Rating 4/4

King Kong is the most influential movie monster put on screen save for perhaps Godzilla. Every child knows who Kong is even if they haven’t seen the movie. He’s on lunchboxes, been made into toys, and is even the namesake of a beloved Nintendo video game character. Kong is also one of the earliest icons in the pantheon of Hollywood heroes and villains preceded by only a few like Dracula and Frankenstein. Whole books could be written about his cultural impact and importance without bothering to even discuss the film itself.

The 1933 classic is a technically impressive spectacle achieved in a time when computer visual effects were wholly nonexistent. Despite their outdatedness the effects in this film required more talent and creativity than can be found in the average VFX artist working on movies today. Lacking the tools and software of the modern era the movie-magicians of 1933 pushed stop-motion animation to its limits alongside other techniques such as matte painting, rear screen projection, and composite shots. The images put on screen are truly a marvel for the time and what I find even more impressive than the effects achieved is the restraint put into their use by the filmmakers. What too often was the case for later b-movies produced in the following decades was an exploitative use of special effects that failed to impress their audiences but succeeded in providing insight into the films’ budgets.
Stop-motion pioneers Willis H. O’Brien (Harryhausen’s future mentor) and Buzz Gibson and cinematographer Frank D. Williams had a firm grasp on the limitations of the methods they were using. When the characters are attacked by a brontosaurus it’s introduced in the background rising out of the water under low-key lighting and masked in mist. All of the stop-motion effects in King Kong are shot in varying degrees of distance and never in close-up. For close-up shots of Kong a full-sized mechanical model of his head and shoulders was used.
Williams achieved the composite sequences of the actors seemingly performing in front of the monsters by using an optical printer to combine the animation, matte paintings, and actors in the foreground into a single shot. The result is staggering, and although it looks nothing like we can achieve on computers today; it took more imagination and broke more ground than what’s being done now which is largely safe, patented, and takes no risks. The last time computer effects succeeded in impressing me was back in 2009.

The film was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Shoedsack, who already had experience with monkeys when filming silent documentaries like Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927) and Rango (1930). The trashy bestiality themed film Ingagi (1930) born out of the trends set by these pictures was enough of an exploitative hit that it was largely based on its success that RKO provided financial backing for King Kong.

The film’s lead is a documentarian jungle filmmaker named Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) who casts Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) to add sex appeal to his next picture; something his critics had found lacking. She is taken to the infamous Skull Island where Denham wants to capture footage of the big ape. She is kidnapped by the natives who want to sacrifice her to Kong. Instead he becomes infatuated with her. Denham makes frequent allusions to Beauty and the Beast interpreting beauty as the beast’s only weakness and cause for eventual downfall. This becomes realized when the woman is rescued and Kong goes apeshit (if you’ll pardon the expression) and attacks the natives’ village. He wrecks their homes, stomps on anyone and everything, and brutally chows down on the locals. Tame by today’s standards, much of the violence in this film is decidedly brutal for 1933 and would not be seen in mainstream cinema again for many years after the Hays Code was adopted by Hollywood a year later. In one earlier scene Kong battles a T-Rex also brought to life by stop-motion. The fight ends with a victorious Kong ripping apart the dinosaur’s jaw with dripping gore and gruesome cracking sounds added for good measure.

After Carl Denham gases Kong what follows is cinema history. He’s showcased at a fair in Manhattan only to break loose and terrorize the city. His climb up the Empire State Building with Ann in tow and being shot by airplanes is an iconic image achieving a fame scarcely less than that that of famous real-world photographs. Denham’s exclamation after Kong’s death, “No, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast,” is equally iconic.

The film was a massive success and a sequel was rushed into production and released the same year called Son of Kong. He also became the subject of two Japanese kaiju films of the 60s in one of which he fought the legendary Godzilla. King Kong was remade twice in 1976 and then in 2005 and later became a key player in the now ongoing MonsterVerse series of films. None of these later pictures were as innovative as this one. King Kong tried and succeeded in doing things that had never been done before. I don’t think it would hurt much if more blockbusters coming out nowadays tried doing the same.

Now something should be said about the more problematic elements in the film that have aged even worse than the effects. I will not deny that these elements are there and I am not going to defend them. The movie is explicitly sexist and racist in many of its themes and dialogue. Ann Darrow is not a character, but a plot point to simultaneously titillate the camera and provide abysmal commentary on women’s roles. When she is being held terrified by Kong Ann doesn’t hesitate to pose in a way that brings more attention to her legs than a woman in peril actually would. She is also subject to condescension and patronizing from the crew which she takes with only marginal protest and the most sexist character in the film becomes her love interest. The island’s natives are presented as superstitious savages and virtually no anthropological and social interest is taken in them in the film’s script.
I believe the film’s historical context should be explained before being shown to younger views. I don’t think cutting these elements out for later releases is appropriate and is as damaging to it artistically as colorizing it was in 1989. I am quite fond of what Disney Plus has been doing by presenting its older films with these elements unedited with a mere disclaimer that explains that these attitudes are outdated and are as wrong then as they are now. Much of our accomplishments in art and literature is sadly mired by these issues and I think we as a society have matured enough to look at them and accept them for what they are without resorting to censorship and erasure. Looking at it I can praise the film for its accomplishments and condemn it for its flaws.
King Kong like any piece of art is several things. It’s an entertaining adventure story reminiscent of the works of H. Rider Haggard and Burroughs. It’s a special effects pioneer. And it’s a sad document of 1930’s sexual and racial attitudes. It is not an ethical failing to praise a film for its high points while also condemning its low ones.