural anthropology in todays age. Probably the reason I return to it at all, all the racially coded meanings and images juxtaposed against a prize that is the blond woman shows how advancements in technical proficiency came a lot earlier than enlightened views did.
One I never considered to be heavily sci-fi (I didn’t include in my list as thought it’s similar to Godzilla, the beasts creations wasn’t down to scientific folly), but of course it could/should be included.
Hi, Jamie. Thanks for the comment. I definitely considered (and read all about) the various racial/social readings of the movie. But I wanted this to be more about the way the movie hit me when I was a kid – and how, miraculously, it still hits me today. It’s such a powerhouse of a movie, so solid, so fun, so sad and so visually rich. To bring the social/political stuff into that, while I definitely don’t deny or refute any of it, would have been a departure from how I actually feel about it. The real crime here is that I gave only passing notice to the genius work of Max Steiner. I just don’t have the musical chops to talk authoritatively on that aspect of the movie, even as important as it clearly is.
Fair enough. I have the perhaps unfortunate reality of first seeing it as an early teenager so all the King Kong sniffing his fingers and racism could never be given over to youthful ignorance. Little worries, it still excites.
A tremendous essay, Robert; you really let your love for the movie shine through.
The movie fit in very well with 1930s conceptions of SF, notably the “lost world” and “lost/undiscovered race” tropes. Take away the dinos and it’d be a bit more borderline.
Thanks, John! I do love it so. I asked around and got a few good answers for how it’s a science fiction film, and all seemed reasonable – yours included. It’s such a life-long thing, having this movie right in front of me almost always in some form or fashion (I have the original 1933 film poster at the top of my stairs at home), that its elasticity, genre-wise, has become a huge blind spot. But I’m learning! Thanks so much for the comment.
I used to love to watch this movie with my dad. It was kind of like seeing it through his eyes, as he’d talk about what it was like for him to see it when he was little. He was only 8 when it premiered. When he first watched it with me as a very young child, he knew just what to point out and how to take me back with him in his memories to make it the most exciting thing I could watch with him. We had a special King Kong bond that wound up carrying us through 2 more releases of this classic, and critiquing them together. He took my brother and I to see the 70’s one at the Showboat Cinema and somewhere, we still have a rubber eraser type Kong that was either given away at the movie or sold at the concession stand there. Great stuff, and great review and essay
Of course it’s connections like the one you describe that proves the rule: the movie will never die. Thank you for your story.
Your essay allowed me to vividly replay those classic scenes in my head. I adored this as a child and can recall many idle days spent recreating these scenes with stuffed animals and plastic dinosaurs rampaging across floors and atop couches. Truly a magical film one can never forget once seen.
You and me both, David. If I wasn’t watching it, I was *being* it. Thanks for the comment.
Opening note: More so and forever a fantasy-adventure film before it’s a science fiction film, I can still find a way to live with it on this list if I think hard about its theme of modern technology (of the time, gas bombs and biplanes) overtaking the absolute epitome of natural strength – that is, for the movie to be science fiction, it has to be seen as nature’s final bow at the hands of what is the unstoppable wave of the future.
I went to the very beginning of this breathtaking essay for a reference point that coincides with my own. First an adventure/fantasy then an appeal to the science fiction Gods for the passage for validation. It straddles the border, but it is at the end of the day a legitimate entry for this countdown. In any case this is some work of personal passion and scholarship and i really have to tip my cap to you Robert. An enthralling piece, so much fun to read, and with a unque approach, zeroing in on some of the most famous and memorable set pieces. This elevates a beloved film that has always irked a tiny minority who have claimed the narrative was boring until we moved on to the Big Apple. Your razor sharp delineation of why these moments have been eternally etched in our consciosness does something that only the very best reviews do – they call for a repeat viewing here and now. I will add KONG for the umpteenth time on my list for this coming week on blu. Thank you so much for this wonderous gift Robert!
Thank you for your high praise, Sammy. If you’re like me, you could watch it once every couple weeks and not get tired of it. It’s that tight (even the opening half hour!) and that fun. Nothing lives like a stop-motion model.
His opening is interesting, I think hard about its theme of modern technology (of the time, gas bombs and biplanes) overtaking the absolute epitome of natural strength, but doesn’t the films final line about “beauty” killing the beast openly refute this? Man, I’m like a palm tree in a hurricane going back and forth if this should be included in a sci-fi countdown. I mean it is an alternative parallel reality where there are lands that have dinosaurs living in nature but it’s not a scientifically created one like in Jurassic Park.
Denham is, of course, speaking metaphorically about Ann’s blame. Or, another way to look at it is that Denham is actually fully to blame for Kong’s demise for taking him from his home and putting him into harm’s way, and he’s using poetry to shuck off responsibility like a tuxedo’d d-bag. I kinda like that one.
Oh of course… do you ever listen to the Canon podcast (two hosts debate/discuss films and whether they deserve induction into a film canon they are creating)? I have my issue’s with it, but they did one on KING KONG (against JURASSIC PARK) that I think you’d like. It’s here;
http://birthmoviesdeath.com/2015/06/08/the-canon-episode-30-king-kong-vs-jurassic-park
I mean it is an alternative parallel reality where there are lands that have dinosaurs living in nature but it’s not a scientifically created one like in Jurassic Park.
But if you take it in its historical context, it very obviously is science fiction. The events on the island are directly descended from those in Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (as are the Jurassic Park movies, come to that, and they acknowledge the fact); I can’t imagine anyone averring that The Lost World isn’t SF. If Doyle’s book were published today, it’d probably be labeled “science fantasy”; but that’s beside the point.
Do remember that, in its day, even something like Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was regarded as what we’d now call SF. (Brian Stableford coined the term “scientific romance” to cover that sort of proto-SF.)
My own feeling about all these category questions echoes Damon Knight’s, on being asked for a definition of SF. Like porn, “you know it when you see it.”
It is definitely NOT an easy decision. Some people thinks it is preposterous to fall under the sci-fi umbrella, others who read this will indeed cite that opening. But every time you think you have it nailed, you then second guess yourself. 🙂
LOL John!!!!!! 🙂
Wherever it fits in the realm of science fiction or fantasy this is a brilliant essay on a film that finds itself in the creation story of movie magic, in the creating of prime evil jungles and indigenous peoples no one has ever seen before and comparing them to or with modern day consciousness, than and now.
I enjoyed this essay as I do so many of the essays here in Wonders in the Dark because it allows me the opportunity to expand my awareness which eventually leads to my ability to view a film from another perspective!
Fantastic, fantastic essay. I myself was a latecomer to an appreciation of all things KONG — only recently having seen the 1976 remake; which I actually quite enjoyed due, possibly, to lowered expectations (i.e., “nil”) — but the original for me always had that sense of what you so meticulously describe in relation to his body movements and facial expressions to the extent that the smallest child can tell what he is thinking and what he is feeling every moment he is on screen. It is, in fact, a marvelous piece of screen acting! And all the more amazing in that it was wholly the result of a team of artists and technicians working to create something larger even than their Promethean-like collective efforts: an all-too-human giant ape more “real” than the humans surrounding him.
I’d like to see the 24-in version of the Kong model go up to accept his 13-inch Best Actor Oscar. Thanks for the kind praise, Justin.
I would have borderline included this film in my own list, had I submitted one, but if it was to be considered I would have ranked it highly. This in spite of the facts that Jamie presents above….it does have racist and unenlightened views that must be acknowledged.