I showed my friend Bob R. the King Kong tape, and he liked the movie but faulted it technically. He was impressed by the way the ape was designed — with stouter legs, arms and trunk than a really existing gorilla, which would be necessary (from a bioengineering point of view) to support the weight of a creature of such size — but was upset at how fast the animated creatures moved, unnaturally quickly given their body weight as depicted. The film has become a hallowed classic, both due to the amazing (for their time) effects and the interesting sense of characterization Willis O’Brien and his technicians gave to Kong, but some of the animation looks pretty stiff and jerky (while some of it is brilliant — the degree of smoothness is really variable, and indicates that the animators got better at it as the production progressed). Bob did like the fact that the film was so visually oriented — directors Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack structured it so that, once the rather talky opening is past, long sequences have no dialogue at all — after the rather dialogue-driven Bogart movies I’d been running him, he was relieved to see an action movie for a change. — 3/18/93
•••••
I came back here at 10 and crashed about an hour and a half
later — and this morning, having a hard time sleeping from all the heat,
humidity and generally testy weather, I ran the “uncensored” tape of the
original King Kong from 1933.
Interesting similarities to Jurassic Park, less in the subjects of the movies themselves than in the times in
which both were released (times of economic depression — one suspects King
Kong served the same fantasy purpose during
the First 20th Century Depression that Jurassic Park is serving in the Second 20th Century Depression:
getting people’s minds off their economic troubles by depicting worlds in which
the elemental struggle is for sheer survival — though Kong at least mentioned the Depression in its opening
scenes, while Jurassic proceeds
in ignorance of it, as if this is still the 1980’s). It’s ironic to note just
how many direct quotes from Kong
are in Jurassic — not merely the
camp gates (as if we didn’t get the reference from the visual quote, as the
cars pass through the gates of Jurassic Park one of the characters says, “What
are we going to see — King Kong?”) but also the bleeding dinosaur in a later
scene being another obvious example.
Kong remains a superb
movie today: beautifully staged and paced, with impeccably done special effects
(about the only problem with the effects — aside from the one Bob R. noticed, which
is that the dinosaurs do move too
fast for their body weight as depicted — is the sometimes shaky process work by
which the animated models were matted into scenes with human performers) and,
above all, a plot that stems from passionate conviction. The filmmakers —
Merian Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack and his wife, screenwriter Ruth Rose — clearly
put themselves into this film (the Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray
characters were clearly inspired by Cooper, Schoedsack and Rose, respectively),
and the main reason this movie holds up so well (while the 1976 remake was a
mega-flop) is that the people involved in this production actually knew the way of life they were depicting. They may never
have run into giant apes or living dinosaurs, but they’d lived and suffered
through enough natural challenges that they knew how they’d react if they ever
did — and it’s that conviction (satisfying the first law of fantasy: that, once
the initial fantastic premise is passed, the rest of the film must be absolutely
realistic and accurate as to human behavior), even more than Willis O’Brien’s
special-effects genius, that makes this movie live. — 7/2/93
•••••
I walked over to his place at 6:30, after giving my roommate
John P. his dinner, and ran Charles the dual tape I’d made years ago of the
movies King Kong (the restored version)
and Son of Kong. As I mentioned
to Charles, what I find the most interesting thing about these movies is not so
much their fabled special effects (though even by modern standards, the effects
work in both films remains stunning — about the only lapse being that some of
the animals move too quickly, a flaw Charles noticed as Bob R. had when I
showed him the original King
Kong) as their dramatic honesty. I pointed
out that the filmmakers, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, had made
their reputations with documentary films made in jungle and desert locations,
and one film in particular — Chang,
their 1927 film about a village in Thailand menaced by a mysterious beast who
proves to be an elephant (“chang” being the Thai word for elephant) — provided
the overall structure and inspiration for King Kong. As Orville “Goldie” Goldner (who actually worked on
the production of the Kong films) and George E. Turner wrote in their book The
Making of King Kong, “King Kong is
essentially a fantastic version of the realistic Chang, an expansion of genuine adventures encountered by
the producers and writers into the realm of the impossible.” There are many
sequences in Kong that are out-and-out reproductions of scenes that apparently
appeared first in Chang (a movie
I’ve never seen but have read a great deal about), including the sequences of
Kong’s final stampede through the native village on Skull Island, in which
various natives get trampled by the monster and a woman comes in and scoops up
her child out of the path of the rampaging Kong at the last minute to save its
life.
More importantly, the documentary experience of the
filmmakers behind King Kong is, I think,
responsible for the basic honesty
of the film. As the Goldner/Turner quote above suggests, Cooper and Schoedsack
were sufficiently experienced as documentarians and explorers that, though they
had never seen a 50-foot ape themselves and knew full well they almost
certainly never would, they knew how they and their characters should react in that type of situation. This kind of honesty
appears in virtually every frame of these films; when Fay Wray appears at the
beginning, she’s wan, almost anorexic and looks like a New York street girl who’s desperately poor,
which is what she’s supposed to be playing, rather than a glamorous actress
wearing a dowdy dress. And when she and Bruce Cabot emerge at the end of the
Skull Island sequences, rushing through the jungle to flee Kong after having
dived into the sea to escape him, they look like they’ve just been through the
experience — her dress is damp and torn and her hair disheveled, unlike so many
other films in which characters emerge from similarly dire predicaments with
their costumes and hairdos in perfect place. — 11/3/96
•••••
After that TCM ran
the original King Kong, also a
movie that ran into censorship trouble and was severely cut before its 1933
release and was even more severely cut for its reissue in 1938. The main
omission pre-release was the deletion of the giant spiders in the canyon that
ate the members of the expedition’s crew after Kong threw them off the log
bridge (in the film as it stands they merely fall to their deaths), and the
main deletions for the reissue (since censorship was stronger in 1938 than in
1933 — as witness what happened when the same studio, RKO, asked permission to
re-release Topaze; the Production Code people gave them a flat no
because the original movie openly described Myrna Loy’s character as a
mistress; and for similar reasons MGM was denied permission to remake Anna
Christie in 1936 and 1946, though by 1962
the censorship had lightened enough they were allowed to re-release the 1930
Garbo version intact) were the scene in which Kong tears off Fay Wray’s clothes
and the scene in which she takes a woman out of a New York bedroom and drops
her to her death when he realizes she is not Fay Wray. (I had seen King Kong for the first time in 1970 and had repeatedly
watched it for 20 years before I finally saw a print that contained the “strip scene.”) Peter Ray came over at
about this time and — surprisingly — didn’t like the movie very much; he and
Charles both pointed to some pretty clunky early-1930’s dialogue and sequences
in which the characters didn’t seem all that smart. Charles said that Robert
Armstrong should have brought gas bombs to the theatre in case Kong went out of
control while being put on display, and that Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray should
have thought of leaving their room and running out into the hallway when Kong
stuck his arm through their window in an effort to recapture her. To me,
however, King Kong holds up
beautifully in spite of these minor lapses, not only in the much-discussed
characterization of the monster (who retains a surprising degree of audience
sympathy in spite of the number of people he kills during the course of the
movie) but also in the basic honesty of the film. The producer-director team of
Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack had previously been known for documentaries
(King Kong was a virtual remake
of their 1927 film Chang, in
which a village in Thailand is menaced by a giant elephant), and therefore they
actually knew how a film crew would behave in the jungle and how individuals
would react in situations of extreme danger. There’s one remarkable scene that
is an astonishing example of the honesty of this film: when Bruce Cabot and Fay
Wray finally make their escape from the jungle, they are shown running
directly at the camera (a surprisingly
unusual choice of angle) and they are genuinely disheveled, their clothes
drenched in water and their hair and faces dirty and stringy, looking like two
people who have actually been through a harrowing, life-threatening experience
instead of two movie stars coming out of a supposedly dangerous situation with
every strand of hair and molecule of makeup miraculously in place. — 12/15/97
•••••
Turner Classic Movies’ prime-time schedule last night
consisted of a tribute to the art of stop-motion animation co-hosted by Ben
Mankiewicz (who, when I was still a regular viewer of this channel, I called “a
nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) and Travis
Knight, son of Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight (the man who made such
embarrassing appearances in Michael Moore’s movie The Big One) who picked three movies that had particularly
inspired him to become a stop-motion animator in an era in which the highly
complex, artisanal and very
expensive process of stop-motion animation had largely been superseded by
digital effects and computer-generated imagery (CGI). He graduated from
animator on films like Coraline
(2009) — which I saw with Charles and liked, though I didn’t mention Knight’s
name in my blog post (I praised producer Tim Burton and director Harry Selick
for their use of stop-motion, though: “[T]he use of puppets and models to enact
the characters enables Selick to bring them to the screen without the heavy
literalness of a version in live-action with computer-generated effects shots”)
— to full-fledged director on last year’s Kubo and the Two Strings, which I might have been more interested in if its
publicity had made clear it was done with stop-motion and not CGI (as cleverly
as they are scripted, the Pixar movies seem all too phony and blocky because
the CGI characters have neither the tactile photo-realism of stop-motion nor
the ultimate freedom of drawn animation) — and he introduced three films that
had been particularly influential in drawing him to such a retro career as
stop-motion animation. The basics of stop-motion have been around as long as
movies themselves — it was one of the techniques the founder and patron saint
of special effects films, Georges Méliès, used in the 1890’s — but they were
refined into an art form by one man: Willis H. O’Brien, who while growing up in
Oakland in the early 1910’s acquired a movie camera and decided to use it to
bring inanimate objects to screen life.
His earliest films were in what would
today be called Claymation: a boxing fan, he made crude clay models of
prizefighters and animated them for his camera. Ultimately he got into making
novelty reels for the Edison company which brought to life the dinosaurs and
other animals of the prehistoric world (he made one film called The
Dinosaur and the Missing Link and called
the ape-like creature he designed for it the ancestor of his most famous
creation, King Kong). In 1919 O’Brien hooked up with a producer named Major
Herbert Dawley and filmed a one-reeler called The Ghost of Slumber
Mountain, which featured fully animated
model dinosaurs integrated with human actors. After O’Brien and Dawley had a
falling-out, O’Brien got involved with another producer, Watterson Rothacker,
who first set O’Brien to work on novelty reels but then bought the movie rights
to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World, about a Brazilian mesa where the dinosaurs never
died out and a British expedition that discovers them. Rothacker signed a deal
with First National Pictures to co-produce his film (this would become the main
way movies got made after the collapse of the studio system in the 1950’s but
it was highly unusual in the 1920’s), O’Brien did the effects, and the film was
a huge hit in 1925. But even coming off a blockbuster success, Rothacker and
O’Brien couldn’t interest First National in doing a sequel or any other studio
in following it up — until 1930, when the recently formed RKO Radio Pictures (a
branch of RCA which had absorbed the FBO studio owned by Joseph P. Kennedy —
yes, the father of those
Kennedys) bought an O’Brien story called Creation, about an island that suddenly rises from the sea
off the coast of Chile and turns out to have dinosaurs on it (the human
characters get introduced when a ship crashes into the island, which none of
its crew knew was there, and is shipwrecked), and hired Harry Hoyt, the
director of The Lost World, to
film it. All went well until William LeBaron, RKO’s production chief, was fired
by the corporate bosses in New York and replaced by David O. Selznick. Selznick
hired Merian Cooper, who had been co-producing jungle documentaries at
Paramount with Ernest B. Schoedsack, to be his assistant and review all the
movies RKO was then making or developing to see which ones they should continue
and which they should cancel.
Cooper saw the test footage of Creation, derided it as “just a bunch of animals walking
around,” and put it on his hit list — but he kept O’Brien and his crew on
salary because Cooper had had an idea of his own for an adventure film and he
realized O’Brien’s techniques might be an economically reasonable way of making
it. What Cooper had in mind was a sort of fantasy extension of his documentary
work: a film crew would travel to an unknown island in the South Pacific and
encounter a 50-foot ape that was terrorizing the locals. The crew would capture
the giant ape and exhibit it in New York City, where it would break loose and
climb the Empire State Building. Cooper and Schoedsack not only co-produced and
co-directed King Kong but based
the three main human characters on themselves: maniacal movie producer Carl
Denham (Robert Armstrong) was Cooper, his tougher and more proletarian
assistant Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) was Schoedsack, and Ann Darrow (Fay Wray)
is Schoedsack’s wife, Ruth Rose, who got the assignment to write the film
because she’d been on several of the Cooper-Schoedsack expeditions and knew how
people would behave under extreme peril. The resulting film, first called The
Eighth Wonder and then Kong until Selznick, about to leave RKO because of his
own power struggle with the bosses in New York, decided at the last minute that
since the Cooper-Schoedsack documentaries had all had similar one-word titles (Grass,
Chang, Rango), audiences would think a
movie called Kong with Cooper’s
and Schoedsack’s names on it would be another documentary. So he added one
magic word to the title and the film went out as King Kong. The 1933 King Kong is a film that has it all: it’s a fantasy but one
that plays by a strictly observed set of rules. Its human characters behave in
ways that are believable for the kinds of people the script tells us they are.
There are a few lapses, notably in the characters of the island’s natives, who,
even though the locale is the South Pacific, are shown as Black rather than
Polynesian and not only act in the accepted booga-booga style — though Cooper,
Schoedsack and Rose had them speak in the authentic language of the Nias Islands
and the Production Code Administration had them submit the natives’ dialogue
both in the original language and in an English translation so the filmmakers
didn’t sneak anything censorable into the movie (so much for the idea that the
1930-34 period in Hollywood filmmaking was truly “pre-Code”!) — but they’re so
enthralled at the idea of a white blonde woman that the native chief offers to
trade six of his own women for Ann.
But for the most part King Kong is an excellent film, which was a blockbuster hit
from day one and made RKO even more money during its periodic reissues, and the
main reason for its quality is that it moves. It’s a strongly put-together story that gets all
the exposition out of the way early on so that, once Kong and the dinosaurs are
introduced, the pace never lets up (Merian Cooper slashed the 140-minute rough
cut to 100 minutes — leaving out some of the most powerful and elaborately
produced effects sequences on the cutting-room floor — precisely to make sure
the final film was one big rush of energy for the audience; when I heard that
Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake ran 190 minutes, that drained me of any desire to
see it), and there are such rarely seen touches of realism as the haggard
appearance of Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray in the shock cut that shows them
escaping from Kong in the jungle. For once they don’t look like they just came out of their dressing
rooms, but like people who’d actually survived and just escaped from the
horrible events we’ve just been shown them undergoing. The quality of King
Kong — its superb integration of effects
scenes into a story that makes sense, its multidimensional characterizations
(as imdb.com reviewer “telegonus” noted, “There are no wholly sympathetic
characters in the movie. While some people are more likable than others,
there’s really no one to identify with”), the gritty reality with which the
opening scenes (especially Denham’s plucking Ann from the line outside a
women’s mission and her offer of a job) are staged (they look more like a Warner
Bros. movie than something from RKO, and indeed the year before King
Kong was released Fay Wray appeared with
Lionel Atwill in the Warners film Doctor “X”, another sinister fantasy that opens on a New York
waterfront in heavy fog), and the fact that even though they may never have
encountered living dinosaurs or giant apes, the people who made this movie had been through similar experiences in jungle
environments. While this time around a little part of me was wishing RKO could
have filmed King Kong in two-strip
Technicolor (though the use of black-and-white — the set designs were largely
copied from the artist Gustave Doré — is quite artful and beautiful) even
though that would zoomed up the budget and made the effects work even more
difficult than it was, King Kong
stands out as one of the two greatest giant-monster movies ever made (the 1954
Japanese Gojira — a far, far superior film to the chopped-and-channeled U.S.
release, Godzilla, we got two
years later — is the other) and an “effects film” that for once uses special effects to tell a coherent and profoundly
moving human story instead of the story being just an excuse to present the effects. — 12/11/16
