NFR Project: ‘King Kong’
Dir: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Scr: James Creelman, Ruth Rose
Pho: Eddie Linden, Vernon Walker, J.O. Taylor
Ed: Ted Cheesman
Premiere: March 2, 1933
100 min.
“Listen, I’m going to make the greatest picture in the world!
Something that nobody’s ever seen or heard of!” – Carl Denham, Kong’s captor
It makes the impossible plausible. It makes a towering
monster out of an 18-inch figure. It still confounds first-time viewers with
its bold storytelling and astonishing special effects. One of Hollywood’s best
movies still stands the test of time.
The film’s premise can be attributed to a dream of Merian C.
Cooper’s. Cooper, an adventurer and movie maker, had with his partner,
cinematographer Ernest B. Schoedsack, made several outstanding silent-era documentaries.
(One of them, Grass (1925), is also on the National Film Registry list.)
Cooper dreamed of a giant ape on top of the Empire State Building, fighting
with airplanes. From this titanic climax, the story wrote itself backwards to
its beginning.
Daredevil documentary film producer Carl Denham (Robert
Armstrong) has a secret map, and a secret mission in mind. He’s going to make a
new documentary on an unknown island, a film that will surpass anything ever
seen. He hires a ship and crew, and prepares to head out to this undisclosed
location.
One last-minute problem vexes him – he wants a beautiful girl
to come along, to appear in the film. He can’t get any self-respective actress
to sign on. Desperate, he searches the city streets, and finds a young,
impoverished woman, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray). He convinces her that he is on the
up and up, and she joins the expedition.
On they travel, exposing the developing relationship of Ann
and Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), the ship’s first mate. (We are unfortunately
given a stereotyped Chinese cook.) Denham reiterates his movie as being about “Beauty
and the Beast.” Finally, moving slowly through the fog, they hear the sound of
breakers – only it’s not breakers, it’s the sound of drums.
They go ashore, finding a native village at the foot of an
enormous wall that separates their peninsula from the rest of the island. There,
the natives worship Kong. (Once again, racial stereotyping abounds, as these
are bone-in-your-nose, gibberish-spouting Africans, led by the great character
actor Noble Johnson, who does his best with the nonsense he has to recite.)
Of course, they want the white woman. No deal; the group
returns to the ship. The natives, under cover of darkness, kidnap Ann. They
open the enormous entrance set in the wall, tie her to two posts, and retreat to
the top of the wall. A gong is rung, and out of the jungle comes . . . Kong.
It took a team of technicians and artists to create the
effects that worked so wonderfully. Cooper and Schoedsack recruited the great stop-motion
pioneer animator Willis H. O’Brien (already a known quantity due to his 1925 The
Lost World, a dinosaur tale inspired by Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel)
and his team, including Buzz Gibson and Marcel Delgado, to craft and operate
miniatures in a convincing manner. By carefully positioning the elements to be
animated, and moving them slowly, frame by frame, they could enliven their models
on film and even endow them with personality.
But stop-motion was just the beginning of the production.
Miniatures, matte painting, rear projection and more were combined with the aid
of an optical printer. The resulting coordination of all the special and live
footage so that it not only didn’t appear ludicrous, but absolutely swept the audience
up with the illusion, was complete.
Any any rate, Kong makes his enormous appearance. He takes
Ann and strides off into the jungle. The movie/ship’s crew go after her, equipped
with rifles and special gas bombs. They run across various prehistoric creatures,
and are massacred. Only Denham and Driscoll survive. Driscoll steals Ann back
from Kong, and the two make it to the ship. Kong, enraged, smashes the wall and
attacks everyone, killing many. Only Denham’s gas bombs get to him and put him
to sleep.
We swing quickly to a marquee – “KING KONG Eighth Wonder of
the World” – and the bustling Broadway crowd entering the theater. Backstage,
Ann and Driscoll discuss their pending marriage. Kong is revealed, bound on a
platform in steel chains. News photographers crowd forward, shooting off flashbulbs.
Kong becomes enraged, breaks his chains, and goes berserk, searching for Ann.
The film’s climax shows him creating havoc across the city,
grabbing Ann, and climbing the Empire State Building. There he staves off
attacking Army planes for a time, but an excess of bullets leaves him bloody
and weak. He plunges off the tower to his death. “So the planes got him,” a
policeman says to Denham. “No, it was Beauty killed the Best,” he replies.
Kong can be interpreted in many ways – Kong as an
outsized caricature of a Black man, Kong as Nature overpowering the modern
world, Kong as a king made into a slave who regains his kingly crown only in
the moments before his death. He is a noble creature, whatever other layers of
meaning you choose to impose on him. You kind of love the big ape, and you are
still rooting for him after all these years, though you know what his fate will
be.
The NFR is one
writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry
in chronological order. Next time: The Power and the Glory.