KING KONG (1933)

After 1926, when Conan Doyle cleaned up at the box office with 'The Lost World', his classic story of prehistoric creatures in the depths of the jungle, Hollywood was desperate for a follow up. Enter producer Merian C. Cooper and director Ernest B. Schoedsack, two filmmakers with a track record in all things wild and wonderful. Cooper was a member of the volunteer American flight squadron which fought with the Polish against Soviet Russia in the 20s, (possibly the inspiration behind Kong's demise at the hands of the Air Corps), Schoedsack directed award-winning documentaries in Iran and Siam, as well as Rango (1931), a Kipling-esque tale of man's best friend, the orangutan.

Their story goes like this: showman Carl Denham sets out to the mysterious and remote Skull Island to find a new attraction, taking along adventurer Jack Driscoll and down on her luck actress Ann Darrow (the legendary Fay Wray). On arrival, they find the island is home to giant beasts of all kinds, ruled over by a 30 foot-tall silverback gorilla, Kong. The locals kidnap Darrow and offer her as a sacrifice to Kong. Kong instead falls in love with her, she is rescued and Kong captured.

Back in New York, Kong escapes his cage to elope with Darrow and meets his tragic end on the Empire State building. The dialogue is laughable, and the special effects, cutting edge at the time by Willis O'Brien, have a comical simplicity, but it remains, in the words of Time Out, "an immortal tribute to the Hollywood dream factory's ability to fashion a symbol that can express all the contradictory, erotic, ecstatic, destructive, pathetic and cathartic buried impulses of 'civilised' man". It's also damn entertaining.

Next page