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One helluva big monkey
11 December 2005
[indent]Watched King Kong last night - the original 1933 version - and once again I marvelled at how wonderful this film is. Susan, on the other hand, was starring glassy-eyed at the TV and wondering if she could possibly drink enough wine to pass out rather than endure another 10 minutes' worth... (I bought the new 2-DVD set).
Okay, it may be because I first saw this film at an impressionable age (when I still slavered over anything to do with dinosaurs), or it may be because I had a youthful crush on Fay Wray, or even because it was simply such a great idea, this giant ape running amok and trashing New York... but for me this has always been a favourite film. Four out of five stars on my scale.
Sure, by today's standards, it's a bit corny, a little racist and sexist, and the stop-motion animation is, well, not quite up to today's computer-generated high-res 3D modelling animation standards. But this was made 72 years ago. My father was 20 when it came out, younger than I was when the first Star Wars was released. Talkies were still relatively new then (The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, and talkies - especially musicals - dominated Hollywood's output by 1929 but silent films were still being made around the world). It was the year of films like Little Caesar, and Duck Soup by the Marx Brothers. Wonderful stuff, at least by my reckoning.
For me, Hollywood would reach one of its high points by 1939, with such movies as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (one of my top three favourite films)*, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Four Feathers and Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur (okay, it wasn't a GREAT cartoon, but consider the dinosaurs in it...). Hollywood sailed through until 1942 with such classics as Citizen Kane* and Casablanca*, but then the war came in and Hollywood became America's willing propaganda machine, so the quality dropped dramatically until well into the 1950s.
Films in the 1930s and 40s were not without their special effects - but the technology was human, not computerized. The limits of the hardware and the tools put the emphasis on dialogue, plot, cinematography and character. Plus, colour was relatively new, so most films were still in black-and-white, requiring a different approach to visuals and art. Watching these films in B&W is often more moving than anything in today's glorious technicolour. Some - like the Thin Man* series - are just great fun that could not be improved by colour.
King Kong has all the elements of a great story: romance, adventure, challenge, redemption, achievement and the separate epiphanies the characters undergo. It's hampered a bit by the technology, and by the underlying Conan Doyle-Lost World premise, but not enough to lose its appeal, or weaken the basic concept. It's Beauty and the Beast and Cinderalla, a modern fairy tale. At the end, we have sympathy for the great beast because he shows compassion - and perhaps passion - for Anne Darrow. Kong had a heart. And he died for his love.
A new remake is out and I dread it. The last remake, in 1977 was by Dino "Kiss of Death" De Laurentis, and did nothing for anyone involved, except brand them all with the "silly" label. That was followed by a sequel-to-the-remake featuring Linda Hamilton, which I've been fortunate enough to miss. Now Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings' fame has done the latest version (complete with accompanying video game). It'll be the usual spectacular, with great graphics and sound, but frankly I doubt it will present the story with any more intensity or appeal than the original.
Me, I prefer to turn down the lights, pour a glass of wine, and snuggle up with my honey to watch an old classic in its original, than anything I've seen of late from Hollywood.
As a sidebar, there were several scenes missing from the original movie when it was re-released in 1938, cut by the sterner censors of the day even though they had been seen by earlier audiences. They are retained in this original version, although by today's standards they are so mild as to make mock of the attitudes of yesteryear. Kong tramples some natives, chews on an unfortunate New Yorker, and peels Fay Wray's clothes away like a banana skin (giving us a brief view of barely visible breast in the distance that would hardly raise an eyebrow today). Plus, Peter Jackson and his animation crew replicated what they thought the missing "spider chasm" scene could have looked like.
*I'm slowly building a library of the classic films on DVD. These are among my favourites. By the time I have all the ones I like, there will probably be another form of storage technology. I'm still working on encouraging Susan to appreciate my choices... give me a decade or so and I might get somewhere... but I don't think I'll ever get her to agree they're the best films ever made...[/indent]
Okay, it may be because I first saw this film at an impressionable age (when I still slavered over anything to do with dinosaurs), or it may be because I had a youthful crush on Fay Wray, or even because it was simply such a great idea, this giant ape running amok and trashing New York... but for me this has always been a favourite film. Four out of five stars on my scale.
Sure, by today's standards, it's a bit corny, a little racist and sexist, and the stop-motion animation is, well, not quite up to today's computer-generated high-res 3D modelling animation standards. But this was made 72 years ago. My father was 20 when it came out, younger than I was when the first Star Wars was released. Talkies were still relatively new then (The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, and talkies - especially musicals - dominated Hollywood's output by 1929 but silent films were still being made around the world). It was the year of films like Little Caesar, and Duck Soup by the Marx Brothers. Wonderful stuff, at least by my reckoning.
For me, Hollywood would reach one of its high points by 1939, with such movies as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (one of my top three favourite films)*, Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Goodbye Mr. Chips, The Four Feathers and Daffy Duck and the Dinosaur (okay, it wasn't a GREAT cartoon, but consider the dinosaurs in it...). Hollywood sailed through until 1942 with such classics as Citizen Kane* and Casablanca*, but then the war came in and Hollywood became America's willing propaganda machine, so the quality dropped dramatically until well into the 1950s.
Films in the 1930s and 40s were not without their special effects - but the technology was human, not computerized. The limits of the hardware and the tools put the emphasis on dialogue, plot, cinematography and character. Plus, colour was relatively new, so most films were still in black-and-white, requiring a different approach to visuals and art. Watching these films in B&W is often more moving than anything in today's glorious technicolour. Some - like the Thin Man* series - are just great fun that could not be improved by colour.
King Kong has all the elements of a great story: romance, adventure, challenge, redemption, achievement and the separate epiphanies the characters undergo. It's hampered a bit by the technology, and by the underlying Conan Doyle-Lost World premise, but not enough to lose its appeal, or weaken the basic concept. It's Beauty and the Beast and Cinderalla, a modern fairy tale. At the end, we have sympathy for the great beast because he shows compassion - and perhaps passion - for Anne Darrow. Kong had a heart. And he died for his love.
A new remake is out and I dread it. The last remake, in 1977 was by Dino "Kiss of Death" De Laurentis, and did nothing for anyone involved, except brand them all with the "silly" label. That was followed by a sequel-to-the-remake featuring Linda Hamilton, which I've been fortunate enough to miss. Now Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings' fame has done the latest version (complete with accompanying video game). It'll be the usual spectacular, with great graphics and sound, but frankly I doubt it will present the story with any more intensity or appeal than the original.
Me, I prefer to turn down the lights, pour a glass of wine, and snuggle up with my honey to watch an old classic in its original, than anything I've seen of late from Hollywood.
As a sidebar, there were several scenes missing from the original movie when it was re-released in 1938, cut by the sterner censors of the day even though they had been seen by earlier audiences. They are retained in this original version, although by today's standards they are so mild as to make mock of the attitudes of yesteryear. Kong tramples some natives, chews on an unfortunate New Yorker, and peels Fay Wray's clothes away like a banana skin (giving us a brief view of barely visible breast in the distance that would hardly raise an eyebrow today). Plus, Peter Jackson and his animation crew replicated what they thought the missing "spider chasm" scene could have looked like.
*I'm slowly building a library of the classic films on DVD. These are among my favourites. By the time I have all the ones I like, there will probably be another form of storage technology. I'm still working on encouraging Susan to appreciate my choices... give me a decade or so and I might get somewhere... but I don't think I'll ever get her to agree they're the best films ever made...[/indent]
