KONG IS US

KING KONG has been around longer than I have, part of that world of black-and-white movie horrors that started with Nosferatu and included Frankenstein's creature and Count Dracula and the Mummy, and would soon include Curt Siodmak's version of the werewolf legend, the Wolf Man, and eventually the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

It took a while until I was ready to enjoy the chills that those monsters provided. But in that pre-video, television-barely-out-of-its-infancy era, you weren't likely to see vintage films unless you haunted midnight revivals at art houses or made it your business to join some high-tone film society.

I wasn't high tone.

But I found myself sitting in one of the cheap seats of the Fillmore East on New York's Lower East Side on May 7, 1970. The headline band was due to perform. The auditorium was dark, and filled with a multitude of mostly drug-dazed music lovers.

The old movie screen that was used in those days for abstract light shows in which colors blended and morphed behind acid rock performers on this occasion blazed into a glorious chiaroscuro image of the Empire State Building surmounted by a gigantic ape dangling a screaming blond beauty from one huge hand.

Antique biplanes buzzed the monster, machine guns blazing. The ape, puzzled, put the woman down, studied his bleeding torso, then tumbled eighty-six stories to the bustling street below.

Cut to a street scene. An elegantly dressed man stands beside the unmoving giant, conversing with a police lieutenant.

"Well, Denham, the airplanes got him," says the lieutenant.

"Oh, no," Carl Denham replies, "it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast."

At which point the lights came up and the music began. The musicians were Grace Slick, Paul Kantner, Jack Casady, Jorma Kaukonen, and Joey Covington. They were the then-current lineup of the Jefferson Airplane. The event is preserved for posterity as the opening track of one of their albums. I believe it's Bless Its Pointy Little Head, but I'm not a discographer and you'll have to check with an expert to see if I'm right.

But enough ex-druggie-hippy-burnout nostalgia. The lovely blonde was Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray; the civilian was Carl Denham, played by Robert Armstrong; and the giant ape was of course King Kong, played by an eighteen-inch-tall model built by Willis O'Brien.

King Kong was released in 1933 to an enthusiastic reception. I won't go into the storyline—everybody knows that by now. The question is, Why did Kong become a cultural icon, and why is he more popular today, three-quarters of a century after that first release, than ever before?

If you think about those popular monsters—Frankenstein's creature, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolf Man, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Kong—you'll notice a common characteristic. They're all-well, wait a minute, you think about it first and in a little while I'll come back and tell you what I see in common for all those monsters and we'll see if we agree.

First, though, I'm assuming that you've actually seen the 1933 masterpiece and not had to settle for any of its many sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and imitations. It's okay if you've seen Son of Kong or Mighty Joe Young or the Dino De Laurentiis 1976 version featuring the World Trade Center in the role of the Empire State Building or even the Japanese King Kong vs. Godzilla. It's okay and you needn't feel guilty even if you actually enjoyed those other films. But the one and only real King Kong is the 1933 version produced and directed by Ernest Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper.

It's a movie that almost didn't get made, and when it did get made it was largely slapped together out of used and recycled materials and pre-shot footage. It was allegedly conceived by Edgar Wallace, the great English thriller writer whose prolific output ran to some 95 novels—at least that's my count—plus hundreds of short stories, military histories, plays, movies, and several volumes of verse. He even ghosted an autobiography for Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, "the girl in the red velvet swing," and if you don't know who she was you're in for a treat. (All of this done when he was not busy with his duties as a soldier, cop, merchant seaman, milkman, racecourse tout, drama critic, newspaper editor, and Chairman of the Board of the British Lion Film Corporation.)

Hollywood legend, and I don't doubt it, holds that Wallace had barely started work on the story that would eventually become King Kong when he died on February 19, 1932. He was fifty-six years old.

Special-effects genius Willis O'Brien had been working on a silent film called Creation as early as 1927. His method was to build flexible models of his creatures and move them painstakingly, frame by frame, while shooting them. Creation was never completed, perhaps because of Depression-era budget cuts, but O'Brien still had his models. The battle-to-the-death between Kong and the Tyrannosaurus rex that made it into King Kong was filmed before the movie was ever green-lighted and used in the pitch session at RKO.

The jungle sets had been built for The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and the great ancient wall on Skull Island was left over from Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927).

How much Edgar Wallace contributed to King Kong is subject to debate. Maybe nothing at all. Maybe just the sketchiest of ideas. The plotline contains elements lifted from here and there, cobbled together and brilliantly filmed.

For example: The Shadow pulp magazine had made its debut in April 1931. If you've never read the very first Shadow story, you might want to give it a try. It's been reprinted plenty of times. It opens in New York with a despondent Harry Vincent, broke and hungry, a victim of the Depression, about to hurl himself off a bridge, thereby ending it all.

copyright © 2005 by Ray Harryhausen