King Kong plays several times a year on Turner Classic Movies. They also have documentaries on Merian Cooper and the making of the film. I don’t recall precisely, but they either ran the entire film Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life, or clips of it, Cooper’s first film. His biography is impressive.
I think I’ve only seen the 1933 original once, in a TV rebroadcast around the time the Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange remake came out. I’ve seen excerpts from it a dozen or so times. I remember thinking it was quaint and the sfx were laughable, but for its time it was pretty good. I sort of liked each of the Kong movies in different ways, but none are on my personal Top Ten or even Top Fifty movie lists, and I’m in no hurry to see any of them again.
It is indeed. If you get a chance, read Goldner and Turner’s The Making of King Kong. (The boook has been reprinted in an incomplete form in recent yearsm, under a different title). Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack really did the life of Carl Denham. going out into the wild and shooting the films in the mountains and jungles. Grass was basically a documentary, shot on location. The backer of the film (a feisty woman whose own bio would be an interesting read) insisted on going along as well as they filmed the migration that forms the basis of the film. She wasn’t abducted by a giant ape, but she DID break her tooth on the rock-hard bread the natives ate.
The genius of the imagery, though, was Willis O’Brien and his crew. They had already made The Lost World and were working on the never-finished Creation, a lot of which ended up in King Kong. Cooper’s original idea was to use real gorillas and Komodo dragons. If they’d done that, and it worked enough to get a film out of, the result would be a curiosity only known to film historians. O’Brien made it a pop culture phenomenon.
Yep. Seen it.
Coincidentally, three years earlier, there was a movie Ingagi, which also featured a gorilla-worshipping jungle tribe that sacrificed women to him. No indication that Cooper and Wallace were familiar with this movie, but ya never know. This gorilla was apparently normal sized, but since I’ve never seen the movie, I can’t attest to that.
No, but you could probably ask that about any movie and my answer would be “no.”
I’ve seen it several times, but only on tv. Great stuff.
I liked the Peter Jackson one well enough when I saw it in the cinema but I’ve only watched fragments of it since and I finally saw the Jeff Bridges one recently and thought it was dreadful!
I’ve seen it a few times, including once in a theatre.
It was I’ve heard of the film, but not seen it. There was also a comedy, otherwise unrelated, called Son of Ingagi that came out later.
There are several things that have been suggested as inspirations for Kong, including an H. Rider Haggard story, and the part of Gulliver’s Travels where Gulliver is captured by the Brobdingnagian mokey and taken up on the roof. There’s no evidence that Cooper and Schoedsack were familiar with any of them. The plot of Kong strongly resembles one of their earlier films with a Mystery Animal (which turns out to be a baby elephant)
I’m 38 and I’ve only seen it relatively recently (on TV), probably around the time the 2005 remake came out. It holds up pretty well. I probably had the opportunity to watch it on TV as a kid, but the idea of watching old monster movies didn’t grab me at the time.
Loved it. Even after all these years, it still holds up. I’ll watch it every chance I get.
I’ve seen it several times. The best was with my overly-sensitive ex, who had to leave the room in horror when the ape was abused . . . not even at the good part yet.
It took me until I was in college that I was able to see it; WOR didn’t run it at any particular time and it wasn’t until I was home in the summer when they ran it in August late at night.* Loved it at the time.
I went back to it more recently, and it held up beautifully. A truly great film.
*The same time frame they ran It’s a Wonderful Life, which is why I never considered it a Christmas movie.
You’re a lot older than I thought.
It would be on for a whole week at a time, every weekday night and several times in a row on weekends. When I was a kid, I watched it as many times as I possibly could. I’ve probably seen it 50 times. I also saw the restored version once in a theater when they reissued it in the 1970s.
I saw it in the run-up to the 2005 film. I liked it more then I thought I would. Pretty incredible how well they did the “creatures” given the tech and budget limitations of the time.
(I really liked the 2005 version as well).
Its a blast to watch this old classic. The “natives” of skull island are a hoot-they look like the usual extras in blackface. Not too much atention paid to their “language” though!
Fay Wray can really faint on command! Technically, the animation was pretty good for 1933-did it really scare kids back then?
The modern remakes are worthless.
I’ve seen the original, the 1976 de Laurentiis-produced remake and the '05 Peter Jackson remake; all on TV. Odd, since I’m not really a giant ape fan, or fan of giant apes.
The original isn’t exactly one of my all-time favorite flicks, but IMO it stands as an early icon of the vast potential of film to show us things that couldn’t have been shown effectively in another entertainment form. Neither of the later films seem to add much of anything to the premise, other than more sophisticated special effects. Even there, I give the original extra credit for accomplishing as much as it did with the primitive effects tools available to the filmmakers, sort how I’m more impressed with the abilities of a B-17 bomber than a modern jetliner.
I do have to say that I have a strange attraction to the female leads in all three films. Fay Wray, Jessica Lange, and Naomi Watts: rowwrr.
According to the Goldner and Turner book (and other sources), people did react to Kong, with women fainting at the Roxy. We’ve become more used to these things, and jaded.
I disagree about “not too much attention being paid to the language”. The studio demanded “translations” of the language, to ensure that it wasn’t obscene, or something. It does appear to be used consistently, and IIRC uses genuine bits of languages from the South Pa cific/indonesian region. Ruth Rose, the major scriptwriter*, was Schoendsack’s wife, and had gone with them on some of their shoots. The language isn’t merely random shouting. Some excerpts are printed in Goldner and Turner, and some DVDs transliterate it.
*Officially there were several writers. Edgar Wallce, the first credited, was ca major mystery writer of the time. It’d be as if Peter Jackson had Stephen King write the screenplay for his remake. Unfortunnsately, Wallace came out to Hollywood to write the script, caught pneumonia, and died. He didn’t actually contribute much. James Creelman’s next effort was too slow-moving and talky. It was largely Ruth Rose’s version that got to the screen.
33-- can’t remember when I first saw it. Probably on AMC or TCM. I definitely taped it off tv (as well as “Son of Kong”)from one of those channels.
Loved it when I first saw it as a kid; love it now, decades later. I’ll drop by and watch it whenever I happen to see that it’s playing. Especially if I’m in time for the whole abduction of Fay Wray - tied to the altar – bang the gong – arrival of Kong scene, which is absolutely breathtaking and spellbinding.
If I turned on my signature, you would see that it reads “O tara vay, rama Kong”.
The Peter Jackson remake is ok…but the thing I loved about it: the theater scene, where they stage a “recreation” of the native village, with music and choreography, looks nothing like the village that we saw earlier in the movie. It is, though, a complete recreation of the 1933 version, with the same costumes and music.