F/ X CREEPIER THAN CGI COULD EVER MATCH
This month marks the 85th anniversary of the giant gorilla’s first screen appearance. His story was remade in 1976 and 2005, he makes a cameo in “Ready Player One” and he’s the star of a Broadway musical opening this fall. Ebert revisited the film in his “Great Movies” series.
On good days I consider “Citizen Kane” the seminal film of the sound era, but on bad days it is “King Kong.” That is not to say I dislike “King Kong,” which, in this age of technical perfection, uses its very naivete to generate a kind of creepy awe. It’s simply to observe that this low- rent monster movie, and not the psychological puzzle of “Kane,” pointed the way toward the current era of special effects, science fiction, cataclysmic destruction, and nonstop shocks. “King Kong” is the father of “Jurassic Park,” the “Alien” movies and countless other stories in which heroes are terrified by skillful special effects. A movie like “The Silence of the Lambs,” which finds its evil in a man’s personality, seems humanistic by contrast.
I’ve seen “King Kong” ( 1933) many times, most memorably in its re- release in the 1950s, when it did indeed scare me. In recent years I have focused on the remarkable special effects, based by Willis O’Brien and others on his f/ x work in “The Lost World” ( 1925) but achieving a sophistication and beauty that eclipsed anything that went before. The movie plunders every trick in the book to create its illusions, using live action, back projection, stop- motion animation, miniatures, models, matte paintings and sleight- of- hand. And it is not stingy with the effects; after a half- hour of lumbering dialogue and hammy acting, the movie introduces Kong and rarely cuts away from sequences requiring one kind of trickery or another.
But “King Kong” is more than a technical achievement. It is also a curiously touching fable in which the beast is seen, not as a monster of destruction, but as a creature that in its own way wants to do the right thing. Unlike the extraterrestrial spiders in the “Alien” pictures, which embody single- minded aggression, Kong cares for his captive human female, protects her, attacks only when provoked, and would be perfectly happy to be left alone on his Pacific Island. It is the greed of a Hollywood showman that unleashes Kong’s rage, and anyone who thinks to exhibit the beast on a New York stage in front of a live audience deserves what he gets — indeed, more than he gets.
The story is not sophisticated. A movie director ( Robert Armstrong) hires a ship, recruits his leading lady from off the streets of New York at the last moment, and sails for a mysterious Pacific island he heard about in Singapore. The island contains a legendary giant ape, which he hopes to use as the star of his movie. Fay Wray plays Ann Darrow, Kong’s co- star, and Bruce Cabot is the sailor who falls in love with her and saves her from Kong.
Modern viewers will shift uneasily in their seats during the stereotyping of the islanders in a scene where a bride is to be sacrificed to Kong ( it is rare to see a coconut brassiere in a noncomedy), but from the moment Kong appears on the screen the movie essentially never stops for breath. In an astonishing outpouring of creative energy, O’Brien and his collaborators show Kong in battle with two dinosaurs, a giant snake, a flying reptile and a Tyrannosaurus rex. Later, in New York, he will climb to the top of the Empire State Building and bat down a biplane with his bare hand.
In modern times the movie has aged, as critic James Berardinelli observes, and “advances in technology and acting have dated aspects of the production.” Yes, but in the very artificial- ity of some of the special effects, there is a creepiness that isn’t there in today’s slick, flawless, computeraided images.
In “Jurassic Park” you are looking, more or less, at a real dinosaur. In “King Kong,” you are looking at an idea of a dinosaur, created by hand by technicians who are working with their imaginations. When Kong battles the large flesh- eating dinosaur in his first big battle scene, there is a moment when he forces its jaws apart, and the bones crack, and blood drips from the gaping throat, and some- thing immediate happens that is hard to duplicate on any computer.
Even allowing for its slow start, wooden acting and wall- to- wall screaming, there is something ageless and primeval about “King Kong” that still somehow works.