budget story of a beautiful, plucky blonde woman (Fay Wray) and a frightening, gigantic, 50 foot ape-monster as a metaphoric re-telling of the archetypal Beauty and the Beast fable. [Fay Wray mistakenly believed that her RKO film co-star, 'the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood,' would be Cary Grant rather than the beast. Later in her life, she titled her autobiography "On the Other Hand" in memory of her squirming in Kong's grip.]
The major themes of the film include the struggle for survival on the primitive, fog-enshrouded, tropical Skull Island between the ardent and energetic filmmakers (led by Robert Armstrong), the hero (Bruce Cabot in a part originally offered to Joel McCrea), the
voodoo natives, and the forces of nature (the unique Beast creature); unrequited love and the frustration and repression of violent sexual desires. However, the primitive, giant ape must also struggle against the forces of urban civilization and technology when it is exploited for profit and returned for display in New York City during a time of economic oppression.
starred Fay Wray. When released, it broke all previous box-office records. Its massive, money-making success helped to save RKO Studios from bankruptcy.
inches in height, and trick photography, etc.), and some of the most phenomenal stop-motion animation sequences and special effects ever filmed (by chief technician Willis O'Brien, famed for his first feature film The Lost World (1925)). A wildly dramatic musical score by Max Steiner enhanced the action of the story.
The film has numerous memorable moments, including Kong's battle with a giant snake in a misty cavern, his struggle against a flying pterodactyl, the screaming beauty (Fay Wray, known as the "Queen of Scream") held captive in Kong's giant clenched palm, and the
finale with the defiant Kong atop the Empire State Building while circling aircraft shoot him down. (Tim Dirks)
Peter Jackson's version of King Kong is engineered as the biggest movie of all time. The machinery shows, and sometimes creaks—elements of Titanic and Jurassic Park double the length of the original. A brontosaurus stampede through a narrow canyon, with some indifferent patches of animation, are meant to link to the inevitable video game. (No matter how many tickets Kong sells, the game will sell more; if this movie is sour about showbiz, maybe that's because there were so many commercial needs this movie was made to serve.)
Jackson's scope makes this version different than the predecessors. The difference isn't just in the Skull Island that's roiling with dinosaurs and indescribably loathsome gargantuan insects. It isn't just in the exquisitely detailed New York of 1933, with cityscapes that can be peered into for block after block. And not even in the finale, against a dawn-lit winter horizon, where Kong makes his last stand. Jackson and his co-writers (the same who
worked on his Lord of the Rings trilogy) took care of the tale where it counts: the love story.
The story's central problem is what might draw a very large silverback gorilla and a lonely vaudeville performer together. It's her sense of tragedy: when Carl Denham (Jack Black, suitably diabolical) outlines a vague scenario of a woman who can't submit to love, the leading lady responds. She immediately understands the Ibsen in Denham's bare, silly outline. I've said it before, but the best computer effects are nothing but cream-cheese without actors to
make them live. In Naomi Watts' Ann Darrow, the odd, yet believable connection between the lady and the ape is virtually without dialogue, leaving the relationship not put into so many words. My classic Kong-loving friend Mike Monahan worried that Jackson would repeat the mistake of the 1976 version: turning the creature into a pet, changing a symbol of indomitable solitude into, basically, a big misbehaving dog.
It's the other way around in Jackson's Kong—she is his pet. When he is recovering from his wounds, Watts' Ann does the only thing she knows how to do as a performer: She dances for him, she juggles, she's the court jester to this great king with his suffering eyes. Watts is the most childlike of actresses. She's naturally, limpidly youthful. It's a later moment—a sort of ballet between Ann and Kong on an icy lake in Central Park—that make this a classic.
Jackson's interpretation reflects the way our feelings about great apes have changed over the decades. When one catches the gaze of a gorilla at the zoo, there's always a feeling of honor at being in the presence of the rare animal, seeing the tragic beauty and the
wrongness of its captivity. And Jackson responds to this wrongness. It's the child in him, just like it's the child in Watts, that makes this movie such a thing of beauty. (Richard Von Busack)
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