Ape Watch: King Kong (1933)

Watched:  06/11/2023

Format:  BluRay

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Merian C. Cooper / Ernest B. Schoedsack

So, last week Stuart sent me a link to a doc on YouTube to watch.  It was, roughly, a 3-part series on King Kong (1933) and the impact of the film over decades.  I texted him 15 minutes in to the first part and said "there's no way I don't wind up watching Kong this weekend", and, indeed, I'm a man of my word.

We all have our foundational films, and King Kong, in it's very roundabout way, is one of mine.  

Growing up in the 1970's and 80's, and in the wake of the 70's monster craze, Kong was more or less a household name, concept, etc...  Everyone had an idea of King Kong as a giant ape liberated from an island who winds up in Manhattan and wreaks havoc, winding up atop the Empire State Building.  

My first exposure to Kong's full story was in a hard-back book my dad read to me (and, I assume, my brother) when I was about 5.  Only later would I learn it was an official novelization worked on by no less than Merian C. Cooper, director of the film.  

I was probably six when my folks let me watch parts of the TV broadcast of the 1970's version of Kong when it aired on television, and I was fine until someone got stepped on in Manhattan, and then, boy-howdy, was I not okay.  

But the story always stuck with me.  When I was in high school, AMC or TCM showed the original 1933 movie.  I managed to get the VCR working to record and watch it, and.. man.  It was like lightning.  

I had grown up on Star Wars and Star Trek and Indiana Jones.  FX movies were my bread and butter.  I almost cried the first time I saw Blade Runner because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.  And 1933 King Kong is an FX film.  It's *the* FX film that would pave the way for 60 years of filmmaking.   And, most certainly, there's an uncanny vibe to the world of Kong and Skull Island, of stop-motion beasts in their jungle setting, battling for life and limb as a helpless Fay Wray looks on, or a horde of unnamed sailors gets wiped out, man by man.  Dinosaurs came alive, from the T-Rex to the Pterodactyl,* moving in incremental steps, jerky and somehow still organic.  Imperfect but buyable in layered effects shots using mattes, rear-projection and techniques I've not quite sorted.  And all oddly beautiful with care paid to make sure their environs and lighting sold the world of Skull Island.

But it's also a story with a deeply complicated central figure in the eponymous antagonist.  

Like Frankenstein in the popular culture, it seems many who watched King Kong and spoke about Kong thought of him only as a brute.  In this case, he's merely a monster who steals a (white) woman and causes damage to polite society.  He's shown as kind of a stupid creature who climbs Empire State Buildings because he's dumb, swatting at planes because he's not as smart as "us".  Just as Frankenstein was painted as a raging, mindless monster, so too is it seen as unseemly behavior from a beast.  

And neither that take on Kong or the other on Frankenstein shows any ability to watch a film or understand a story.**  So it's weird that's what wound up as the popular version in the zeitgeist, ultimately becoming what Frankenstein was in the Universal pictures in the latter-era.

But that's not Kong at all.  He's an animal of great intelligence, but an animal reacting to his own world to protect the most unique thing he's ever seen, and will surely accidentally destroy given another 72 hours in his care.  Fay Wray's Ann Darrow is not the same as that of Naomi Watts in 2005 (which I think is a good performance, and a more romantically empathetic take), but Wray's feels like the more organic take.  She's a NYC girl, and she's going to fucking die.  In the jungle.  At the hands of an unimaginable creature.  

But that doesn't mean Kong isn't fascinated and the words of Denham about Beauty killing the Beast are any less wrong.  It's a movie about a deeply fucked-up situation for an animal who never asked to be put in that situation.  Something to ponder when you hear about circus or zoo animals "rampaging".  

Animation was about 35 years into it's existence when Kong brought its stop-motion version of 3D life to the Silver Screen, and it's amazing to see the sympathetic posturing, expressions and motions of the character as he sorts out his world and Ann.

I mean, this is the stuff I got at age 5 being read the book, and that I grokked watching the 1970's version. But the movie invites the critical examination of so many things, from the value of the dollar for a thrill, entrapment and display of living beings for that same thrill, and - of course, the pursuit of that thrill for audiences ending in innumerable deaths and feeling no reason to dwell upon it.  And, also, the curious state of leaving the people of Skull Island minus the god they've feared for decades (assuming there's no other gorillas, which seems an illogical bet).  

This is maybe far less heady, but it's also interesting to see Fay Wray in 1932 or so, with the lovely but striking features necessary to work in film, and with a profile not entirely unlike Gloria Swanson and others, needed to make an impression in celluloid that could lose detail in the lighting (see Norma Shearer, who made them re-do her screen test because they didn't get how her nose would play on screen).  But, man, is Fay Wray so good as Ann, especially in that first NYC scene.

Anyhow, go watch King Kong (1933).  It's an astounding film to this day, with no narrative drag and spectacle after spectacle.  

And then here's the podcast from the time Stuart and I watched TOO MANY KONGS.

*fun fact:  Pterodactyl isn't a dinosaur, but a Pterosaur

** and don't get me started on Bride of Frankenstein as a fucking love story