This
is going to come off sounding dismissive, and I apologize, but I didn’t really care
for King Kong. That is not to underestimate its importance
as one of the first uses of stop motion animation and rear projection with live
action. I mean, we’ve got a big-budget
movie (Frankenweenie) coming out this
week that is stop-motion, so the technology hasn’t gone away, and how many other
things from 1933 can you say that about?
There
have been two notable remakes of King
Kong, in 1976 and 2005 (sorry, that one was called Peter Jackson’s King Kong).
I haven’t seen the 1976 version, and the 2005 version was so forgettable
that all I can come up with from my memory is that I was wondering why Adrian
Brody was in it (answer: getting paid,
because independent film pays squat) and being inundated with lots and lots of
post-Gandalf CGI. Fuck CGI. Get some puppets and entertain me, Peter
Jackson.
Anyway,
the one thing that sticks out in my mind from the 1933 version is Robert
Armstrong. A few weeks after watching King Kong, I watched a movie called The Mystery Man (1935), which was a
strange bird of a movie where he plays a newpaper reporter named Larry
Doyle. He breaks a big story and then
sort of runs away from the paper after getting a raise and lots of praise but
then insulting his boss after getting drunk.
He ends up in St. Louis and meets this girl, Anne. They are both broke at a coffee shop at the
train station, and he devises this really kooky (there’s a word I don’t get to
use often) scheme for the two of them to pretend they are newlyweds so they can
get the honeymoon suite at a ritzy hotel (recall this is in the middle of the
Great Depression). On the story he
broke, the police had given him, as a show of appreciation, a gun. Doyle hocks the gun in order to try to get
money to buy food, and the gun is used in a crime. Implicated, he tries to solve the crime and
break the story. It was such a far-out,
weird-assed, implausible plot with awkwardly-contrived twists and turns that I
kept watching (and it was only an hour and two minutes) just to see what sort
of lunacy would come next. Just
weirdness after weirdness, like listening to a five-year-old make up a story as
he goes along.
There’s
also the intrinsic racism that exists in early cinema where white man goes to
Africa or thereabouts and deals with the Unga-Bungas. Really makes me appreciate Paul Robeson and
the fact that he starred in a
movie two years earlier. And of course
the sexism of the era where woman equals stupid and/or sex object and/or victim,
which makes me appreciate Joan Crawford a little
bit more (but not much). Denham’s
assertion at the end that it was “beauty killed the beast” is an awkward one to
unpack. So Kong was attracted to Ann? Er … that’s
all kinds of wrong. Kong eats
people. He didn’t eat or kill her, and
protected her when all the other dinosaurs were out to get her. So what was Kong’s end game? Oh, boy.
But
what is fun is some crackerjack lines, the kind that are pretty much every line
of The Thin Man. No one writes like that anymore. That is a redeeming quality of a lot of these
early movies – intelligent writing.
Critics are all stuck on the decline of the romantic comedy (not that King Kong is one), but that’s because it’s
either too bawdy or low-brow. You don’t
have to make fart jokes to be funny, and I don’t know anyone who makes them to
be romantic. It’s the writing, the
mental sparring and tango before the two people get together. You need writers for that.
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