Those are interesting. The Time magazine appears to ber citing the full-size head and upper torso that was built, and used in shots of Kong munching on people (most of which were cut in the late thirties, but have since been restored) and when, for instance, Kong first appears. Just before Fay Wray screams, you get a close-up of the giant head framed by greenery. As Schoedsack demonstrated to Cooper (or was it the other way around – one of them was against the making of the head), it was extremely effective. But its total on-screen time can be measured in seconds. Almost all of Kong’s shots in the movie are of one of the miniatures, which were covered (IIRC) in rabbit skin., not bearskin.
The Variety review is interesting not only for the audience reactions, but because it says that the first dinosaur encountered is a triceratops with which Kong fights. as a viewer of the film uncountable times, I can state that there is no triceratops in the film. (There was a styracosaurus in the film, but it ended up on the cutting room floor, except possibly for a test screening). The first dinosaur encountered is a stegosaur, which Denham and his men fight, not Kong.*
The article also seems to suggest that the movie used a man in an ape suit (“The errors arrive when mechanical figures are obviously used in place of the ape impersonator.”) As Orville Goldner says in The Making of King Kong, they never used an actor in an ape suit in the making of the film. Other magazine articles of the time suggested this, too – Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland back in the 1960s reproduced a two-=page spread from a science and technology magazine article detailing how the Man in the Ape SUit was shot to appear realistic. Ackerman, the eternal buff, pointed out how no ape-suited men were used in the film, and noting that the obituary of hollywood ape-man Charles Gemora stated that he had “played King Kong” – which was patently untrue. Goldner and Turner’s book give further examples.
So apparently the reviewer for Variety thought it was mechanical when he caught it, and an actor the other times. But it was always an animated armature, except for the handful of shots of the full-sized head and shoulders.
*IIRC, the novelization (which came out in the 30s) by Delos W. Lovelace has Kong fighting a triceratops. So does the Gold Key comic adaptation from the 1960s. In the Direector’s cut of the recent Peter Jackson film, the first dinosaur Denham’s men encounter is, indeed., a Triceratops. I suspect that Kong buff Jackson – who read the same Famous Monsters issues I had, and i’ll bet the Goldner and Turner book, too – deliberately put it in because of these inaccurate reviews.