- Kong wasn't the first movie monster, nor was he even the first onscreen beast created by legendary stop-motion animator Willis O'Brien, but he's the only one who deserves the title of "King." You can debate whether Godzilla is more popular -- certainly the giant lizard has appeared in more films -- but I think it's safe to say that nobody at Toho would have dared to make a giant monster movie if King Kong hadn't blazed the trail twenty years earlier. Certainly Ray Harryhousen cited this film as the inspiration for his career, and everyone from George Lucas to Peter Jackson was influenced by his work. I recently read that there's even a Broadway musical adaptation of King Kong in the works, a full eighty years after the film came out. When the characters in King Kong advertise the giant ape as the "Eighth Wonder of the World," they aren't so far off.
- It's impossible to imagine anyone who isn't at least marginally familiar with the plot, so I'll keep this part brief. A brash moviemaker named Denham (Robert Armstrong) drags a newly-minted actress named Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) to a remote jungle island where the locals worship a mysterious "ape god" named Kong. Presumably because this film was made in the 1930's, the primitive natives are fascinated with Darrow's blonde hair and kidnap her to offer her to Kong as a human sacrifice. But theirs is no mere superstition! Sure enough, the enormous ape emerges from the jungle to steal the constantly screaming Ann, and it's up to the love-stricken first mate Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) to get her back. Not one to be discouraged by the deaths of several loyal crewmen, Denham drags Kong back to New York City, where he's sure "the whole world will pay to see this." You know how well that goes.
- On my most recent rewatching of King Kong, I was struck by two things. The first is that there are really a lot of dinosaur fights on Kong's island, and they're all terrific. I expect most people remember the New York scenes best, but most of the film takes place on the island where the film's truly amazing visual effects and set designs are completely captivating. The second thing to strike me is that King Kong features a huge diversity of visual effects shots. While most lazy monster b-pictures of the 1950's relied on rear projection alone, King Kong employs both split screens and rear projection and constantly cuts between stop-motion and real physical models. Also, I'm not sure how they achieved the final airplane point-of-view shots of Kong as he's swatting the planes away. I assume they zoomed the camera in on the finished visual effects, but whatever they did it looks terrific.
- All of that said, the real accomplishment of King Kong is surely that it made its monster so fundamentally understandable. Like the first mate Driscoll, Kong is just another "big, hardboiled egg (who) gets a look at a pretty face and bang, he cracks up and goes sappy." His expressions are something intermediate to those of a human and an ape, but above all they clearly convey intelligence and, yes, love in a way that few movie monsters did before or since. Like 1931's Frankenstein, the film succeeds in making its star so relatable that the audience certainly isn't rooting for the planes by the end. I think the film's fictional producer summarizes King Kong best: "Listen - I'm going out to make the greatest picture in the world. Something that nobody's ever seen or heard of. They'll have to think up a lot of new adjectives when I come back."
- A big ape falls in love with somebody named Darrow. I detect some Scopes Trial humor.
