King Kong (film)
"King Kong" is a 1933 film that tells the story of Carl Denham, an ambitious filmmaker who leads a crew on an expedition to an uncharted island in search of something spectacular to film. He invites Ann Darrow, a struggling actress, to join the crew as the female lead. Upon discovering a village on Skull Island, the crew encounters its primitive inhabitants, who kidnap Ann to sacrifice her to a giant gorilla named Kong. Denham organizes a rescue, but Kong, drawn to Ann's beauty, protects her rather than harm her. The narrative shifts to New York City, where Kong is captured and showcased as the "Eighth Wonder of the World." The film culminates in a tragic climax atop the Empire State Building, where Kong fights off attacking planes before falling to his death. Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, "King Kong" employed innovative stop-motion animation techniques that shaped the monster movie genre. Its themes of beauty, tragedy, and the consequences of exploitation resonate deeply, leaving a lasting impact on popular culture and inspiring numerous adaptations and remakes.
King Kong (film)
Identification Horror film about the discovery of a gigantic ape that is taken to New York and exhibited
Directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack
Date Released in 1933
One of the great horror films of the 1930’s, King Kong became the archetype for an entire film genre of “monster movies” and provided a significant contribution to modern mythology by adding to the lexicon of universally recognizable fictional characters.
King Kong tells a simple story about an ambitious American film director, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), who charters a tramp steamer to carry his film crew to an uncharted island in the South Seas where he hopes to find something spectacular to film. Before sailing from New York, Denham invites a beautiful, down-on-her-luck woman, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), to join his expedition to play the female lead in his film, promising her adventure and thrills. The expedition eventually reaches Skull Island, where its members find a village whose primitive residents are preparing an elaborate ritual to propitiate an unseen creature on the other side of an ancient and gigantic wall. At night, the islanders kidnap Darrow from aboard the anchored steamer and tie her to an altar on the other side of their protective wall.
When Denham’s people see Darrow being carried away by Kong—an unimaginably large gorilla—Denham sends a rescue party to go after her. Meanwhile, he organizes preparations for Kong’s anticipated return. As Kong carries Darrow to his mountain aerie, it becomes clear that he is charmed by her beauty and is determined to protect, not harm, her. Eventually, most members of Darrow’s rescue party are killed, but Darrow is rescued and returned safely. When Kong reaches the village, Denham’s people use gas bombs to capture him.
The film then jumps to New York City, where Denham is about to present King Kong as the “Eighth Wonder of the World” to a paying audience in a Broadway theater. Kong’s unveiling causes a sensation, and the audience’s fright is soon fully justified. When Kong fears that Darrow is being threatened by news photographers’ popping flashbulbs, he breaks loose from his chains and goes on a rampage outside the theater. Fortuitously, he sees Darrow through a hotel room window while climbing a building and grabs her. He then carries her to the top of the Empire State Building—which is visually reminiscent of his own island mountaintop—and futilely fights off a squadron of fighter planes peppering him with machine-gun fire. Finally, he falls to his death. The film ends with Denham examining Kong’s dead body. When he hears someone say that Kong was killed by the planes, he retorts, “It was beauty killed the beast.”
The Production
Conceived by Merian C. Cooper and codirected by Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, King Kong was to have been scripted by the English thriller writer Edgar Wallace, but he was incapacitated by what eventually proved to be a fatal illness, and the job was done by James A. Creelman and Ruth Rose, although Delos W. Lovelace wrote the novel that was published in association with the film’s release.
The film had a larger budget than most RKO pictures because of its extensive innovative use of the stop-motion animation techniques designed by Willis H. O’Brien and previously used in the 1925 film The Lost World. Later refined by O’Brien’s protégé Ray Harryhausen, these techniques came into their own in King Kong and subsequently became the backbone of a whole genre of “monster movies,” which became a staple of “drive-in” films.
The story told by King Kong became legendary. Its unique fascination lies in its fairy-tale element. Its exaggeration of the story of “Beauty and the Beast” is not only taken to a grotesque extreme but also given a remarkable tragic flourish in the iconic final scene, in which the hapless Kong stands atop the Empire State Building, fighting a battle against a squadron of tiny fighter aircraft that is just as inevitably hopeless as his bizarre passion for his leading lady. King Kong made Wray, incessantly screaming and swooning under the threat of brute masculinity writ large, a household name, although it ruined her reputation as an actor. None of the sequels to or remakes of King Kong, in spite of their use of more advanced special effects, had any chance of matching the naive grandeur of the original.
The Film in Its Time
King Kong was a product of the Depression, not only in the trivial sense that it belonged to a surge of films intended to provide some solace to people caught up in that slow disaster, or merely in the straightforward sense in which Kong, the giant run amok, could be construed as a model of the disaster, but in the subtler sense in which the innocent Kong becomes a victim of callous modernity and buccaneering entrepreneurialism. When Cooper invited the audiences of 1933 to sympathize with Kong in the moment of his destruction, he was mobilizing the public’s own self-pity, as people imagined themselves caught up and chewed up by the alien logic of the stock exchangecollapse and all its effects.
Impact
Since his creation in the 1933 film King Kong, Kong has never gone away, and he is likely to live on in the popular imagination for a long time to come, even if no more remakes and sequels are undertaken. The poignant aspects of his tragedy were sharply mirrored in the slew of Japanese monster films made after World War II, which featured several revamped apes and the most influential of Kong’s clones, Godzilla, modeling the Japanese people’s endeavors to come to terms with the atomic demolition of their aspirant empire. To Americans, Kong is perhaps more memorable than any of the giants of traditional folklore or any of the steel monsters of modern technology.
Bibliography
Bellin, Joshua David. Framing Monsters: Fantasy Film and Social Alienation. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Perceptive sociological study of the role of monster movies in society.
Bergman, Andrew. We’re in the Money: Depression America and Its Films. New York: New York University Press, 1971. General overview of film and society in the 1930’s, with brief but insightful discussions of monster movies, the Marx Brothers, women’s roles in film, and other topics.
Erb, Cynthia Marie. Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture. 2d ed. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2009. Scholarly study of the surprisingly broad impact that King Kong has had throughout world cultures.
Jewell, Richard B. The RKO Story. New York: Crown, 1982. Oversized and filled with photographs, but good for reading as well as for browsing. Covers every film RKO produced year by year and includes useful facts about the costs of productions and the box-office receipts of notable successes, such as King Kong, and failures.
Morton, Ray. King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon from Fay Wray to Peter Jackson. New York: Applause, 2005. Well-illustrated history of the many sequels and remakes of King Kong, through Jackson’s lavish 2005 homage to the original film.