By now, reviewing King Kong is kind of pointless. The details of plot and characterization are familiar to millions who have not even seen the original film, and its conclusion has been copied and referenced so many times that it has come to feel more obligatory than revolutionary. But as the distance we look back to see its 1933 premiere grows greater and greater, so too does the film’s at once majestic and concise vision of primal aggression. In a cinema that frequently seems obsessed with exploring different modes of male hierarchy and how they are enforced, there has yet to be a better expression of singular power than of Kong standing astride the Empire State Building, shaking his fists in the air and roaring defiantly at a more complicated world that it won’t take him down by wits alone.
Carl Denham (Bruce Cabot) is a out to get the biggest story in the world, and he’s smart enough to know that when he finds it, watching it through a camera lens just won’t be enough for the audiences in New York. Based on nothing but the terrified ramblings of a sailor, he sets sail with a film crew towards Skull Island, armed with everything from gas bombs to blond street urchin Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), just in case his mysterious target can’t be baited by normal means. But once on Skull Island , he and Jack Driscoll (Robert Armstrong) find a primitive colony ruled over by a giant gorilla referred to only as Kong. As a fighting force, Kong proves stronger than any man that faces him, but he has one vulnerable flaw: his love (?) of Darrow, whose blond locks throw Kong into a protective frenzy as he struggles to keep his greatest prize from dinosaurs, men, and the inevitable truth that the world outside Skull Island might be a mountain too big to scale.
Chinua Achebe once criticized Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for characterizing the Africans in the novel as but a mere extension of the jungle’s lawlessness, and a similar claim could (and has) been made about King Kong. The film’s depiction of its native islanders (replete with unkempt hair and grass skirts) will probably horrify many modern viewers, and the film’s tacit association of black men and gorillas (Kong’s lust for a blond woman all but solidifies it) don’t do it any favors either. But to interpret Kong’s world solely as a reflex of Hollywood racism would be to underestimate it: it’s simply the hungriest, least tamed environment on the face of the Earth, set loose from the restrictions that allow any one but the strong to survive. And Kong is the undisputed ruler of that world, as ruthless in his ascent to power as Vito Corleone, and just as forceful in the way that he rules. Skull Island may seem like a dark ‘other’ to the more familiar New York, but it is really just a carbon copy, with sharper and more imposing angles. If the film-makers really had any contempt for Kong or the natives, they wouldn’t have regarded the ape's exploits with the lingering adulation that indicates both admiration and envy, or stressed that, more than anything, you just shouldn't mess with the big ape (which the witch doctors figured out long before any one else did).
In that respect, several clear parallels can be drawn between Kong and later gangster films, particularly 1983’s Scarface, perhaps the only film to seriously rival this one in the hedonistic adandon with which it revels in the ability of a character to do whatever he wants all the time (only to be brought crashing down again). The difference, of course, is that Scarface and other films of its kind take place in a somewhat realistic world (emphasis on the somewhat), whereas Kong takes place in a world where dinosaurs and giant apes have managed to survive in an entirely self-contained ecosystem for millions of years. But therein lies the promise of fantasy and genre fiction, and the reason that it is frequently more indelible than entries in more respectable genres: it can cut out the interim between what people feel and how they see it, and realize it more fully. As effective and imposing as Charles Foster Kane standing in front that giant poster of himself was, sooner or later you just have to come around to the fact that it’s just not the same as a giant ape standing on top of the tallest building in the world. The idea's the same, but at the end of the day, it's difficult to say that they're on par in terms of pure gumption.
If that seems like too many words to say that King Kong is cooler than Citizen Kane because it has a giant gorilla in it, it's only because the film doesn’t need to be spoken for. It lets its fists do the talking. There have been many very good films to try to tell the same story that Kong does, and one might argue that they’re better. It’d be hard to argue however, that any of them conveyed the breadth of their themes with the same directness that Kong does, if only because of the creative limits that they set for themselves. Kong doesn’t recognize limits. He smashes them.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Aside from a handsomely put together book set that makes extensive use of original release artwork, the disc also features test footage from Creation, a cancelled film that nevertheless tested a good number of stop-motion techniques that were later utilized in King Kong, as well as the complete recreation of the lost spider sequence. There are two documentaries: RKO Production 601: The Making of Kong, The Eighth Wonder of the World and I'm King Kong: The Exploits of Merian C. Cooper, a theatrical trailer, and a feature commentary by Ray Harryhausen & Ken Ralston with Fay Wray and Merian C. Cooper.
"King Kong" is on sale September 28, 2010 and is not rated. Adventure, Horror. Directed by Ernest B Schoedsack, Merian C Cooper. Written by Ruth Rose, James Ashmore Creelman, Edgar Wallace, Merian C. Cooper. Starring Bruce Cabot, Fay Wray, Frank Reicher, Robert Armstrong.
