This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and now I can't stop until I finish.
(PG) ★★★★★
Director: Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack
Cast: Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher, Sam Hardy, Noble Johnson, Steve Clemente, Victor Wong.
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| September 11 - never forget |
Special effects are as old as film. Since the likes of Georges Méliès in the 1890s, directors have found increasingly inventive ways to not only trick our eyes and brains, but to tell remarkable stories they couldn't have otherwise told.
Rear-projection, stop tricks, matte painting, compositing, rotoscoping, hand-drawn animation, stop-motion, blue screens, match-moving, CG, robotics, miniatures, and motion capture - all these tools and more have been used over the years to do the impossible. Think of believing a man can fly, lightsabers, bullet time, velociraptors, Gollum, and getting whisked to Oz in tornado. Special effects have brought all that and more to life.
Which brings us to King Kong, the godfather of the FX flick. It certainly wasn't the first to do many of the things it did, but it pushed many of the techniques it used to new heights. Stop-motion guru Willis O'Brien and directors Cooper and Schoedsack stood on the shoulders of giants to get a boost up the Empire State Building, raising the bar for special effects to giddy heights.
Empire magazine called it "the grand-daddy (of) today's blockbusters", 1001 Movies You Must See Before Die's Joshua Klein called it "the undisputed champ of all monster movies and an early Hollywood high-water mark for special-effects work", while esteemed critic Roger Ebert, torn between praising the film and lamenting what it inspired, labelled it a "low-rent monster movie (that) pointed the way toward the current era of special effects, science fiction, cataclysmic destruction, and non-stop shocks".
"King Kong is the father of Jurassic Park, the Alien movies and countless other stories in which heroes are terrified by skillful special effects," Ebert wrote.
(This excellent video examines the state of special effects prior to the release of King Kong and how it broke new ground more thoroughly than I probably could.)
But this monster of a movie is more than just its technique. Being the first or best with a technique doesn't usually reserve you a spot on the Best Films Of All Time list - that's why Young Sherlock Holmes (which features the first fully computer-generated photorealistic animated character) and Forbidden Planet (which combined a dazzling array of techniques) are much loved, but rarely held in the same regard as other FX masterpieces like King Kong, Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey.
King Kong and its ilk are more than just their effects. While they're transporting and dazzling, they are merely means to end, which is to tell a tale of humanity's (and Hollywood's) hubris. Just like Jurassic Park did 60 years later, King Kong is the story of men trying to control nature and sell it. In this case, not only does man's actions doom others, but it ultimately dooms nature itself.
Central to these themes of man capitalist-fuelled destruction of the natural world is Carl Denham (Armstrong), a fast-talking director with all the scruples of a tree stump. When he can't find a find an actress to star in his next production because he's too dangerous to work with, he heads to a woman's mission to find someone desperate enough to forego their own safety for his latest vanity project. Indeed, he only secures the services of Ann Darrow (Wray) because she's too vulnerable to say 'no', having been caught stealing a piece of fruit.
Denham never once considers the risk he puts anyone in. Sure, he never asks anyone to do anything he wouldn't do, but he's fucking nuts. The ship he hires loses a dozen men but he doesn't care - he's too focused on making his millions by bringing Kong to New York, where the 20-foot-tall creature promptly goes ape-shit and has to be put down. "It was beauty killed the beast," says Denham in the film's iconic climactic line. No it wasn't, you utter flog - it was you that killed the beast, dooming him the second you took him from his native habitat.
Peter Jackson understood this, re-imagining Denham in his 2005 remake as more of a con man than in the '33 original, and bestowing even more "humanity" upon the poor doomed Kong. He couldn't go that extra mile for the ultimate ending though - Kong falls from the Empire State Building and lands on Denham, killing him. That would have been perfection.
(Jackson's love of the original is evident in his remake, and the fact he recreated a lost scene from the film.)
The pathos drawn from Kong is a tribute to the fine work of O'Brien, Cooper and Schoedsack. While it's unclear what the big ape does with the women regularly offered up to him by the inhabitants of Skull Island, it's clear he cares for Darrow, despite Fay Wray's incessant screaming. Kong moves Darrow to safety on several occasions, and when he turns to check if she's okay right before toppling to his death, it's a touching moment.
As well as its man vs nature themes, King Kong is, perhaps unwittingly, a sharp dig at Hollywood's treatment of women. Denham couldn't care less about Darrow - she's a necessity for his latest production, and little more. The fact Wray is given so little to do in the film itself is a sharp irony, reinforcing the idea that women were little more than beauties to be ogled by the beasts.
While some of its effects are creaky by today's standards, it's remarkable how well the film stands up. There are some moments where I'm still not 100 per cent how the film-makers pulled it off, such as when Kong places Darrow in the tree prior to the T-Rex fight, or when he undresses her. The final battle atop the Empire State Building is still impressive. "Yes, the giant ape is clearly, to the modern eye, a crudely animated doll," wrote Empire magazine, "but you're too convinced by Kong as a character to notice."
And that's part of how and why this film from nine decades ago has endured. It's immersive, building its sense of mystery beautifully as it establishes a sense of size and scale that is truly impressive. It boast themes about nature, sexuality, patriarchy, capitalism, Hollywood, and the destructiveness of mankind. It gave us a doomed hero unlike any other. And best of all, it made us believe a bloody big monkey could climb the Empire State Building.
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