Pre-Ramble Movie Ramble: One of my biggest complaints about talking with people about older films is that I hear time and time again “Oh, I’ve always been curious to check out the original this film or that film, but it’s so old, I don’t think I’d enjoy it.” It’s frustrating. Yeah, King Kong is in black and white and uses stop motion animation. Yeah, both Metropolis and the original Phantom of the Opera are silent films. Yeah, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is literally a film full of nothing but talking and arguing (and honestly, I don’t even think that last on is that old). But these films are classics for a reason. They stand the test of time for a reason. They’re genuinely good. The creators know the limitations they’re working with and work within and around them and know how to bring out a story. These films are not just full of emotion, but human experiences that anyone watching can appreciate and enjoy. So don’t let the fact that the original King Kong is from 1933 deter you. Be brave. Give it a shot. Chances are, you’re gonna enjoy at least some of it.
Pre-Ramble Trivia Ramble: Chances are, someone’s written a book on this subject. Probably a lot of people wrote a lot of books on this subject. Let me give you a brief though. If you didn’t know, King Kong’s DNA is pretty much interwoven in monster films. In order, Willis O’Brien made King Kong and worked together with his protege and successor, Ray Harryhausen on a Kong-Esque sequal, Mighty Joe Young. Meanwhile, in Japan, they were so impressed with Kong that they made a film (that is now sadly lost) called King Kong Appears in Edo. Harryhausen eventually goes on to make a film called The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms which plays a partial role in inspiring the creation of a film called Godzilla. Just like The Beast inspired some of the plot of Godzilla, the special effects director of the movie, Eiji Tsuburaya wanted to follow in O’Brien’s and Harryhausen’s footsteps and use stop motion animation, only to find that it would be too expensive and time consuming, so he resorted to suitmation instead. But it doesn’t stop there. In 1962, the two greatest monsters ever known meet in a film called King Kong v. Godzilla and that following year, Tsuburaya creates his own production company, Tsuburaya Productions and goes on to create the Ultra Series of TV shows which spawns other shows like Toho’s own hero series Zone Fighter and on and on it goes until we have shows like Power Rangers being a consistent property here in The United States and a big budget Godzilla v. King Kong coming out next year. That’s not even a fraction of it. So much has come from King Kong. So much. Honestly, the legacy of this film is just as impressive as the the film itself.
I have so much to say on this film, I don’t even know where to start. I guess I’ll get the bad out of the way so I can talk about the good and the weird. In case you can’t tell, being from 1933, there’s a few things that date this film. Some of the dialog is a bit clunky and some of the acting, while not necessarily bad, is not what we would consider to be good acting today. This is early cinema after all, there’s still a bit of stage and vaudeville DNA to be found in acting styles here. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it pretty quickly. There’s some mild misogyny as well from comments like “A ship is no place for a woman!” to the fact that Fay Wray’s character, Ann Darrow, devolves from being an actress with motivations and desires to a prop character who’s sole role is to scream in terror and be in need of rescuing. Then lastly, while I wouldn’t call the depictions of indigenous people and Charlie the cook in this movie intentionally racist, it does, in my opinion, lean towards one dimensional and unflattering, and actually, probably pretty racist. I don’t think the bad outweighs the good in this movie, but I will say that it’s a product of its time and while it’s by no means that rough, it is enough to detract from the film.
So onto everything else.
If you don’t know the plot to the film, it’s pretty simple. A film producer, Carl Denham, wants to produce a film on a lost island which is supposedly home to a mythical beast that the locals worship as a god. Desperate for a leading lady, he plucks a woman off the streets, Ann Darrow, who after only knowing the guy for a few hours somehow decides to go along. At the island, a bunch of natives kidnap said actress to offer to their god, King Kong, as a prize bride and Denham and his hired crew of sailors set out to rescue here. Violence happens. A lot. People die. A lot. Eventually, a brave sailor named John Driscoll is able to rescue Ann and bring her back to the village, but Kong follows him, where he is quickly subdued by Denham and the sailors. Six months later (I think), we’re back in New York City where Denham, Darrow, and Driscoll show Kong off to the world. Kong escapes, hunts down and captures Darrow, and we get the iconic scene at the top of the Empire State Building. Kong dies. The end.
There’s one scene that stands out to me in this movie more than anything. Carl Denham is on the deck of the ship withAnn Darrow doing some test shots with her. It starts out simple enough, with directions like “Start looking at the ground, slowly look up, and flash a smile.” It quickly changes into something else, with “You’re looking up in terror. You’re panicked! Frozen! You want to speak but you can’t! Now scream!” The scene is supposed to foreshadow that Denham expects to find something not only monstrous on the island, but gigantic. It’s supposed to create a sense of foreboding. What it also creates, looking back decades later, is a sense of foreshadowing a style of acting and directing that will eventually be developed to coincide with the use of green screens.
What amazes me most is that this movie is amazingly violent. There’s two ways that this is fixed in my mind. Firstly, there is a scene that has been lost to time, as it was cut from the film after an initial showing. It’s called “The Spider Pit Sequence.” The way the story goes is, when the audience saw this scene, it was so mind blowingly horrific to them, they couldn’t calm down to enjoy the rest of the film so the creators decided to cut the scene out for future showings to keep from causing a panic. The counter story goes, that the scene was so laughingly unbelievable, no one could take the rest of the film seriously. I honestly and truly buy the first story. When Kong goes on his destructive sprees, he goes on destructive sprees. He throws helpless sailors off a log into a pit below (the pit that’s supposed to become a spider pit) and you see rag dolls emulating the sailors hitting the ground hard and violently. He repeatedly tramples people underfoot and shoves people into his mouth to chew them to bits, both scenarios involve real actors with life size props and I’m not completely certain their fear is acting here. He fights a Tyrannosaurus bare handed and eventually kills it by not only breaking its jaw, but smashing its nose into its skull. Seriously. This movie is brutal. Secondly, there was a scene taken out years ago by the censor’s board that was eventually put back in. Long story short, Kong reaches into a window to grab who he thinks is Ann Darrow out of bed, see’s that he’s got some random woman by mistake, and then unceremoniously drops her to the grown below, presumably to her death. When I saw that for the first time in a restored version of the film, all I could think was “Seriously? After all we’ve seen so far, that was too over the top for censors?” I’m still confused about the reasoning behind that today.
No. Wait. What amazes me most is the special effects. I mean, yeah, Kong and the island’s dinosaurs and monsters are brought to life through stop motion animation. Yeah, it’s not too hard to play the game of “is that a real actor or a clay doll?” and if God gave you even a hint of eyesight, you’re gonna win. Yeah, it’s easy to tell when actors are in front of a back projection screen (or however they did it back then). I understand all of that. The seams are showing, yes, but everything is just so beautifully done it’s so hard to care. It doesn’t take much suspension of disbelief to see Kong as a living thing and while the dinosaurs and other monsters might not seem so lifelike, they still seem like a very real, very credible threat to the characters. When Kong tears through the islander’s village in a rage, you can’t help but feel horrified and sympathetic for the people who live there. Equally, when Kong is making his way through New York, you can’t help but feel that Kong must feel lost and confused and New York is kind of screwed if something isn’t done. This movie, for as old as it is, for as dated as it is, is very, very much alive. O’Brien and everyone else did an amazing job on this film. It’s nearing 100 years old and it just holds up so well.
I honestly don’t know how to rate this movie. It’s flawed in some very rough ways and it’s flawed in some very beautiful ways. The more I think about it, the more I think I can’t rate it fairly, because like Godzilla ‘54, it’s more than a movie at this point. It’s a legacy and the legacy is so big, I don’t know if I can really give a true, subjective rating and justify it.
Screw it though. I gotta give it something so I give it a 4/5. I can honestly say, that without the parts that detract from it that I talked about in the beginning, this is just an amazing, amazing film.