King Kong: ‘the film caters for all tastes’ – archive, 1933
Kong, which will start an exclusive season at the Coliseum on Monday, was press-shown today. It is based on the last story Edgar Wallace wrote for the screen. The idea is good, and the picture begins well with an explorer about to set out on a film expedition to an unknown island. It is not on the map, and natives dwell on it in worshipping dread of a giant ape which lives behind a wall built in “time immemorial.” This is to be the subject of the producers’ picture, but when the party reach the island their leading lady is kidnapped and offered to King Kong, the ape. The party set out in pursuit and, penetrating the wall, enter a world where prehistoric monsters still range.
Dinosaurs and pterodactyls destroy most of the party, but the higher-salaried principals survive to subdue the ape with gas bombs and ship it back to New York. Here it is exhibited, but, breaking loose, it sets out in pursuit of the leading lady, whom it has recognised. Playfully wrecking houses and snapping trains, it is not caught till it has climbed the Empire State Building with the girl in its fist. Here a squadron of aeroplanes bring it down with machine-guns, and the film fades out on hero and heroine dizzily blissful on the edge of a gutter high over New York.
By this time, of course, the film has ceased to be the thriller with an idea which it set out to be and has become one of the best comedies seen for years. But in between there have been more thrills than have been manufactured for the screen since speech came to it. The producers, indeed, have been so busy piling Pelion on Ossa chat they have destroyed King Kong in the avalanche. The film has so many excitements that it is not really exciting.
The ape and the various monsters are triumphs of technical craft, but the skill which galvanised them has not made it possible for them to stir our imagination. We know such mammoths did not move so fast. We wonder why the huge ape so rarely disturbs the foliage of the dense jungle – he moves in it as if superimposed; we notice that his size varies from scene to scene – sometimes towering over human beings he is at the end small enough to be shown on the stage of a theatre, – and we feel that this exhibition is more convenient than impressive.
King Kong, however, is unusual even for an ape fifty feet high. He is agile, his mind moves quickly, and he roars like a lion. The real impressive feature, indeed, is the hardness of the heroine, for she is flung from cliffs, perched in tree tops, chained to stakes, and poised on skyscrapers, and at the end merely observes, “I’m all right.” No one, indeed, can say that modern young women are soft after seeing Fay Wray in King Kong, and many will see her, for the film caters for all tastes, whether they be for excitement or amusement.