King Kong (WingNut Films, Big Primate Pictures, MFPV Film GMBH, Universal, 2005)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 31) I wanted to run my husband Charles and I the extended DVD release of Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of the 1933 classic King Kong. I had originally been put off by the sheer length of this film – the original theatrical release ran 190 minutes (the 1933 original ran just 100 minutes; the rough cut ran 140 minutes but co-producer and co-director Merian C. Cooper did major surgery on it) and this DVD was 13 minutes longer (as well as containing a supplemental disc including 38 minutes of deleted scenes). I remembered the book The Making of King Kong by Orville Goldner (a technician who worked with Willis O’Brien’s effects team on the original) and George Turner, which lamented the loss of many creative scenes the original technicians had worked hard on and would never be seen by a paying audience, but they wrote, “Cooper was right, of course. He set his jaw and cut his own ideas with a ruthlessness that must have given him nightmares. In doing this he delivered to the public a movie that holds the attention during every one of its scenes, each second of its 100 minutes. It is one of the few films that builds its suspense deliberately and then holds it until the last fade-out because there is no useless action, no waste of words, no side-plots to detract from the main stream of the story it tells – a show without fat or padding. Cooper’s skill as an editor is no less remarkable than any of his other accomplishments.” Unfortunately, that was one memo Peter Jackson never got: I had plowed through his three movies based on J. R. R., Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings cycle and found them really slow going (and I liked the three films he stretched out of Tolkien’s prequel, The Hobbit, even less; though Jackson arguably fulfilled Erich von Stroheim’s dream of shooting a movie based on a normal-length novel and stretching it out to nearly 10 hours’ running time, the films seemed interminable and I’d have rather watched one carefully edited and adapted movie based on The Hobbit than three epic-length ones that did a taffy-pull on Tolkien’s original story), despite some spectacular moments.

I liked Jackson’s 2005 “take” on King Kong quite a bit more than I’d thought I would, however; not only does the basic story remain strong but the additions and elaborations Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, don’t weaken it that much. Jackson and company also wisely chose to retain the original film’s 1933 setting instead of updating it the way the makers of the 1976 version did, and indeed the longer running time allowed them to do more to dramatize the Depression and its cataclysmic impact on the characters than the makers of the 1933 version (Cooper, his producing partner Ernest B. Schoedsack and their writer, Schoedsack’s wife Ruth Rose) had (or needed to because their audiences were experiencing the Depression first-hand). They also tweaked the characters quite a bit: movie producer Carl Denham (Jack Black) became a charlatan bamboozling his backers and stealing their money and equipment to set off at night for his mad voyage to Skull Island. He has a long-suffering assistant named Preston (Colin Hanks) who’s too honest for his own or Denham’s good. Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts) is a vaudeville entertainer who’s hoping to land a part in a legitimate play but ends up with no better offers than a burlesque house. Jack Driscoll (Adrien Brody, intriguing casting for an action hero!) is a playwright whose work has attracted Ann’s interest (she’s shown reading a published play of his called Isolation and he’s written another play, Cry Havoc, intending it for her even though it’s a comedy and he’s never met her, just seen her in vaudeville), and who when Denham shanghaies him aboard the Venture (a tramp steamer in this version), he’s literally made to sleep with the animals on board in an ironic commentary on what Hollywood historically has thought of writers. Ann gets the part in Denham’s latest semi-documentary because she’s exactly the same size physically as the major star who’s just bailed out of the assignment – which I suspect Jackson and his writers lifted from the story of how Renée Asherson got the part of Queen Catherine of France in Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V. Olivier had originally intended the role for his then-wife, Vivien Leigh, but Leigh’s contract with David O. Selznick meant she needed his permission to take the role. Selznick refused, so Olivier cast Asherson because she was the exact same size as Leigh and therefore the costumes wouldn’t need to be altered to fit her.

Charles was a bit dubious about Jack Black’s casting as Denham, but I think he got the part because of his striking resemblance to the young, pudgy Orson Welles, who’s become the stereotype of the monomaniacal filmmaker ready to do anything, no matter how unscrupulous, to get his picture made. (In the 1930’s stereotypical megalomaniac directors in movies about movies generally copied Erich von Stroheim, as witness Alan Mowbray’s character “Koslofski” in the 1937 film Stand-In; when told that the edelweiss on his Swiss Alps set is fake and it will take a month to get real edelweiss, he folds his arms across his chest and says, “I can vait.”) It’s an indication of Peter Jackson’s everything-including-the-kitchen-sink editing style that this film is over an hour old before we finally see Kong, and it takes a half-hour more before we see a dinosaur, but once the film gets going in earnest it does a good job of checking off the boxes of the 1933 original. I was really disappointed at the way the Skull Island natives were depicted, especially compared to the way they were in 1933. In 1933 the natives spoke a recognizable tongue (Palauan, actually, since Cooper and Schoedsack had conceived their fictitious Skull Island in the vicinity of Palau) and were human; here they’re mindless monsters who chatter away in gibberish and it seemed to me like Jackson just recycled the Orcs from The Lord of the Rings and based the Skull Islanders on them. (One of my big problems with The Lord of the Rings movies is the way Jackson depicted the Orcs, much the way John Ford showed Native Americans as mindless hordes intent only on destruction.) Some of the legendary scenes that were cut from the 1933 version get included here – notably the giant spiders that attack and consume the Venture’s crew members once they’re upended on the log bridge and plunge to the canyon floor below – but others don’t. I was particularly disappointed that Jackson and his writers didn’t include the charming “strip scene” in which Kong almost daintily lifts Ann’s dress and takes off her underwear (which was included in the original 1933 release, was cut when the film was reissued five years later in the period of especially strict Production Code enforcement, and not restored until the 1970’s). Instead Ann treats Kong to her vaudeville act, and for some reason she hits him and he gently love-taps her back.

There is a charming scene in the last part of the film, once Kong has been shipped to New York City for public exhibition and has escaped, in which he and Ann play together along the surface of a frozen lake in Central Park. One imdb.com contributor faulted the film for the way Kong carries Ann around: “The way Kong shakes and throws Ann around while carrying her would almost certainly snap her neck or spine.” Also in the climax, there are stand-ins for both Jack and Ann in the scene in which Kong is exhibited at the theatre – “Jack” is actually the film-within-the-film’s male lead, Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler), who previously revealed his cowardice on Skull Island, and “Ann” is a blonde look-a-like since the real Ann has turned down the part for fear of encountering Kong again and instead signed on to the burlesque theatre she was going to work at early on, though she’s part of a decorous chorus line accompanying an unseen woman singing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird.” Also the final scene between Kong and Ann atop the Empire State Building is really stretched out here, with Ann continuing to climb up rooftop ladders to stay with Kong in what Charles called an example of the Stockholm syndrome in action. But one point on which the new version scores over the old one is the use of a human actor, Andy Serkis, to play Kong via “motion capture.” Though Willis O’Brien was an animation genius and his rendition of Kong is surprisingly expressive and emotional, there’s really no comparison between O’Brien’s stop-motion puppet and Serkis’s use of body language to convey Kong’s depths of feelings.

The 2005 King Kong is at once a respectful homage to the 1933 original and a nicely honed work of art in its own right, though the film’s credits end with a welcome but woefully incomplete dedication to some of the personnel involved in the 1933 version: Cooper, Schoedsack, Robert Armstrong and “the incomparable Fay Wray.” Missing are the original Jack Driscoll, Bruce Cabot (who played him as a taciturn sailor and was more credible as an action hero than Adrien Brody!), and also Ruth Rose, who wrote the original script based on a story credited here to Cooper and Edgar Wallace (a famous British thriller writer who, according to Cooper, actually didn’t write any of King Kong – he died before the film started shooting and, Cooper said, “I’d promised him screen credit and I gave it to him”) and was a major contributor to the 1933 version as well as at least a minor contributor to this one via recycled dialogue. Also welcome are bits of the original score by Max Steiner to the 1933 film; most of the score for this one is by James Newton Howard but there are references to some of Steiner’s cues, notably the “Aboriginal Sacrifice Dance,” heard in the 1933 film when the Skull Islanders are about to sacrifice Ann to Kong and in this one as the accompaniment for a bizarre production number featuring African-American dancers costumed as Polynesian Natives reproducing the dance to Kong in the New York theatre scenes.