King Kong

King Kong (1933)
RKO Radio Pictures
Directors: Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack (effects by Willis H O’Brien)

Also discussed: Son of Kong (1933), Mighty Joe Young (1949).

The word “classic” is a loaded one, isn’t it? In the mouths of most cinephiles and film pundits, it means something a cut above, something iconic, something imbued with a gloss of quality that has stood the test of time. King Kong is certainly that. (Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a revisionist take-down of a beloved film.)

In another sense, and I’m thinking particularly of the field of literature, it can mean a text that everyone is supposed to have read, or feels they ought to have read, but that many haven’t. Something that’s gained a kind of authority through seniority, but that younger generations don’t have a natural connection to. I think that can be true of film, and it might be true of the 1933 Kong. Other Kongs are available, and anyway Kong has long since escaped the bounds of his own film and become part of the cultural furniture. So a recap of the plot of this extremely well-known film might not go amiss.

Ann Darrow is an actress in New York who has fallen on hard times. (What no one’s saying out loud, but must have been on the minds of everyone who scraped together the ticket money to see the film, is that we’re in the fourth year of a global economic depression. Apple-stealing Ann must have been quite a relatable everyman protagonist.) She’s offered a job by Carl Denham, an eccentric filmmaker who – rather like directors Cooper and Schoedsack – likes sailing off to exotic climes and filming the wildlife. He charters a ship to take him and his new star to a little-known island near Indonesia whose inhabitants have supposedly built a gigantic wall to contain a mysterious being called Kong. (Although the island features a “Skull Mountain”, it isn’t yet known as “Skull Island”. That’ll come later, with the remakes and the tie-ins.)

The travellers find the island as expected, with its tribal people and its huge, gated wall. The local chief offers to buy Ann from the Americans so that she can take centre stage in a ceremony to appease Kong; that doesn’t go down well, so he has her kidnapped instead. Her rescuers arrive just in time to see Kong appear and take Ann away into the jungle.

Kong is an enormous ape, about 15 metres tall, a bit like a gorilla but with quite stumpy legs and a narrow, bony head. He has a very expressive face and is obviously infatuated with Ann, despite the size difference. He seems to be the only outsized simian on the island, and apart from the local tribe throwing parties for him, he’s clearly starved of company. Other strange animals abound, but mostly dinosaurs – the odd thing there isn’t their size, but their survival at least 65 million years after they supposedly all died out. It’s also not clear how they’ve survived as species when we see so few of them, but that’s true of Kong too. The only other unusually large animals we see are a carrion bird and, in a famous cut scene, a pit full of insects and other creepy-crawlies.

Denham and the sailors endure a series of adventures but manage to rescue Ann and flee back to the ship. When Kong pursues them through the jungle – and the village – Denham, who’s obviously planned ahead, ambushes him with knockout gas and has him chained to a raft so that he can be shipped back to America. In a career shift from filmmaker to theatre impresario, Denham plans to exhibit Kong to audiences in New York and rake in the cash.

Things go wrong on the first night when the press dazzle Kong with their camera flashbulbs; in a frenzy, he breaks out of his restraints and goes on a rampage through the city. He finds Ann and carries her to the highest vantage point, the top of the Empire State Building. Army biplanes are called in to shoot him down. Ann is left safely on the roof of the building, but Kong falls to his death, where an unrepentant Denham delivers a final quip over his corpse.

King Kong has its roots in the wildlife travelogues and ethnographic features made by its directors and others like them for the wide-eyed entertainment of American audiences after the First World War. It’s just... bigger, and more obviously fictional. Cooper and Schoedsack had at least been overseas and brought back genuine footage for their earlier features, notwithstanding they framed it with actors and scripted narratives. Others, like the makers of the infamous Ingagi (1930), were less scrupulous, producing schlocky, racist “documentaries” that suggested bestial relations between blacked-up women and men in gorilla suits filmed on an American studio backlot. There’s undeniably an echo of that in Kong’s pursuit of Ann, although here it’s played as a larger-than-life doomed romance, which I think does much to soften it.

The visible unreality of the special effects also helps to reinforce the fantasy nature of the film, but let’s just take a moment to appreciate those effects. (And maybe at some point I’ll take a moment to share my thoughts on just what “realism” in fictional media is worth anyway.) Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion Kong is great, a monster both destructive and sympathetic. His expressiveness makes the melodrama work. And the compositing of the effects is tremendous – the scene of Kong rolling sailors off a log to their doom (or, in the cut scene, into a pit full of lethal giant bugs) is sensational. It’d be contrary of me to suggest that 90-year-old special effects haven’t been bettered since, but at least they stand up well enough.

According to an interview cited on Wikipedia, Cooper rejected any suggestion that King Kong might be taken as some sort of racial commentary in the manner of the exploitation flicks. His intention, in juxtaposing Kong with the audience’s familiar world of skyscrapers and biplanes, was apparently to tell a tale of “the primitive doomed by modern civilization”. While this choice of phrasing isn’t great, the idea of King Kong as a lament for nature overtaken by human industry appeals to me, and would chime nicely with quite a few other giant monster movies.

Besides, the film doesn’t portray America in 1933 as unconditionally better than Kong’s world. Again, bear in mind that this was economically a miserable time for the industrialised world, so the audience wouldn’t necessarily consider New York the more desirable of the film’s two destinations. The juxtaposition of New York and Kong’s island invites comparison (something the 2005 Peter Jackson remake takes a lot further).

And while Carl Denham – who looks suspiciously like a self-insert by Merian Cooper, who co-drafted the story – might have been intended to be a lovable rogue, he’s not the hero. (That would be either Ann Darrow or First Mate and love interest Jack Driscoll, if we insist on a human hero, but it’s actually more likely to be the tragic figure of Kong himself). When told that the planes got Kong in the end, Denham ripostes that “it was Beauty killed the Beast”, implying that Kong’s love for Ann was his fatal flaw and turning the whole thing into an inevitable fairytale tragedy. This neatly sidesteps the fact that, in reality, it was Denham killed the Beast. Kong’s death, the untold loss of life and damage to property in New York and the enormous counselling bills Ann is going to rack up would never have happened if Carl Bloody Denham hadn’t hunted and captured Kong and displaced him for the sake of other people’s entertainment to begin with. We should have been tipped off to Denham by the obvious parallel with the island chief, who also wanted to buy Ann’s participation as a sacrificial damsel in a staged performance. (Which makes the recipient of the performance, Kong, a monstrous mirror for Denham’s audience... and us?)

I think it’d be a step too far to suggest that the character of Denham was meant to be a comment on the trouble thoughtless entrepreneurs can cause. Even now, the jury’s out on what the root cause of the Great Depression was – I don’t suppose people at the time were blaming freelance film directors for it. Still though, I wonder if contemporary audiences felt a frisson at the spectacle of this amoral man exploiting Kong and Ann in pursuit of a fast buck, then turning his back on the fallout.

Back to those planes. In just about all the American monster movies that followed this, particularly in the 50s wave of creature features, the American armed forces are the heroes and the whole purpose of the exercise is boosting them in the public eye. The monster is there to provide something large and dangerous for the military to shoot at for an hour and a half, and its death is meant to reassure the American public that guns, tanks and planes will keep them safe. That’s not the case here. Kong, too, is shot down by Army biplanes, but it's presented as a tragedy rather than a military triumph. It's a compounding of Denham's error, injury on top of insult.

Kong himself, for all that he bridged the gap between the stop-motion dinosaurs that preceded him (including many created by Willis O’Brien) and the stranger creatures that came after, doesn’t fit the same pattern as The Deadly Mantis or The Giant Claw (both 1957). He isn't an aggressive invading force, he's just a gigantic ape who wants to go about his business without being kidnapped, shipped across the ocean and exploited. (He is, ironically, the “little guy”.) He has more in common with the antagonists of Universal Pictures' monster movies: he has his own unique personality, including a proper name, which is more than the Mantis or the Claw can boast. Those other creatures rarely feel like characters at all, but Kong is a headline act on a par with Dracula or Frankenstein’s Creature, and he doesn't just dominate the title but the whole film. And yet, unlike Universal’s monsters, Kong doesn’t have his roots in Gothic literature or folklore – he’s part of the natural world, albeit oversized, which puts him back in line with the dinosaurs and the giant bugs. He’s a hard one to place.

Because King Kong was a huge success, there was of course a reflex sequel. It’s hard to believe Son of Kong (1933) came out in the same year as the parent movie, given how painstakingly slow stop-motion animation is, but they made it happen. A few of the actors reprise their roles: Robert Armstrong as Denham, the ship’s captain and cook, a couple of the islanders. Son of Kong presents a warmer, softer story than King Kong, and this time Denham actually is the hero, trying to redeem his earlier behaviour and becoming the romantic male lead.

Denham’s facing bankruptcy after being held accountable for the events of King Kong (ha, Schadenfreude!) and the ship’s captain who brought Kong to New York isn’t too popular either, so they take the ship and become itinerant cargo haulers in Asian waters. At a Dutch-controlled port, they meet Denham’s future love interest and, in a surprising twist, the Norwegian sailor who first sold Denham the map of Kong’s island. (The port’s called Dakang, which doesn’t exist in the real world, but the name suggests it’s somewhere in what used to be the Dutch East Indies.) The sailor claims there’s an ancient treasure on the island, so back to the island they go.

There they encounter another giant ape, albino and only about twice as tall as a person, which Denham decides (on rather scant evidence) must be Kong’s son. He dubs him “Little Kong” and repeatedly helps him out or openly apologises to him to make up for what he did to Kong. Little Kong is friendlier than his dad and protective of the humans for more apparently altruistic reasons (there’s no suggestion that he lusts after Denham, for instance). More adventures with stop-motion dinosaurs ensue, then a massive earthquake sinks the island. Little Kong bravely gives his life to save Denham, who has in fact found the ancient treasure and plans to split the proceeds with his crew and his future wife.

Son of Kong is less fondly remembered than King Kong.

Some little while later, RKO brought out Mighty Joe Young (1949), a fantasy caper about a gorilla of roughly the same size and temperament as Little Kong who is brought to America (from a settled home in Tanganyika, this time) to perform in a Hollywood nightclub, goes on a rampage when some drunken customers upset him but ends up heroically helping to clear a burning building. Yet again Robert Armstrong features as the entrepreneur responsible for putting the ape on the stage and again Cooper and Schoedsack direct. The film’s notable for featuring the first professional stop-motion effects of Ray Harryhausen, working under the supervision of his hero Willis O’Brien and somehow delivering an even more expressive ape. In Germany, it’s known by the title Panik um King Kong, just in case the reprise wasn’t obvious enough.

Kong himself has appeared in a couple of remakes of the original film, which this blog won’t trouble itself with, and an assortment of other, stranger movies, of which we will hear more anon.