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: NOW PLAYING :: CINEASTE :: All Things Kong-sidered Peter Jackson’s King Kong is the movie as megachurch, where the faithful can gather to pay homage to the great ape. The devotional objects floated in from Skull Island to my Cineaste inbox for several weeks, and, being a lifelong cultist, I picked up a few more, much as I had done when the 1976 remake appeared. Then, it was model kits, a stuffed Kong (which I still own), and a scholarly collection of attractively illustrated essays, The Girl in the Hairy Paw, one of which asked the question, “How Big is Kong’s Penis?”—which did not cross my 11-year-old mind, though thinking about it the absence of one may account for his grumpiness in his various incarnations since 1933. Today, with promotional excess that would shame Carl Denham, I was sent, purchased, or gifted with the following, much of it stamped “Official Movie Merchandise”: A novelization of the remake’s screenplay (“Ann focused on just breathing…her initial terror had been sublimated by the primal need to survive”); a novelized prequel to the new film, The Island of the Skull; the inevitable The Making of King Kong (05); The World of Kong, a sensationally illustrated faux natural history from Jackson’s design team at Weta Digital; a new essay collection, Kong Unbound, with contributions from Ray Bradbury, Michael Chabon, and Maurice Sendak; and Ray Morton’s info-monster King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon, a study of Kong in all his guises. Our winter issue already corralled Mark Vaz’s Living Dangerously: The Adventures of Merian C. Cooper, Creator of King Kong. Making the longest journey was Kiss of the Beast, the exhibition guide to a program about wild animals and wilder movie beasts presented by the Australian Cinematheque at the Queensland Art Gallery. And, oh, yes, a tin of Topps trading cards and a Kong-faced collector’s Coke cup, with the slogan “Make it Real.” Make it real. The achievement of the new Kong and its death knell. I’ve had my agnostic ups-and-downs with Kong, notably in December 1986, when I found myself alone in a theater showing the unbelievably shoddy King Kong Lives, and decided that I should grow up and spend more time with Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson. (Don’t remember King Kong`Lives? It’s the one where producer Dino De Laurentiis and director John Guillermin, unsatisfied with the damage they wrought 10 years earlier, returned Kong from the dead with an artificial heart, with blood supplied by a newly discovered Lady Kong. They have a baby son. Played a week.) But movie lovers bitten by the Kong bug can’t stay away for too long. The ’76 version followed me to a stint in Hong Kong, where it showed continuously on one of the two English-language TV stations, much as the original was a year-round staple on New York’s Channel 9 until the mid-1980s, with a holiday helping of Kong, The Son of Kong (1933), and Mighty Joe Young (1949) every Thanksgiving. Laserdiscs of the first two films helped salve the pain inflicted by their evil twins. The rift healed by 1999, when Fay Wray appeared at Manhattan’s Film Forum, to talk about Erich Von Stroheim’s The Wedding March (1928), her favorite film. The Q&A led, of course, to Kong, and I was entranced, my faith restored. I was ready to enter Jackson’s church, as his take is very much a shrine to Kong, but found the pews emptier than expected. “There’s not a lot of us left,” muses legendary stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen of the Kong faithful at the close of the commentary track that accompanies the new DVD of the original classic—and given boxoffice returns that were more chimp than gorilla, in relation to its $207 million cost, Universal executives may be inclined to agree. There will be no new converts. In his early 70s, Kong is dead. His sendoff is at times glorious, and a fitting tribute for all whom he inspired in their love of film, and he is sure to have a prosperous afterlife in the ancillary markets. But his hold over our imagination, the spell he cast, is broken. To get to the end of his story, we start at the beginning. Whatever you think of remakes, there’s nothing like them to stir studio interest in reviving their ancestors, and it’s on DVD where King Kong truly lives. The two-disc Kong set, with a mammoth 158-minute (!) documentary about the making of the film produced by Jackson, is the starting point of our journey. But there will be sidetrips, too—the road to Kong ’05 also brought us, on DVD, The Son of Kong and Mighty Joe Young, the American versions of the Toho films King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) and King Kong Escapes (1967), and a reissue of the 1976 remake. (You can continue your Kong studies, solo, with tangential curiosities like 1961’s Konga, from Britain, and the 1977 Hong Kong fantasy The Mighty Peking Man). This is the story of a legend: How it rises and falls, and comes, finally, to rest. In 1933…no, to the beginning. Also on DVD are Grass (1925) and Chang (1927), the two famous silents, produced by Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, that lead right to their Kong. The intrepid filmmakers journeyed to places like Persia, Siam, and Abyssinia before they were Iran, Thailand, and Ethiopia in search of exotic, exciting travelogues, but Cooper felt that, despite their pains, they had come up short on the first adventure, the story of a nomadic tribe’s trek for grassland. In a career-length audio interview with film historian Rudy Behlmer, conducted in 1965, that is used as a supplement on Grass and is the Rosetta Stone for all subsequent Kong-related audio commentaries on DVD, Cooper, feeling the audience needed an identification figure, laments not telling the story through the eyes of the Persians themselves. The improved Chang, with its potpourri of factual and staged incidents, concentrates on a Siamese family that miraculously survives every catastrophe that Cooper puts them through, including a roiling elephant stampede that Jackson recycles for his Kong, with brontosaurs. The first Kong, a blend of made-up travelogue and man-and-monster drama, is itself full of borrowings. Robert Armstrong’s ballyhooing Denham, is, of course, Cooper, minus the Florida drawl, and free of his personal code of ethics, which Behlmer elaborates on the Chang disc as “not interfering with native customs, not fooling around with the native women, and always cleaning up after themselves.” (The women were safe.) Less well-known is that the rocky professional relationship between the restless Schoedsack and the more contemplative Marguerite Harrison, a reporter and third member of the Grass team, was used by co-screenwriter Ruth Rose (Schoedsack’s spouse) to give the shipboard romance between Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot, a dead ringer for Schoedsack) and Ann Darrow (“the incomparable Fay Wray,” as the final, tribute credit in the new Kong calls her) a little backbone. I used to find it a stilted pairing, but was surprised that it played as more believably amorous than the coy, out-of-date love taps traded by dewy-eyed, bubble-headed Jessica Lange and hippie paleontologist Jeff Bridges in 1976 and the unrequited yen that Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody’s Driscoll have for each other, which can only be consummated the minute after Kong slides off the Empire State Building. Jackson—who pointedly excludes Cabot from the tribute—is so embarrassed by this he-man he splits him into two, making Driscoll a sensitive playwright and a new character, blowhard adventure actor Bruce Baxter (Kyle Chandler) a fraud, allowed a redeeming moment on Skull Island before being sucked back in again to Denham’s circus when it returns to New York. What the remakes can’t duplicate is the biographical touch that makes its predecessor so engaging. (Kong, the King Kong documentary points out, was suggested by the plight of two monitor lizards, a species seen in Chang, that died during exhibition in New York.) The old Kong has several other surprises. Helping to reveal them is a DVD transfer, taken from an intact British print, that is so conscientious, and respectful of the age of the source materials (unlike, say, the new special edition of the 1953 War of the Worlds, whose digitized “improvement” exposes every cyclorama and wire-driven spaceship). In the new documentary How To Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It), Melvin Van Peebles blasts Kong for its racism—whether for its depiction of savage native rituals or its perceived likening of Kong to a ravening black beast lusting after white women, he doesn’t say (conceivably both). Solely in the context of the Kongs to come, however, the 1933 version is respectful, if in no way enlightened (Cooper and Schoedsack packed Victorian-era attitudes in their rucksacks). The chieftain and the witch doctor, enduring movie characters played by Noble Johnson and Steve Clemente, have their own forbidding dignity, and the natives fight for their homes against Kong’s onslaught, which is the direct result of whites tampering with their rites. In most of the remakes and spinoffs, the natives are simply peripheral, disappearing as soon as their Great Wall is breached, or, in Jackson’s film, prehistoric, led by a matriarch barely recognizable as human with her scary, drugged-out eyes. (In the Toho movies, the islanders are played by Japanese actors in brownface, which further muddies the waters). They’re monstrous only in that Denham’s obsessive pursuit of Kong gives them an opening to rework their sacrificial ritual, which ends disastrously. Though loyal to his shipmates, and repentant in the quickie sequel, The Son of Kong, Denham is the real human monster. Vaz’s book pegs Cooper as a racist, and there is something unsettling about the son of Kong, a cute, helpful albino, growing into his dark-furred, seething pop. Seen today, however, Kong is more an idea of a gorilla than an actual specimen, a breed largely misunderstood at that time. And his “human” side is negligible. He is the uncontrollable spirit of the natural world, loosed on the automated one, which is sinking into the savagery of the Great Depression. He is…well, he is whatever you want to project onto him, and if that includes a racial dimension than that is precisely Kong’s particular, disconcerting power. The DVD commentators, preferring to concentrate on the fraternity of its production team, the leitmotifs of Max Steiner’s brilliantly innovative score, and the ageless wizardry of Willis O’Brien’s hand-crafted special effects, never bother to examine the myth, which Harryhausen says would only interest professors, anyway. Whatever you make of Kong in this version, finding sympathy is difficult. Resisting easy domestication, he gobbles down or stomps on the natives, and discards a fair amount of Manhattanites as well. (If you haven’t seen Kong in a while, your eyebrows may shoot up at the havoc he wreaks, in scenes that were cut from prints long before the film reached TV and my consciousness, which has had some trouble absorbing them into my movie memory bank.) Ann clearly doesn’t like him, particularly when Kong tears at her clothes, a scene Cooper intended audiences to find funny, not creepy-sensual. Steiner’s comical underscore bears him out but the image of Kong as a cross-species romance, reinforced by the remakes, has stuck. The reinsertion of the deleted footage shows Kong as a fighter, not a lover—mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Cooper buried the son of Kong, the natives, and Skull Island in the earthquake that ends the sequel. A follow-up film, The Last Days of Pompeii (1935), also on DVD, ends with no less than Jesus Christ tending to a survivor of the volcanic eruption, but Cooper was always happiest with the pagans. For him there was RKO, economically replenished by the proceeds of the two films, to tend to, another war for him to fight from the air, and John Ford to work with. Before turning his attention to the development of Cinerama, however, he and Schoedsack collaborated on the monkeyshines of Mighty Joe Young. Joe, an only somewhat outsized gorilla, is the most lovable creature in the Cooper canon, who offsets his creator’s most despairing vision of mankind. Armstrong again plays the Cooper figure, Max O’Hara, a nightclub czar, an even less reputable job than filmmaker. In Africa to find animals for his latest themed nightclub in Hollywood, O’Hara strikes gold in Jill Young (Terry Moore) and her adopted gorilla friend. Always with a twinkle in his eye, as this is a family picture, he exploits them ruthlessly when they become star attractions at the club, locking Joe in a cage between shows and bamboozling Jill, who, though described as “underage,” begins a grown-up affair with O’Hara’s cowboy animal wrangler, Gregg (Ben Johnson). As they share their first passionate kiss Joe, given alcohol by the club’s awful patrons, goes bananas, and gleefully trashes the joint, in a spectacular sequence that helped win O’Brien (assisted by Harryhausen, who commentates from ringside on the DVD) an Oscar. He wasn’t going to win a humanitarian award; at age 40, just as at age 8, I wanted Joe to pound those postwar lounge-lizard softies into dust, really wallop them, and the movie (much more circumspect about the human toll than Kong, but you get the point) obliges. Joe is redeemed when he saves little kids from a burning orphanage, a spectacularly grim institution, so awful-looking I suspect the tots torched it themselves. It all ends in smiles, back in Africa, where Joe, having picked up a thing or two from his American adventure, now peels his bananas before eating them—a comical touch, but also another sign of corruption. Small wonder that the 1998 remake Disney-fies and tames the storyline, even if Charlize Theron was the most fetching girl ever to cuddle in a hairy paw. The Toho Kongs came about from a deal the studio struck with Universal, which Morton hashes out in his book. Godzilla, a sly satire in its original form, with Kong captured and intended to be used as a pitch-animal for a pharmaceutical company, was cut for the U.S., its continuity held together with scenes of a U.S. newscaster giving monster updates on a global satellite service sponsored by the United Nations. In Escapes, which was based on a popular Japanese cartoon that is also on DVD (there’s no end to it) Kong becomes a full-fledged U.N. peacekeeper, a simian Romeo Dallaire. He thwarts the plans of the nefarious Dr. Who to strip-mine the ultra-destructive “Element X” with the help of his remote-controlled robot duplicate, Mecha-Kong—you can’t make this stuff up—then returns to his island home, presumably to await further instructions for the next combat zone. The man-in-suit Kongs in both movies are laughable but the films are fun, with spritzes of intrigue (Escapes shoehorns two chaste interracial relationships among its human characters), and their faith in the U.N. and the American-identified monster to get the job done is touching 40 less certain years later. But we’re far now from Kong the myth. Cut down in size, given a sunnier disposition and enmeshed in geopolitics, he’d become ordinary, the gorilla in the gray flannel suit, and the hope was that the 1976 remake would restore him to active duty. No such luck; set amidst the Seventies energy crisis, King Kong ’76 suffers from its own energy crisis, everywhere except in John Barry’s savory score. Cineaste’s Paul Arthur calls it the “pre-Syriana” Kong, with Charles Grodin, a ladder-climbing oil company executive without an ounce of showbiz in his soul, alighting to Kong’s home to uncover black gold but, finding only the gorilla, taking him back to New York, figuring he’ll be an even bigger advertising sensation than Tony the Tiger (Lorenzo Semple Jr.’s screenplay has flashes of urban wit). The update fails, by pushing the species-crossed “romance” to the forefront, begging us to love Kong, and because New York lets the beast down so badly. Once mired in the Great Depression, but in the Seventies simply depressed, it’s not much fun watching the man-in-suit ape listlessly batter a graffiti-strewn subway car, or pull himself up the featureless and dull World Trade Center, whatever its post 9/11-resonance. With much of the budget wasted on a full-size Mecha-Kong of its own that never really worked (controversially, the film won a special Oscar for visual effects), the production design is on the cheap; Kong’s island home is as barren as Dogville, and the ape was likely glad to have a shot at a more exciting life in the Big Apple. Maybe Sidney Lumet could have made more of his plight on the mean streets best left to Al Pacino and Robert De Niro in that era. Which brings us to the end of the line for Kong. There is much to applaud in King Kong 05 for Kong lovers, for whom the king of the Rings cycle is our surrogate, spending millions of dollars in a fan’s dream of having another crack at the story, seemingly so perfect for our bits-and-bytes age. The decision to keep the film a period piece is sensible; the design of New York, awesome, so good you wish Kong would get out of the way (even if I have a few qualms about the expenditure of so much capital to recreate poverty, as in Gangs of New York). The in-jokes are largely successful, with Kong’s display in New York to a crowd of swells a bravura encapsulation of the first film’s sacrificial rite. Skull Island teems with dinosaurs, the way we like it, even if their activities are over-elaborated. Admittedly, there is a too-muchness to the film, double the length of the original, and a too-littleness in other areas. Jack Black, an amiable funnyman, never finds the core of Denham and was surely requested to keep it light; maybe only Werner Herzog, with his combination of showmanship and recklessness, could play the part. The new crew of the Venture, seagoing reprobates rather than the loyal confederates of the “moving-picture ship” of 1933, don’t snap into focus. Hayes (Evan Parke), a noble black sailor likely inserted to blunt or balance the stereotypes that linger around Skull Island, is himself a cliché and has an awkwardly handled Huck-and Jim friendship with Jimmy (Jamie Bell), the youngest crewmember. When Hayes is flattened by Kong, you’re clearly meant to feel something at his passing, other than relief that he and Jimmy won’t be discussing Heart of Darkness anymore. But it gets the core relationship just right. Indeed, the film is focused much more on Ann’s emotional journey, from the depths of despair to new roles as friend and protector to Kong and, at that final, shimmery moment atop the Empire State Building (a nod, perhaps, to the Art Deco fantasies of the Astaire-Rogers musicals that were on Cooper’s watch at RKO?) a lover and soulmate to Driscoll. Ann, a fatalist played no-nonsense by Watts, has her spirits lifted by Kong, who responds to her fearlessness. Separated by greenscreens, she and Andy Serkis, cast as Kong in complex motion-capture gear, breach the technological divide and connect, never more so than in a go-for-broke Central Park sequence, a pas de deux on ice that goes on long enough to be thoroughly winning, and not just an embarrassing throwaway moment. The fluidity of effects technology today allows the two to interact believably, unlike 30 years ago, where Lange can clearly be seen positioning herself in Kong’s stiffly mechanical arm, and Bridges, in pursuit of her and Kong, actually says that the search team isn’t looking for “some guy in an ape suit.” There’s no reason for such defensiveness this time and, wisely, given how poorly lines like “you goddamn chauvinist pig ape” went down in 1976, Jackson and his co-screenwriters, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, reduce the Ann-Kong banter to a single, gentle word. When Wray was offered the part of Ann she thought her “tall, dark, and handsome” leading man, then a secret, might be Clark Gable. In their early scenes together, when Kong takes her to his killing ground, the artifacts of past sacrifices left behind, he’s as rough on her as Gable (or Cabot) might have been in a jungle adventure of its period, slapping her over his shoulder and on the ground, treating her like a toy (and a pretty indestructible one at that, but this is pulp fiction). Like a Howard Hawks heroine, she proves herself by standing firm and holding her ground, at first playing dead, then by entertaining him with her vaudeville routines, which he watches with an ape’s sidelong, wary glances. Jackson is a master of the digital world, pixel-perfect as it were—his playful recreation of the lost spider pit sequence from the first film may be the best extra ever put on DVD—just as Cooper was a master of the physical world. Depression/Skull Island And so passes the legend. The unintended consequence is to make Kong, finally, once and for all, a real gorilla. Not a monster, not a monkey, not a romantic figure or tragic outsider or Christ figure or [insert symbol here] but a greatly sized great ape, whom Ann, summoning her inner anthropologist, treats like Dian Fossey. The myth and magic dissipate accordingly. With Kong now a flesh-and-blood animal, the movie likewise has to correspond to a different, more stringent reality. When Kong and Ann were fantasy figures, no one asked, “why is there no wind atop the Empire State Building?” “Isn’t Ann cold in her slip?”—the kinds of things people are asking on internet forums. In a way, audiences who ask these questions might be more at home at Good Night, And Good Luck., but even if you like the new Kong, you have to see their point. On the King Kong and Mighty Joe Young commentary tracks I thought Ken Ralston, a multiple Oscar winner for visual effects, was being disingenuous, and sucking up to the senior Harryhausen by downplaying his own achievements, but I think they were onto something in criticizing computer-generated design. Too much reality is a myth slayer. Kong, the movies, are with us always. Kong, the legend, truly the stuff that dreams are made of, is dead. Long live Kong. Twas beauty killed the beast? No. Twas Silicon Graphics.