My Favorite Movie

Me: Comma: King Kong

Being a cinephile of any degree, sooner or later people will ask you about your favorite movie of all time. While I can't give the equivalent answer about albums or books or television shows, I do have a definite and consistent answer in the category of movies, the same one I've given for the last fifty years. It's not a picture from my youth, although it was on television constantly when I was young. My mother would have been ten years old when it was released. Yet 'King Kong' was my favorite since before puberty and has remained, uncontested, ever since.

As a movie event, 'King Kong' was singular and unique even during the Golden Age of Hollywood. No other film used special effects as an integral part of the plot in such a way for another fifteen years, although a few very pale echoes emerged. It influenced young Los Angeles teenagers such as Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen to go into their respective careers when both were just a few years older than my mother. It has been remade twice, and rebooted recently, with very mixed results. And as a brand, Kong still has a worldwide presence eighty five years after the premiere.

It was a project that took over four years to compete when directors finished that many movies in a single year. RKO wasn't a major player in Hollywood, just a step above Republic and the Gower Gulch independents, yet they did manage both 'King Kong' and 'Citizen Kane', an equally one-of-a-kind film. The special effects were done, then scrapped, then done again and again until they were right. This was at the height, or rather depths of the Great Depression, and today it would be more like taking over a decade and spending a billion dollars to create a movie.

And what a movie; it was more exciting and fantastical than anything else ever done before. Despite being primarily a visual effects movie, it was also the first film to have a wall-to-wall soundtrack, the music mimicking every act of the great ape star. The stop-motion character of Kong became the star of the vehicle, outshining all the humans. And the film is filled with perhaps more subtext that any other American movie, giving it a continuous resonance down to today.

Every great piece of art can be broken down three ways; text, context, and subtext. In the case of 'King Kong', which is indeed great art, the text is a black and white movie from the early talkie era with exceptional special effects work, both in matte painting and stop motion. The context is Hollywood and the Great Depression, both reflected in the script. As for the subtext, it could be argued that it concerns the original sin of America, overflowing with both gender and racial politics in ways unlike any other movie ever created.

'Birth of a Nation', Hollywood's first blockbuster, is more notorious for its odorous racial attitudes than it is for the groundbreaking use of montage and intercutting scenes. 'Gone with the Wind', the biggest money maker of the Golden Era, has a racial attitude not much better, treating negros both when slaves and after they are freed as children, in need of white parents to guide them. 'King Kong', while not explicitly about race, tells the story of a giant beast taken from the jungle in chains for profit in the New World, only to go on a rampage over a white woman. It actually brings sex and miscegenation into the foreground of the plot.

This was entirely accidental, of course; had the creators known what powerful topics they were dealing with, they could not have handled them so adroitly. Only blissful ignorance can balance the plot line so that everything is there in plain site but nothing is offensive. There is a racist attitude in the film, but it is a casual one, a typical white unenlightened stance that differs from the Southern attitude of D.W. Griffith and Margaret Mitchell, both knowingly racist. And there is a feminist angle that comes from the final screen write, Ruth Rose.

Edgar Wallace wrote the first draft, but the story was from Merian C. Cooper, who also served as producer and co-director. Wallace was a famous writer of mysteries, very popular, and he would remain a name brand in Europe through the 1960s. Perhaps Cooper wanted to repeat the slant that Arthur Conan Doyle, another mystery writer who also wrote 'The Lost World', the first plot to bring a dinosaur to a modern location, a key plot point in 'King Kong'. Wallace unfortunately died before doing much work on the script.

Another couple of male writers worked on the story, especially James Creelman, who filled in much of the backstory and plot details. But he was cautious about too many fantastic elements, and Cooper eventually removed him after Creelman finished a companion picture shot on the same sets, 'The Most Dangerous Game'. Ruth Rose was brought in by Cooper even though she was the wife of the other co-director, Earnest Schoedsack. Even though she entered the game late, Ruth Rose made all the difference in the world.

The first thing she did was remove most of the back story, instead increasing the screen presence of Ann Darrow, the female protagonist. Now the plot was seen through a female perspective, including all the threat, shown and implied, of the giant ape. Cooper had already come up with the climb up the Empire State Building and the 'Beauty and the Beast' angel, but Ruth Rose made the female character the fulcrum of the drama. All the other actors - even Kong - are seen in relationship to her.

Carl Denham, the director and showman, takes advantage of her poverty. The crew aboard the ship thinks that she is bad luck. The first mate falls in love with her. The natives want her as a sacrifice, since she is 'superior' to the native queen. Kong falls in love at first site and rips up the island getting her to his home, where she is promptly stolen back by the first mate. Kong goes nuts and tries to get her back, only to be captured and shipped back to New York, to be exploited.  In chains, Kong goes even more nuts when he thinks that Ann in being attacked by the newspapermen, tearing up the Big Apple. Going to the highest place for safety, the giant ape is mercilessly killed.

Consider how you feel at the end of the movie; once Kong is dead, you no longer really care about Ann Darrow or her lover, who supposedly rescued her. Carl Denham gets the last word, but you are furious at him for causing the tragedy through his actions. And it is a tragedy that is nearly Shakespearian, because there is a faint echo of Othello in the sexual and racial politics. It takes a stop motion gorilla's to give dignity and humanity to the African American male experience. That was the sorry state of racial politics in the United States at the time.

It is also, curiously, the glory of the movie. 'King Kong', through its sub textual resonance, hidden in plain site, is almost Biblical in the distribution of guilt. As I said before, the creators were playing with huge cultural issues, and in their ignorance came up with a masterpiece. Or there could be another reading; the leading light in the making of the film. Merian C. Cooper, went on to produce many other films. The last fictional film he produced is the other great classic Hollywood study of miscegenation, John Ford's 'The Searchers'. It also handled horribly divisive subject matter explicitly but without any of it ever spoken in the dialog. In 'The Searchers', that icon of America, John Wayne, becomes the villain, the cold hearted killer, intent on murdering his niece because she took an Indian as a mate.

Kong himself never had it as good again. RKO Studios rushed 'Son of Kong' into production. If you've never seen it, don't; it is a terribly shoddy wasted opportunity. In fact, the only good thing in the movie is that the Carl Denham character is continued, and he is fleeing New York City to escape all the law suits resulting from his actions in the previous films. The production team never had the money or the time to duplicate the special effects, instead having more moderate success with such pot boilers as H. Rider Haggard's 'She' and the 'The Last Days of Pompeii'. It wasn't until 1948, a full fifteen years later, that the producing, writing, directing and special effects team reunited to create a movie that wasn't an embarrassment, 'Mighty Joe Young'. This time, the ape manages to live happily ever after.

Kong was evidently ripped off by the Japanese before the Second World War; the film no longer exists but there are a few publicity stills that don't look promising. Toho Studios, riding high on Godzilla, resurrected Kong and Skull Island with dubious legal rights and produced 'King Kong vs Godzilla', a movie so bad that even at the age of eight I was appalled at the atrocity. Dino de Laurentiis did the pretty bad 1976 remake, complete with a leading man with more hair than the giant ape, plus Kong made a leap from one of the Twin Towers to the other, unfortunate in hindsight. Peter Jackson did a Kong for the new millennium, but unfortunately showed only his shortcomings as a director, producing a movie that was spectacular in any individual scene but numbing in overall effect. At least his heart was in the right place.

The recent 'Kong; Skull Island' was a blast, a fun action adventure that made a great popcorn movie. It had none of the resonance of the original, but it didn't try to, instead bringing in the Vietnam war as the subtext. It's all part of a plan to get Kong to square off with Godzilla, and I'm down with that, since it will be nice mindless destruction. But the bigger Kong gets, the more removed from being a sexual threat he becomes.

And sex does play a big part. 'King Kong' borrowed a good deal of plot from 'The Lost World', but no dinosaur can pose the kind of threat that a thirty foot dark ape beast can, no matter how fetching Raquel Welsh's fur bikini may be. Kong stomped into gender, racial and sexual politics on such a grand scale that he became iconic, while the hidden symbolism was missed by most of the general public at the same time. It was closest to a retelling of the 'Beauty & the Beast' story, a myth for the modern age. This is how we find a way to live with ourselves over the sins of our fathers.