King Kong

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Preston Neal Jones

One of the classic monster movies of all time, the 1933 production of King Kong is best remembered for the dramatic scenes of a giant ape climbing the recently erected Empire State Building and batting away airplanes with Ann Darrow in his grasp, though she is universally remembered not with that character's name, but as the real-life actress who portrayed her, blonde scream queen Fay Wray. That image of Kong and Wray atop a New York skyscraper, along with Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road and Scarlett returning to the ruins of Tara, ranks among the iconic film scenes of the pre-World War II era. A popular sensation in its day, King Kong failed to win a single Academy Award nomination, yet has outlived most of its contemporaries to achieve the stature of a twentieth-century myth.

A modern variation on Beauty and the Beast, the screenplay was credited to popular pulp writer Edgar Wallace, though King Kong was the brainchild of documentary film pioneer Meriam C. Cooper and his partner in adventurous filmmaking, Ernest Schoedsack. The film's effects, groundbreaking in their day, were the handiwork of stop-motion animator Willis H. O'Brien, whose efforts on the silent film version of Doyle's The Lost World had laid the groundwork for King Kong. Promising Fay Wray "the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood," Cooper and Schoedsack cast her as Ann Darrow, the petite object of Kong's affection. Rounding out the cast were Robert Armstrong as headstrong filmmaker, Carl Denham (modeled after Cooper), and Bruce Cabot as the rugged seaman who falls for Darrow even before Kong does. Kong himself was in actuality a small model. O'Brien's genius was that movie-goers not only believed Kong was a giant, but also that he had a soul.

Like other "jungle" movies of the period, King Kong delineates a clash between the "civilized" and the "primitive." Denham's "bring 'em back alive" expedition to remote Skull Island uncovers a living prehistoric world populated by local natives and--on the other side of their great wall--dinosaurs, pterodactyls, and Kong himself. The islanders kidnap Ann to offer her as a bride for the giant gorilla, prompting a struggle in which many men die in the attempt to rescue her from her fate. Eventually Kong is subdued and taken to Manhattan, where Denham exploits the great beast as "The Eighth Wonder of the World." But the love-smitten Kong escapes, rampages across Manhattan, recaptures Ann, and ends up atop the Empire State Building, only to plummet to his death in a dramatic air assault. Denham's rueful obituary: "It wasn't the airplanes--it was beauty that killed the beast."

All of this thrill-packed hokum was made convincing by O'Brien's effects, aided by skillful art direction--Skull Island was a mythical landscape straight out of Gustave Doré--the optical printing of Linwood Dunn, the sound effects of Murray Spivak and, above all, the almost wall-to-wall musical score by Max Steiner. It has been suggested that Depression-era audiences took a particularly vicarious delight in seeing Kong lay waste to the buildings and subway trains of the cold-hearted Manhattan. King Kong has remained a staple of late-night television and in film festivals, chiefly because O'Brien endowed his great brute with an uncanny personality that evoked sympathy from audiences.

King Kong spawned a modestly budgeted, inferior sequel, Son of Kong (1933). O'Brien also worked on one more giant ape movie, Mighty Joe Young (1949), aided by his young protege, Ray Harryhausen, who went on to make many successful screen fantasies of his own, such as The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), all of which carry echoes of King Kong. In truth, there is something of the big hairy ape in every giant-monster movie that has followed in his pawprints, from Japan's Godzilla (1955) to Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1992) and, of course, in the successful 1976 remake King Kong. But no other creature feature seems to have quite caught the public imagination as the original King Kong.

The image of Kong and his beloved atop the skyscraper has been continually copied in horror movies, parodied in cartoons, comic books, and countless television commercials. For a period in the 1980s, a pop shrine to the gorilla's memory was created when a giant inflated model of King Kong was hung near the top the Empire State Building. Still, the original black-and-white film has lost none of its power to enthrall. Modern digital technology may have outstripped O'Brien's hands-on puppetry, but it has not replaced the charm and humanity that every great fairy tale requires and which King Kong displays in abundance.