King Kong (1933 film)
King Kong is a 1933 American adventure film directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot as actors. main. The film was produced by the film company RKO Pictures and written by Ruth Rose and James Ashmore Creelman, based on an idea by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace.
It is about the discovery of Kong, a giant gorilla, on a lost prehistoric island and how he was captured and brought back to civilization against his will.
In 1932, a year before the film's release, Delos W. Lovelace published a novelization of the King Kong script, with some scenes not present in the film. King Kong was first performed in New York on March 7, 1933, at Radio City Music Hall.
Plot
Film director Carl Denham searches for a girl for his new movie, but none of his tastes turn up. When he decides to look for her personally, he finds Ann Darrow, a stage actress unemployed because of the crisis of 1929, and convinces her to go with him on a ship. Shortly after, they sail aboard the Venture, where they sail for several weeks towards Indonesia, where Denham wanted to make the film.
Finally, when they arrive at the location chosen for the filming, Denham reveals his purpose to Englehorn, captain of the Venture: the destination of the trip is an island that does not appear on the maps, Calavera Island, where there is a mysterious being called Kong, whom he wants to film.
Upon reaching the island, they discover a native village and realize that there is a wall that separates the village from most of the island. Although Denham, Englehorn and Ann hide in the foliage, they are discovered by the chief of the tribe. The captain, who understands the Aboriginal language, tries to get Denham to befriend her chief, and when he sees Ann, he proposes to trade her for six tribal women. The director rejects the proposal and the aborigines decide to go to the ship at night to kidnap the girl; when the crew members realize it, they go in search of it.
In the village, the natives perform a ritual to call their idol Kong and give Ann to him as a sacrifice; the crew arrives in time to stop it and shoots the aborigines to flight, but Kong manages to take the girl and they have to chase them through the prehistoric jungle behind the wall. The crew, following Kong's trail, are attacked and chased by a sauropod dinosaur and have to cross a cliff via a bridge. Kong notices the pursuit and blows down the bridge, leaving only two crew members surviving: John Driscoll, who had hidden in a cave between the cliff walls, and Carl Denham, who remained in the village.
Kong begins to develop a strange attraction to Ann and has to fight off a T-rex that attacks her. So the gorilla and the girl head to a cave to rest, and Driscoll follows them there. Driscoll accidentally knocks over a rock and catches Kong's eye, but at that moment, Ann is attacked by a pterosaur and the gorilla confronts it. While he is distracted, John takes the opportunity to go down a liana with the girl, but at the end of the fight with the pterosaur, Kong begins to pull her, leaving them no choice but to jump into a river. Furious, the gorilla chases them into the village, and upon reaching the shoreline, is knocked unconscious by a grenade that is thrown by Denham.
Immediately, they decide to transport Kong to New York, to be put on public display in a theater marquee. Kong's contact with a world he doesn't know and his love for Ann infuriate him until he breaks free and runs loose on the city. Kong searches for the girl and finding her, he takes her up to the Empire State Building, where he is attacked by Curtiss SBC Helldiver from the Navy, who manage to make him fall from the building and die.
Cast
- Fay Wray - actress Ann Darrow.
- Robert Armstrong - director Carl Denham.
- Bruce Cabot - First Officer Jack Driscoll, Venture.
- Frank Reicher - Captain Englehorn. He's the captain of the Venture.
- Sam Hardy - theatrical producer Charles Weston.
- Noble Johnson - the head of the tribe.
- James Flavin - Second Officer Briggs.
Background
The film King Kong draws on literary adventure stories about lost worlds, and especially the novel The Lost World (1912) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Land That Time Forgot (1918); in both, a good part of the action takes place in jungles full of prehistoric animals. In 1925 there was a film adaptation of the novel The Lost World , with special effects made by Willis O'Brien and his team, who would later work on King Kong .
The producer of King Kong, Ernest E. Schoedsack had experience working with monkeys, having previously directed the documentaries Chang in 1927 (with Cooper) and Rango in 1931. Taking advantage of this trend, the Congo Pictures company made the film Ingagi in 1930, which it advertised as "a documentary showing the sacrifice of a woman to a giant gorilla." ».
Willis O'Brien had done the special effects for the unfinished 1931 feature Creation, directed by himself. The dinosaur models in that film were inspired by illustrations by American artist Charles R. Knight. Cooper approved of the sequences made by O'Brien with the crank step animation technique in Creation, and therefore decided to hire him to handle the special effects on King Kong. The dinosaur models used in King Kong were originally built for the filming of Creation and some of the scenes filmed in this film were modified to include in Kong's script.
Production
Originally, the film was titled The Eighth Wonder (The Eighth Wonder in the original English). Press brochures were sent in 1932 to excite theater owners and to feature The Eighth Wonder in their advertisements. In the original script, the gorilla is called just Kong and it was the publicists who added "King", so that in the film the full name appears only in the opening titles and end credits.
The giant gate used in King Kong was burned along with a movie set for a scene re-enacting the burning of Atlanta in the movie Gone with the Wind. This gate had originally been built for the 1927 feature film King of Kings.
Some jungle scenes were filmed on the same set as the film Evil Zaroff. The set locations for that film were on the Palos Verdes peninsula, but the scenes in the cliffs were shot in San Pedro, Long Beach, and Redondo Beach. Santa Catalina Island was another location used to film scenes set in the jungle.
Kong's model was made with some kind of steel skeleton, stuffed with cotton and covered with latex so that he could move naturally. This model was later covered with bear skins. Rear projection was a photographic composition technique used so that Kong could appear on stage alongside Fay Wray. For this same purpose, miniature models of the characters were recreated.
Deleted Scenes
An early 125-minute version of King Kong was previewed in San Bernardino, California, in January 1933. In that version there was a scene showing the crew being eaten by a spider, a crab, a lizard and an octopus (all giant) after falling from the bridge that Kong brought down. This scene is said to have been removed because it caused some of the viewers to scream, leave the theater, or faint. But in a studio memo, Merian C. Cooper said he himself dropped the scene because it "stopped the story."
That scene was added to the 2005 version, and coincidentally, the version's director, Peter Jackson, made his own recreation of the scene, based on the 1933 storyboard. This recreation appears as bonus material on the DVD and Blu-ray released by Warner Home Video.
The following scenes were filmed, but were never part of the development of the film:
- Kong fighting with three tricerátopos. That scene was partially filmed, but then it was eliminated.
- A brontosaurus killing three sailors in the water violently.
- A styracosaurus persecuting some sailors to the bridge that would then knock down Kong.
- At the scene where Jack and Ann escape from the cave, Kong goes down the cliff chasing them. That detail was eliminated by Cooper.
Premiere
The 1933 release of King Kong was an immediate box office success and had a major impact on popular culture in the 1930s. It was also the first film to open in two of the theaters New York's largest movie theaters, just like it was the first of the 1930s in the horror movie trend.
Reruns
In 1938, King Kong was first re-released, although scenes such as Kong ripping off Ann's dress were deemed unacceptable under the Hays Code. The film was re-released twice during the 1940s, once in 1942 and again in 1946. It was re-released again in 1952, becoming one of the events of that year and generating more box office earnings than when it was first released in 1933.
The most significant sequels derived from King Kong until the 1950s were Mighty Joe Young (1949) and Godzilla (1954). In 1956, King Kong was sold for television broadcast after its fifth rerun. Since then, it has attracted the attention of viewers who became fans of the film.
Reception
Criticism
The film received good reviews from its first release, although Joe Bigelow of Variety magazine stated that King Kong would make a good adventure film if "audiences got used to it." to the mechanical movements, to the damages of the exposed animals and to the false atmosphere of the film".
The newspaper The New York Times found King Kong a fascinating adventure film:
"Imagine a beast of fifteen meters with a girl in one of his claws, climbing the outside of the Empire State Building, and after leaving the girl in a slope, try to grab the planes and then these shoot bullets from their machine guns into the body of the monster."
Susan Sontag, in 1964 wrote an essay called Notes on Camp, which includes King Kong as part of the Camp canon. In 2002, Roger Ebert wrote in his criticisms of Great Films that the effects are not up to modern standards, "but that something ageless and primal in King Kong somehow still works".
King Kong, as of 2007 had an average score of 100% based on forty-six reviews on the Rotten Tomatoes website.
Awards
In 1991, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry. In 1998, it was ranked #43 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies list from the American Film Institute, and in 2007 it ranked #41 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movies (10th Anniversary Edition).
It also peaked at No. 12 on AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrillers, and 24th on AFI's 100 Years...100 Passions and, in June of 2008, to #4 on AFI's 10 Top 10 list of the top ten fantasy films.
In April 2004, Empire magazine ranked King Kong the best monster movie of all time. In May 2004, Empire magazine >Total Film ranked the final scene of King Kong at the Empire State Building #3 on its list of "Best Death Scenes". King Kong it was added by Time magazine to a list of the "100 Greatest Movies of All Time".
Cultural Impact
King Kong is one of the best-known characters in film history. Kong and the films in which he has starred have been referenced in popular culture around the world. King Kong earned the prestige of being a popular culture icon and urban legend. King Kong has been the inspiration for commercials, cartoons, comics, movies, magazine covers, plays, poetry, short films, and television shows. Other references to King Kong are in the form of parodies.
King Kong managed to reach the height of its popularity in the 1960s and 1970s, as part of a nostalgic trend for 1930s Hollywood cinema. During this time the character of Kong and the film were common in popular culture.
In the mid-1960s, RKO Pictures began licensing King Kong-related products due to public demand; such as comics, games, miniatures and posters.
The Sitges Fantastic Film Festival incorporated it into its logo and as a brand image.
References to King Kong in film and television
King Kong was the first feature film to show a giant monster in civilization after the silent film The Lost World (1925). In the monster movies filmed after 1933 the influence of King Kong became palpable. These include: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), Godzilla (1954) and Jurassic Park (1993).
The scenes from King Kong where the dinosaurs appear were referenced or imitated in all three Jurassic Park films, especially in the second, The Lost World: Jurassic Park II (1997). In this movie, a Tyrannosaurus is brought from a remote island to civilization, manages to escape from his captors and starts running into the city. The ship carrying that beast is called The Venture, the same name as the ship featured in King Kong. Kong is even mentioned in the first Jurassic Park movie, when Jeff Goldblum in his role as Ian Malcolm asks, 'What have they got in there, King Kong?' ("What do you have there, King Kong?"). The fight Kong fought against a Tyrannosaurus in both the 1933 and 1976 versions is very similar to the fight in Jurassic Park III between a Spinosaurus and a Tyrannosaurus.
In King Kong, one of the best-known scenes is the gorilla on top of the Empire State Building with Ann Darrow. This scene has been copied or parodied in cartoons, comic books, horror films, and television commercials. The episodes Monty Can't Buy Me Love, Bart Has Two Mommies and the King Homer segment of Treehouse of Horror III, both from the animated series The Simpsons, are television parodies of King Kong.
References to King Kong in other media
Kong's image has been used for advertisements, for example for Coca Cola or Energizer advertisements. In 1990, Kongfrontation, one of the attractions of the Universal Studios Florida theme park became one of the most popular until it was closed in 2002.
Kong was the inspiration for the 1981 Nintendo video game Donkey Kong and its sequels. In the game, the player takes the role of Jumpman and must rescue his girl from the gorilla of the same name.
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