Thursday, October 4, 2012

October 4: King Kong (1933 -- Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack)

★★★★

King Kong is big, and it’s still exciting 80 years after the fact.  The story pushes forward at a dizzying pace with rapid development in NY quickly superseded by visual extravaganzas like native ceremonies and culminating in the arrival of the colossal special-effects beasts.  And King Kong doesn’t rest with the introduction of these monsters but goes eight on to fights between the monsters and between people and the monsters.  Then there’s the monster in New York.  This is the breathless narrative that Steven Spielberg resurrected in the 80s. 

Action thrills is the focus here, so we don’t have real characters.  Instead, we have claymation monsters that are oddly compelling.  King Kong’s fur may get ruffled irregularly while he stalks his island, but there’s enough plausibility when he breaks the jaw of the allosaurus to still make today’s audience wince.  And then he gives it an extra thump to be sure it's dead.  Things are even more tense when he adn other animals are matted into shots with real actors.  For 1933, the action is pretty seamless when he tears a piece of fabric off of the dress of live actress Fay Wray and holds it.  And we feel a thrill after Kong breaks into the village and a woman dashes in front of the monster foot to snatch her child out of harm’s way.  And ditto when natives on a platform throw spears at him and he walks over to knock the platform down.  Live action and stop motion merge well here, and generally to give the audience the thrill of the uncanny confronting the normal.

The animation in King Kong also has a lot of expressiveness.  The scenes in Kong’s lair capture the strained, unsteady Romanticism of a Doré print with their dynamic light differences in foreground and background and their starkly vertical lines.  More than that, the clay Kong emotes sensitivity.  He is curious, and he is tender.  His body language at the tragic end of the film speaks of both his desire to continue protecting Ann and his simultaneous recognition that he can’t.  It’s a posture of defeat and regret as good as any we might see from Charles Laughton.

In fact, King Kong is a more developed character than any of the people in the film.  With the focus on action, King Kong treats its characters as story elements and setting more than anything else.  Ann and John are the screaming, shallow blonde and the distant, cool hero.  Our most annoying character is sociopath Carl Denham, and his failure to get his just desserts is as painful to watch as is Kong’s demise.  Denham ignores every caution, and when society declines to place a woman at risk for a Denham project, he goes recruiting among the vulnerable.  He exploits Ann for his purposes, putting her in harm’s way.  He manipulates the ship and crew, knowing they’d object to the danger he’s putting them in and, in fact, ends up getting many of them killed.  Ever with an eye on his glory and achievement, Denham goes on to capture the noble Kong and cause the beast’s death, along the major swaths of destruction.  And at the end of King Kong, he blames Ann as a femme-fatal who has destroyed Kong and ends the film blameless. 

King Kong is not deep, but it is a great, fun film with a surprisingly strong action narration.  It's thrilling to be touched by such an old story with such old effects.

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