Before Godzilla: King Kong (1933)

Content warning: discussion of racism and misogyny

By the next time Willis O’Brien headed up the special effects of a feature film, the movie industry was in a very different place. The twenties had seen filmmakers around the world bring silent film to new heights as an artistic medium, with the decade being symbolically bookended by Robert Wiene’s aesthetically radical German Expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Dziga Vertov’s experimental Soviet documentary Man With A Movie Camera (1929), a film sufficiently visionary that the potential for cinema it articulates still feels incompletely realized almost a century later. However, the rise of synchronized sound technology from 1927-28 would, within a few short years, absolutely devastate silent film as a format. This sea change resulted in an intermediary period where the film industry struggled to figure out how this whole “sound cinema” thing was supposed to work. Simultaneously, the Great Depression hit in 1928 and plunged every industry worldwide into desperate straits. Production budgets and resources were tighter than before, so any large-scale film had to earn its keep. It had to give the audience a spectacle they couldn’t stay away from.

 

Fittingly, then, 1933’s King Kong seems peculiarly aware of its responsibility, to itself and its audience. The film makes this awareness clear from the beginning, as movie producer Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) plucks struggling actress Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) out of the waiting line at a Depression-era soup kitchen and entices her with the prospect of playing the lead in his latest project. Denham and his crew are charting the ship Venture to an uncharted island, following rumors that they hope will lead them to find, and film, something spectacular. Thus, the film’s diegetic narrative stands in for the production as a whole: King Kong is about its own making, the characters’ discovery of fantastic beasts on the island a neat parallel of the producers’ efforts to wow their audience.

 

King Kong’s quest for spectacle has an ugly side, framed as it is in deeply racist terms. During the journey to the island (not yet called Skull Island here, as it will be in some future iterations of the Kong story), Carl Denham identifies the object of their search as something “no white man has ever seen.” The film’s white, western lens is further apparent once the explorers actually reach the island. There Denham and crew interrupt a ceremony performed by the native tribe (who are actually played mostly by black actors rather than white performers in blackface). The natives are suspicious and hostile toward the white intruders, as seems pretty reasonable, but the tribe is of course framed as a potential source of danger and arm to the protagonists rather than the other way around. This danger increases once the tribal leader (Noble Johnson) notices Ann among Denham’s group. The leader wants Ann to be the tribe’s sacrifice to their god, and offers six of their women as a trade - the implication being that blonde, Aryan beauty is objectively viewed as more desirable the world over, and apparently that’s just the nature of things. The tribe kidnaps Ann and chains her in front of the giant gate between their village and the rest of the island; Denham and his first mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) launch a rescue attempt, only to see a giant gorilla emerge from the gate and carry a screaming Ann away into the jungle.

My observations on Kong’s racism are hardly new, as criticism of the film’s racial and gender politics are well rehearsed in scholarly and critical circles. That said, it’s worth pausing to note the exact nature of the bigotry here. The Lost World, both the novel and film, is a colonial adventure story in the classic pulp fiction mode. Colonial overtones are clearly present in the film version, but don’t play a big part. In King Kong, the much more overt racism is of a different nature. The island’s tribe live among the ruins of a long-forgotten ancient civilization, which the explorers compare to Angkor, the capital city of the Khmer empire in southeast Asia from the eighth to fifteenth centuries. (The remains are a UNESCO World Heritage Site today.) In invoking the iconography of a long-forgotten non-white civilization, King Kong channels the work of H.P. Lovecraft, who - like Kong’s co-scenarist, Edgar Wallace - was regarded primarily as a pulp writer at the time. Lovecraft’s celebrated, eerie horror stories present primordial cosmic terrors beyond (white) humanity’s comprehension, ancient powers that seep into the present day and pervert it. Works such as the novella The Shadow over Innsmouth literalize this terror through narratives concerning civilizations of inhuman monsters interbreeding and contaminating with humans. The xenophobic attitudes on display are no accident; Howard Lovecraft was a virulent racist even by the standards of the early 20th century, and his works reflected his attitudes that the world beyond white, western civilization was so diseased and inhuman that attempting to interact with it at all would lead to utter destruction. 

It isn’t necessarily the case that any of Kong’s producer/directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, story creator Edgar Wallace, or screenwriters Ruth Ray and James Creelman consciously shared Lovecraft’s views. Indeed, Cooper and Schoedsack repeatedly denied any political subtext to the film. Nonetheless, they created a film indebted to the themes of Lovecraft: the explorers go to a non-western civilization and bring back something terrible with them that should have been left alone. 

Kong is treated more sympathetically than Lovecraft’s creations, but the same cannot be said for the other wondrous creatures that inhabit the island. Before any of the prehistoric reptiles there have even menaced Ann, the explorers shoot and gas a Stegosaurus that charges at them. That would be a reasonable reaction under the circumstances, but Denham then instructs his men to keep shooting the incapacitated herbivore instead of leaving it in peace and moving the hell along. Cooper and Schoedsack stage the scene to resemble game hunters killing a big animal, and that attitude extends to every other non-mammalian creature in the film. All of the dinosaurs exist to be cannon fodder for Kong or the human cast to kill. The only reason the audience is meant to sympathize with Kong at all is because he’s a warm-blooded mammal like them. 

But even the film’s sympathy for Kong is extremely limited. His apparent possessive affection for Ann - and unmistakable sexual interest, as evidenced by a scene where he rips off and sniffs a piece of her clothes - seems to be viewed by the film more with a patronizing lens of pity than true sympathy. Kong’s tragedy isn’t presented as a romantic one. This is the tragedy of a dumb animal unable to control its feelings, and as a result it blunders into the hands of the humans, is brought to New York City, and goes on a lovesick rampage that results in his death, never understanding that Ann could never be capable of loving such a sad brute as him. Add into account the racial coding to the Kong, and the entire narrative becomes irredeemably ugly. If Kong attained his pop culture reputation as a sympathetic, admirable figure with dignity in later years, it isn’t because of how the film tells its story. 

No, what gives Kong the character and Kong the movie their beating heart is Willis O’Brien’s special effects, which are absolutely fantastic. O’Brien and his team’s stop-motion work here blows every one of his previous projects out of the water in its technical polish: the movement is smoother, the characterization more refined, the framing more impactful. The fight between Kong and the Tyrannosaurus Rex that attempts to eat Ann mid-film is nothing short of spell-binding, viscerally staged, physical, and brutal in a way that makes an impact ninety-one years later. Similarly impressive is the other showstopper sequence and the most iconic moment of the film, the climactic battle on the Empire State Building between Kong and the biplanes that gun him down. For my money, the third highlight is the sequence up high in the mountains on the island, where Kong sequesters Ann away only for them to be attacked by flying pterosaurs; the lush background paintings of the vast island landscape combine beautifully with the physical models in the background to produce a truly gorgeous vista. The visual atmosphere of Kong’s island is indelible, and the tropical fantasyland feels vivid and lived-in almost a century later.

Ultimately, the most important impact of the effects being as good as they are is on the nature of Kong as a character. Under O’Brien’s supervision, Kong becomes a complex character with inner life. The animators give Kong an incredible range of expressions without ever betraying his nature as a giant gorilla monster: rage, surprise, amusement, pain, even flashes of tenderness toward Ann. If the script treats Kong as a creature to be pitied, then it is O’Brien’s special effects that transform Kong into a character the audience can feel for, root for, and mourn the death of. He is something more than just a giant animal.
 

And there’s one additional advantage King Kong has that its predecessors did not: sound. The roars, cries, growls, and snarls that Kong and his reptile opponents make gives them additional presence beyond their visual impact. Not for nothing are the moments of Kong beating his chest and roaring one of the enduring images from the film; the sound is just as important to its success. Kong’s roar completes him as an icon, just as Max Steiner’s thunderous musical score cements the sound of the adventure around him and would define how Hollywood films would be scored going forward. The utter dominance of sound cinema as a medium was cemented by a character as sonically imposing as he was visually intimidating.

 

Thus was born cinema’s first true giant monster.

Most often, when critics identify the special effects as the best aspect of a film, the implication is that the rest of the work is lacking in character or craftsmanship. And while I have no desire to sit through the racism or the chauvinistic romance subplot of the first, human-centric half of King Kong again anytime soon, that segment is hardly badly acted nor badly made. But the heart and soul of the film really is its special effects and the power they hold today. King Kong set out not to make audiences question their worldview but to present them with the ultimate spectacle, and on those terms, the 1933 original remains one of the best pieces of escapism ever made.

King Kong’s spectacle made a titanic impact around the world, making ripples large and small. But the most important one for this blog was the effect it had on a man named Tsuburaya Eiji, who saw the film when it was released in Japan. Once an inventor in his youth, Tsuburaya had gone on to be an innovator in the field of photography in Japan and was well respected as a cutting-edge cameraman. Tsuburaya was entranced and delighted by Kong’s stop-motion and photographic effects, and the film sparked in him the desire to one day make his own work in the same vein. (He wasn’t the only one in Japan who felt that way: there were a few copycat films and spoofs of King Kong made there in the 1930s, some of which may have pioneered the kind of effects Tsuburaya would use in his own work. Sadly, these films are lost along with the vast majority of Japanese films made before World War II.) In the 1950s, Tsuburaya would get his chance to work on monster movies when he served as director of special effects for the original Godzilla film.

We’ll see how that went in due course. First, we need to address one particular legacy of the original King Kong: its Son.