King Kong
Directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
- adventure
- fantasy
- horror
The story
Adventurous filmmaker Carl Denham sets out to produce a motion picture unlike anything the world has seen before. Alongside his leading lady Ann Darrow and his first mate Jack Driscoll, they arrive on an island and discover a legendary creature said to be neither beast nor man. Denham captures the monster to be displayed on Broadway as King Kong, the eighth wonder of the world.
What it’s like
Stop-motion and rear-projection monsters loom out of murky jungle fog, shot in high-contrast black-and-white with hard shadows and a crackling, pre-digital grain. The music is a swelling, Max Steiner orchestral score that never lets up, so the film feels thick with melodrama and old-Hollywood ceremony, while the island sequences are dark, humid and claustrophobic in their painted-backdrop sets. The pace is brisk and theatrical: long stretches of 1930s New York bustle and ship-deck bravado give way to sudden, jolting action, and the emotional arc is a captive woman and a beast caught in a cruel spectacle, with the human characters more grasping than admirable. Violence is frequent and sometimes brutal, with creature attacks, deaths by dinosaur and falling, and a few tense and frightening scenes, though there is almost no gore and the tone is more pulpy than grisly. It suits a rainy weekend with a bowl of popcorn, fans of creature features and Depression-era adventure, and anyone curious about where screen monsters began.
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