King Kong

So, after 19 years, 9 months and 4 days, I finally got around to watching the original King Kong last night in film class. About damned time, you're thinking, and I daresay you're right. However, as I've made clear, the horror genre isn't somewhere that my interests lie, so perhaps it shouldn't shock you too much. Still, it was high time for me to tackle yet another overlooked 900 pound gorilla of cinema (ho, ho!). So, I offer the following as my review.

If you aren't at least vaguely familiar with the storyline, after the myriad of parodies and remakes, you must have been living under a rock, or don't get AMC or TCM on your cable package. Basically, obsessive film director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) organizes a large expedition to a faraway island in the Indian Ocean, unknown to White Men (cue ominous music and racial stereotypes). Denham picks up a naif waif (or waif naif), Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), a pretty blonde down-and-out who thrills at the idea of being a movie star. And a star she is, as they arrive on the island, only to confront the dreaded Ooga-Booga Tribe, who want to sacrifice her to their god, Kong. Turns out, of course, that Kong is very, very real. He's a big-ass gorilla who lives on the other side of the island, and he immediately falls for Ann, taking her back to his lair. Ann's response is to scream a lot, while the manly-man crew led by Ann's love interest Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) takes off through unbelievable back-lots and projection shots, fighting vicious clay dinosaurs and the elements all the way. Eventually Ann is rescued, and Kong is incapacitated - only to be taken to New York City, where Denham tries to make him into an international star. Guess what happens. Just guess. Do you really not know where this is going?

Let's deal with the obvious first: King Kong is very, very, very dated ("obsolete", as one classmate put it). The special effects and "location shooting" are laughable, the sexual and racial stereotyping gallops at full speed into the danger zone, and even the acting - save Robert Armstrong - isn't very good. Audiences weened on gee-whiz ILM CGI effects - or the Peter Jackson's remake, as of yet unseen by me - will undoubtedly find Kong's clay fur and monkey face laughable - the class I watched it with sure did, and let's be fair, I did at times too. The ooga-booga natives and the pidgin Chinese cook would be best left in a Looney Tunes cartoon, and the film's sexual politics are childishly misogynistic. And Ann's greatest character definition is that she's the one that screams. A lot. Really loud.

But Goddammit, all that aside, it's still a fun film. The story still has a compelling narrative drive, Max Steiner's score is appropriately epic, and the script is sharp (in terms of dialogue of course), the direction quite good (particularly in the New York scenes). The scale-models are quite something, a wonderful achievement in production design, even if they aren't really convincing. The stop-motion dinosaurs, and of course Kong himself, have a remarkable life and energy to them given that they're quite obviously fake. As laughable as they look, they're REAL - something the giant computerized ape in Jackson's film, however good, couldn't claim to be. There's a remarkable amount of pathos in the final scene, as Kong is slowly and methodically machine gunned to death by the airplanes - a moment of astonishing poignance beyond the grasp of many films since.

So, King Kong is a fun, classic adventure movie (not that much of a horror, really) with a heart. A big clay heart. It gets my recommendation and I enjoyed it thoroughly in spite of its myriad of flaws. 8/10.