KING KONG (1933)
- Thread starter FalTorPan
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It's one of the great adventure films.
This is such a cool movie. I wish big budget blockbusters were still made with as much panache and simple perfection as this. I still think the primitive stop motion effects in this flick look way better and cooler than a lot of modern CGI.
I love the bit where Kong throws the 'rex over his shoulder. Amazing stuff.
Sometimes I wonder, though... the remakes have portrayed Kong as a giant gorilla, but the original doesn't look much like a gorilla at all, and I don't think they ever said he was. So were the designers of Kong just totally ignorant of actual gorilla anatomy (which is certainly possible for the time), or was Kong really intended to be more a sort of Gigantopithecus?
...mine is when he reaches down and flicks the Rex's broken lower jaw a couple of times lol. Very monkey-like.
I'm sure people living in 1933 had seen pictures of gorillas. I mean certainly they had Wikipedia back then, right?
Kidding aside, I'd chalk it up to just simple "movie fudging of reality" due to restrictions in costuming, physical movements of a human actor, restrictions in the stop-motion puppets, etc. They probably did the "best they could" to make Kong as "ape/gorilla like" as possible. We could probably look at any number of movies of the same time period and wonder if the movie makers didn't know about what should've been a common fact.
The origional Kong is, indeed, a classic.
It's a classic, all right, though it does have a bit too much running and screaming (especially screaming) for my tastes. And I would have liked to see the crew react with just a bit of wonder at finding dinosaurs alive and well. A very impressive achievement for its time, no question, but not a perfect film either.
In the 1933 film, the only time Kong MAY have been played by a costumed actor was in the long shot of him climbing the Empire State Building. His movement in that shot seems a bit too fluid for stop-motion. In all other scenes, Kong was portrayed by an 18-inch stop-motion miniature, as well as a life-size head and shoulders, foot, and articulated hand and arm.
I'm sure people living in 1933 had seen pictures of gorillas. I mean certainly they had Wikipedia back then, right?
Kidding aside, I'd chalk it up to just simple "movie fudging of reality" due to restrictions in costuming, physical movements of a human actor, restrictions in the stop-motion puppets, etc. They probably did the "best they could" to make Kong as "ape/gorilla like" as possible. We could probably look at any number of movies of the same time period and wonder if the movie makers didn't know about what should've been a common fact. The origional Kong is, indeed, a classic.
The creators of King Kong had experience making jungle documentaries and certainly knew what a real gorilla looked like. They intended Kong to be a sort of hybrid gorilla-human fantasy creature, rather than a realistic gorilla. In fact, some early design sketches of Kong were rejected because they looked too human.
Fay Wray's nearly constant screaming was done intentionally, since her character was portrayed by a stop-motion puppet so much of the time. The screams helped the audience believe Kong had an actual girl in his giant hand instead of an animated doll.
BTW, Fay Wray did all her own screaming. She spent one day in a studio recording booth doing various screams, which were later dubbed onto the soundtrack. In fact, she was such a good screamer that her screams were used in other RKO movies for actresses who didn't quite have Ms. Wray's lung power!
Haven't seen it in yeeeeeeaaaaarrrrrrrs. Thanks for the recommendation. On the to do list in goes...
The original King Kong is one of my top five films of all time. Great cast (especially Fay Wray 
) and beautiful scenery and special effects. It's almost as flawless as Casablanca.
) and beautiful scenery and special effects. It's almost as flawless as Casablanca.Yeah, I always figured he was some completely unknown species rather than a giant gorilla.
Actually, Peter Jackson's 2005 film is the only one in which Kong was a supersized but anatomically correct gorilla. In fact, as played by ape-suited Rick Baker stomping around miniature sets, walking upright on two legs and making no attempt to imitate the locomotion or behavior of real gorillas, Kong ’76 was even less gorilla-like than Kong ’33.
That's what I thought. I think the remakes have goofed by treating him as just an oversized gorilla rather than a new, oversized species of hominid.
That's not the impression I got when I saw the '76 film not too long ago. Allowing for the limitations of execution that one would expect from the period and the techniques involved, it's clear to me that the intent was to represent Kong as a gigantic gorilla. In fact, I'm fairly sure there was dialogue to that effect. But the 1933 Kong, as you remarked above, was not specifically meant to be an oversized version of an existing great ape species, but rather some kind of ape-man or missing link. The '76 Kong tried to be a gorilla and didn't quite make it, whereas the '33 Kong wasn't trying to be a gorilla in the first place. That's the distinction I'm drawing.
Yeah, it was a fantastic portrayal of a gigantic gorilla. I'm just saying that I think the remake creators have misunderstood that the original Kong was supposed to be something else.
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