Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List

Empire Magazine Greatest Movies List - #242: King Kong

The original 1933 version of King Kong is the one that started it all, or at least you can say it’s the one that would influence many generations of filmmakers despite the fact it was made in the early 20^th century. By now the effects are dated, but somehow it still works. It is the ultimate adventure story: a ship finds an island with an ominous name populated by restless natives, dinosaurs, giant bugs, and the world’s biggest gorilla. Without King Kong you don’t have Godzilla, Jurassic Park (What do they have in there? King Kong?), and of course the 2005 Peter Jackson remake.

Speaking of the remake, since we live in an age where hit movies are redone every year, this is another case where I had not seen the original first. I saw the Peter Jackson version on the big screen, as you should, in the holiday season in Quebec City without having the black and white Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B Shoedsack version. That being said, I still knew where Jackson was going. The story has been around for so long and referenced so many times in pop culture that just about everyone knows the plot. The ship gets on the island, Kong snatches the girl, the crew captures Kong, takes him to New York, Kong escapes, and then it’s time to climb the Empire State Building. And yet, when the 1933 version was playing on TV a few months after the remake I still wanted to see it. Just because you know how the ride is going to end, it doesn’t you shouldn’t climb.

The first thing I noticed is how faithful Jackson was to the original story. It is essentially the same story only it is much longer, with deeper character development, and of course with special effects that are 1000 times better.

Fay Wray, in a role that would define her career, plays starving New York actress Ann Darrow who accepts to play in the latest film by Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong). Denham is famous for shooting on location and for his latest project he is pushing the envelope by taking his crew to an uncharted island that is home to a mysterious creature.

The 1933 romance is quite old-fashioned, played between Ann and the ship’s first mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot). Driscoll is a sea dog who doesn’t believe in having women on board, but of course by the time the ship has reached the island his cold heart begins to melt. On Skull Island you have the obligatory natives who believe in human sacrifices in order to placate the hunger of Kong, the king of the island. One look at Ann and they believe they have found a way to avoid sacrificing their own this time around.

A surprising difference between this version and the latest is that here the natives are somewhat treated with humour. The crew approaches them casually without fear, and Captain Englehorn (Frank Reicher) can conveniently talk to them and learn about their human sacrifices. After politely declining to give away Ann, they walk away with Denham whistling as though he was off for a stroll in the park.

The movie’s real star is of course King Kong himself, here brought to life thanks to a combination of stop-motion animation and models. There were no computers back then, so everything from Kong’s arms to the smallest dinosaur had to be hand crafted. Nowadays a 10-year-old kid could tell you when the actors are shooting at the dinosaurs they are aiming at a green screen, or the version of a green screen back then.

As old as the effects look, Kong and the rest of the beasts still look great. Seeing him atop of the Empire State Building being attacked by those airplanes is as memorable as ever and deserves its place in the history of cinema. The effects crew who made him did not only build King Kong, they created the template for the future.

One caveat though: the monster in this version is only an animal. Throughout the film he grabs Darrow and plays with her as though she was an interesting toy for him to play with. In Jackson’s version Ann and Kong have more of an emotional connection, with her seeing how lonely he has become on his island and even feeling sadness during his final hour. The filmmakers from the 1930s would probably find this strange, but in the 21^st century we like our monsters to have personality and even a touch of humanity.

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #147: Notorious

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #85: Blue Velvet

Exactly how do you describe a David Lynch movie? He is one of the few directors whose style is so distinctive that his last name has become an adjective. According to Urban Dictionary, the definition of Lynchian is: “having the same balance between the macabre and the mundane found in the works of filmmaker David Lynch.” To see a prime example of that adjective film lovers need look no further than Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), which does indeed begin in the mundane before slowly sinking in macabre violence. My first introduction to the world of David Lynch was through his ground breaking, but unfortunately interrupted, early 1990s TV series Twin Peaks . This was one of the first television shows to grab viewers with a series-long mystery: who killed Laura Palmer? A mix of soap opera, police procedural, and the supernatural, it is a unique show that showed the darkness hidden in suburbia and remains influential to this day. Featuring Kyle MacLachlan as an FBI investigator with a l...

Empire Magazine (2008) Greatest Movies List - #91: Return of the Jedi

If you want someone to give you death stares, tell a die-hard Star Wars fan the original trilogy is not perfect. I am however going to take a risk and write that if there is one major flaw with Return of the Jedi (1983) is a lack of imagination when it comes to the central plot. After the good guys blow up the Death Star in the first movie, the bad guys are almost done building a brand new one, which of course needs to be destroyed again in more or less the same way. Richard Marquand may be directing this time, but it was still George Lucas writing. Plot hole aside, as a kid you can’t help but have fun as the good guys join forces with a tribe of living teddy bears to get the job done. Like many people in their early 30s, I was introduced to the first Star Wars trilogy by my parents who had recorded the movies, commercials included, when they were showing one night on TV. Upon first viewing, a few things stick out in the mind of a young boy watching Return of the Jedi such as:...

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