King Kong (1933)

Official trailer

King Kong is Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 American adventure horror film. The film depicts filmmaker Carl Denham hiring out-of-work actress Ann Darrow for a mysterious expedition to Skull Island in the Indian Ocean. The crew encounters a giant gorilla worshipped by the native population, captures him through gas attack, and transports him to New York for theatrical exhibition. Kong escapes during the show, abducts Ann, and climbs the Empire State Building, where aircraft fire kills him. Fay Wray plays Ann Darrow. Robert Armstrong plays Carl Denham.

Bruce Cabot plays first mate Jack Driscoll. Frank Reicher plays Captain Englehorn.

James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose wrote the screenplay. Willis O’Brien designed the visual effects using stop-motion animation. RKO Radio Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 670,000 dollars, and its first run turned a profit of about 650,000 dollars. The work helped save RKO from bankruptcy during the Great Depression.

I love this movie with very few reservations. Kong is an eighteen-inch model covered in rabbit fur, and I still feel worse when the planes close in on him at the top of the Empire State Building than I do at the end of most modern tragedies. The Skull Island scenes with the native villagers have dated badly and I wince at them. Nearly everything else holds up beautifully.

The film is the template for every later giant-monster film. The Willis O’Brien stop-motion animation produced images 1933 audiences had never seen, combining live-action footage with composited animated figures, miniatures, glass paintings and rear projection in ways contemporary productions couldn’t match. The Max Steiner score introduced techniques film scoring still uses, and I think it does half the work of making Kong feel alive. Fay Wray’s performance made her the original scream queen.

Later King Kong adaptations including the 1976 De Laurentiis production, the 2005 Peter Jackson production, and other treatments have all measured themselves against the 1933 original. Most have failed to match it.

The O’Brien Animation

Willis O’Brien created Kong using stop-motion animation of an articulated metal armature covered in rabbit fur.

The figure stood approximately eighteen inches tall. O’Brien moved the model frame by frame, photographing each position separately. The resulting animation gives Kong heavy expressive range including emotional response to Ann, varied combat movement, and the climactic Empire State Building sequence. This required months of patient frame-by-frame work for sequences that play out in seconds of screen time.

Stop-motion has a quality that digital animation can’t replicate.

The slight irregularities in frame-to-frame motion give Kong a physical presence that smooth digital movement loses, and the real model catches real light and real shadow. I’ll take that jittery, handmade ape over any polished computer creature. Later productions using digital monsters haven’t generally surpassed the 1933 Kong in audience emotional response, and the older technique holds its own against anything that came after.

The Beauty and the Beast Theme

A quoted Arab proverb opens the film, stating that beauty killed the beast.

Denham repeats variations of the line throughout the film. The theme works at multiple levels. Kong’s relationship with Ann moves from captor to protector. He defends her from threats including dinosaurs on Skull Island. His decision to climb the Empire State Building to escape from the New York gunfire while still carrying Ann allows him to be killed because he refuses to abandon her.

The romantic-tragic framing sets King Kong apart from conventional monster pictures.

The beast is sympathetic, and the civilization that kills him is morally compromised at best. Carl Denham’s exploitation of Kong for theatrical profit makes him a worse antagonist than Kong himself. The film closes with Denham saying beauty killed the beast, and I don’t buy it for a second. Civilization killed him, and Denham led the way. That ending is a big reason I rate the film this high, because the monster is the one I mourn.

The Pre-Code Content

Strict enforcement of the Production Code didn’t start until 1934, and the film predates it. The 1933 version contains material that later reissues removed. Kong peels away Ann’s clothing.

He chews and stomps multiple human victims explicitly. The native population scenes include content that later decades have found problematic for racial representation reasons. The pre-Code freedom produced material that post-1934 productions couldn’t have shown.

The 1938 reissue removed several scenes, including the more graphic violence and some of the Ann-Kong material. The cut versions circulated for decades, and the censored footage was found in 1969 and restored soon after. Later home video releases have generally used the restored version.

Watch that one. I think the restored violence makes Kong more of an animal and more tragic at the same time, and the censored cut sands off exactly what makes him frightening.

Does King Kong still hold up?

King Kong is the template for every later giant-monster film, and I think it’s still the best of them. The O’Brien animation gives Kong a physical presence later digital work hasn’t surpassed, and the beauty-and-the-beast theme gives him a death that hurts.

My only knock is the dated treatment of the islanders, and that’s what keeps it at a 9. Watch it if you care about horror, about special effects history, or about where so much of modern monster filmmaking came from.

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