Week of November 24, 2005, Issue #527
FILM
Nature of the beast
By JOSEF BRAUN
Delivered to an unsuspecting public in the lowest depths of the Depression,
King Kong (1933) must have seemed like a great psychic
beast laying waste to the façade of universal prosperity, an irrepressible
fantasy creature dreamed up collectively by Americans in a rage against the
mockery of their failing experiment in civilization. It’s no wonder that
the film’s titular giant gorilla, though made of rubber and steel, is
imbued with more soul and depth any of the humans who first invade his territory
then run screaming in terror from his instinctive animal wrath. His role in
the film is to wreak havoc on behalf of the audience, to offer anarchic satisfaction
by climbing all over and destroying the greatest and cruellest of American cities
in one brief but fevered cry of frustration, humiliation and unattainable love.
Seventy years later, King Kong retains its power, even though its particular
social context, colonialist spirit of adventure and filmmaking conditions have
long since fallen away. The film’s flaws—its naïveté,
its corny dialogue, its racial crudities, its resolute refusal to examine the
culpability of its ostensible hero—are fused with its dazzling showmanship,
its brute hugeness, and its historical value. What might be considered flaws—its
special effects—are, in fact, no flaws at all. If there’s a real
star of King Kong, it’s undoubtedly Willis O’Brien, whose landmark
stop-motion animation of Kong still impresses with its expressive tenderness
and lacerating savagery. The way Kong plays with the still bleeding broken jaw
of the T-Rex after killing it, the way he casually tears away Fay Wray’s
soiled dress and sniffs it, as those long legs wriggle and kick helplessly under
his grip: these moments possess a kind of movie magic well beyond the limits
of technology or kitsch.
King Kong is finally available on DVD in a deluxe, two-disc special edition,
just in time to re-fortify its legacy before Peter Jackson’s remake hits
theatres next month (and Jackson himself gets plenty of screen time in the disc’s
longest special feature, paying his respects to the source material and generating
a little more hype for his highly anticipated new Kong). The transfer itself
is gorgeous, taken from a carefully restored new print, and those sumptuously
textured, Gustave Doré-inspired jungle scenes look especially wondrous,
as does the fuzzy, ominous fog from which the sea creature emerges. Accompanying
the new transfer is an audio commentary with Ken Ralston and legendary animator
Ray Harryhausen (who decided upon his career path after first seeing King Kong
at the age of 13). Harryhausen is an endearing and authoritative presence, and
the commentary is peppered with archival recordings of comments from director
Merian C. Cooper and Wray, but overall, it’s a pretty dull conversation
full of general praise for the film and not much else. It just doesn’t
feel very prepared for.
On the second disc are a pair of documentaries that are very informative but
also very repetitive and lacking in much critical distance. One tackles the
exceedingly colourful, larger-than-life biography of Cooper, the model for King
Kong’s arrogant, non-repentant thrill-seeker Carl Denham. Cooper was a
war hero, fearless adventurer, staunch anti-Communist and obsessive aviator,
as well as a filmmaker who helped to usher in new technologies such as Technicolor
and Cinerama. The doc abruptly ends with the advent of Cinerama, not even noting
Cooper’s death or dealing with how this lover of ancient foreign cultures
felt about the crass depiction of islanders in King Kong. Meanwhile, The Making
of King Kong explains the arduous process of creating the film’s special
effects and the personalities behind them, an amazing story, but one that takes
up most of the doc’s two-and-a-half-hour running time. V
King Kong
Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack • Written by
James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose. • Starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong
and Bruce Cabot • Now available on DVD