The Screen
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
ing and complaint by the two teams' experts. George Bush and Leo Cherne of the Board of Intelligence Oversight have both deplored leaks about the new Soviet estimate, and President Carter has...
...When papparazzi swarm around Dwan, Kong breaks out of his cage because he thinks she's in danger...
...To do that you have to have the stuffings of which myths are made...
...In all the ads, for example, far from being shot down b y a couple of helicopters, Kong is shown crumpling up a whole jet fighter in one hand like a beer can...
...We can't deny he has such staying power considering that he has now been resurrected, like Christ, over forty years after we first killed him...
...And it is something like instinct which leads me to believe we are watching a tentative replay of the 1950s, an effort by the pessimists, perhaps only half-deliberate, to reestablish the Cold War consensus which once insulated the defense and intelligence communities so effectively from scrutiny...
...Having been seduced by Jack, she makes love to Kong as if they were, man and beast, one and the same...
...He contains, for instance, both the hero and heroine, who are but aspects of Kong's own personality...
...The only natural resource which could be a commensurate metaphor for Kong today is oil, of course, so that is the one De Laurentis equates him with...
...The one place where De Laurentis has shown neither wit nor restraint is in the promotion of his film, which began over a year in advance...
...A lot of skeptics think the CIA's estimates have been political for years, but I don't think that was the ease, or at least not entirely the case...
...The expedition which accidentally discovers Kong is in fact looking for oil under the supervision of a petroleum company executive named Fred (Charles Grodin...
...The momentous events in Kong'S story all occur through a kind of transference between him and the other characters, a kind of animal magnetism which always seems to draw down upon him the consequences of their actions...
...Like Christ, Kong gathers all possibilities into himself...
...Instinct tells me that the Russians must have learned the lessons of the 20th century, having suffered from them so much already...
...The Kingdom of Kong is within...
...In a way the papparazzi are what have killed him, too...
...As they confront one another in the crowd beside his corpse something in them seems to have gone dead too, for they are not able to fall into each other's arms...
...In this reincarnation De Laurentis has given him...
...De Laurentis rolls out no artillery heavier than those few helicopters to kill Kong because he wants us to recognize that Kong's fate is in truth self-inflicted...
...Kong is that "throttled and pitiful giant" L.B.J...
...Though brought into existence with only a fraction of the financing and hoopla of Gone with the Wind, King Kong has played to more audiences in more countries than were ever dreamt of in David O. Selznick's philosophy...
...The compromise on that issue was a lot like the compromise on the question of Soviet intentions back in the early 1950s, when the CIA said nothing was going to happen, but said it in the most alarming way possible...
...Kong therefore remains the same tragic figure he was in the 1933 version of King Kong...
...0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 FELIX STEFANILE SAYING SORRY TO YOU Saying sorry to you is like climbing the stairs to the landing, where the little table is, and the vase with one flower in it, your match in the dark...
...and at his public unveiling in New York, the shrouds lifted from his cage are even shaped and painted like a gas pump...
...While Kong is a despoiled natural resource, he is also a despoiled human resource...
...With an advertising blitz like this, De Laurentis's film is perhaps too central a document of our time to become a genuine legend...
...To have made it a second time, maybe even to have made it better in some ways, required only intelligence...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...My own instincts tell me that the pessimists are wrong, that the Russians are genuinely committed to d&ente, not as a cover while they secretly prepare for war, but as the best way of avoiding war...
...He is the infinite embodied...
...And there you are in the room, sewing by the open window, humming to yourself...
...At the same time, typically, the CIA never said it was not going to work either, while conceding, with a bow to the Air Force, that it was doing a lot of damage, was "hurting" the North, was making Hanoi's supply efforts more "cosily," etc...
...During the war in Vietnam, for example, there was terrific pressure on the CIA to find some benefit in the bombing program but you can read the Pentagon Papers from beginning to end without ever finding an estimate which said the bombing was going to "work," in the sense that Lyndon Johnson, Walt Rostow and the Air Force wanted it to work...
...It is in keeping, then, that Dino de Laurentis's new remake of King Kong should treat its hero as if he were the most precious of natural resourcesmas if he were the very wealth of the earth, the innate power of nature itself...
...Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes...
...Having existed for over forty years in only one feature and its sequel, not counting Japanese imitations, Kong has nonetheless become as widely known as Mickey Mouse, who had to found an empire to achieve such recognition...
...But the controversy also raises a stark question which journalists have been visibly reluctant to state baldly, and which they clearly do not know how to resolve: Either the pessimists are right, and increased Russian military spending is evidence of Russian ambition, or the CIA's estimating process, after decades of independence and rough honesty, has finally been politicized...
...Thus Kong has been refined the way any load of crude would be...
...The hero is Jack (Jeff Bridges), a zoologist who stows away on the oil expedition, and the first time we see him we are struck by what a hairy ape he is with his untrimmed hair and full beard...
...Next to Kong, even Rhett Butler is a pipsqueak...
...His omnipotence lies to a large extent in an omnipresence, in being utterly protean...
...Again, we feel that they are all somehow only part of him to begin with...
...He is unique in the sense that all of creation is unique, and therefore he is at once both unique and ubiquitous...
...He is a victim of their world of publicity and celebrity...
...For all that, however, the new film will never have the same sway with us that the old one has...
...4 February 1977:86...
...Consequently, Dwan and Jack remain true to Kong, and a part of his personality, even after he's dead...
...Like his kingdom, his only real enemy is within...
...De Laurentis's version is limited in this respect by its own financial resources and spectacularity...
...Outside, the mourning dove has just picked up his flute...
...This is his secret strength...
...The heroine is Dwan (Jessica Lang), who has only a single, peculiar name like Kong, and the first time we see her, since she is adrift in a lifeboat as mysterious and unexpected as Kong's island, we realize that her fate too must be tied to his...
...When Kong starts raging just as Jack is about to score with Dwan, she rushes off to sooth Kong instead...
...From the wellhead to the consumer, he has been exploited by the same vertical consolidation which, any anti-trust lawyer will tell you, is ripping us all off these days...
...Having been confused with oil deposits from the start, Kong is then shipped back to civilization in the hold of a tanker...
...When he climbs atop the World Trade Center to make his last stand, the military send in their Cheyenne helicopters, the ones that were nicknamed "Puff the Magic Dragon" in Southeast Asia because they spew 12,000 machine-gun bullets per minute...
...George Bush and Leo Cherne of the Board of Intelligence Oversight have both deplored leaks about the new Soviet estimate, and President Carter has been placed on constructive notice that he faces a strong arms lobby which is fundamentally out of sympathy with d6tente...
...Whoever came up with the original idea for King Kong, to have made the film the first time required real inspiration...
...In this closing note, as elsewhere, De Laurentis shows himself a producer with considerable restraint and wit...
...Gone with the Wind never played in a single African theater for years...
...Containing the multitudes of the world at large, Kong of course contains all the characters in De Laurentis's film as well...
...once warned us we would become if we fought a war in Asia...
...Yet at the same time that Kong is the enemy, he is also we ourselves...
...and under Puff's Commonweal: 85 fusillade, this primate Kong suddenly becomes that other Cong whom we tried to kill off the same way...
...He becomes the enemy who opposes us with the same guerrilla tactics Christ used against the Romans, the enemy who, though slaughtered in the flesh, lives on in the spirit and wins in the end...
...And in the same vein, while De Laurentis realizes he must make his characters smaller than life in order to make Kong seem bigger, he doesnt make them so small that their feelings are non-existent or arbitrarily changeable...
...He is that for which there is no other, no opposite...
...THOMAS POWERS MONKEYSHINES 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 THE SCREEN During the button craze of the sixties, one of my favorites was, "King Kong Died for Our Sins...
...Great myths come, like Kong himself (or Christ), out of nowhere...
...Instinct tells me you have to be slightly crazy to think the Russians would be willing to lose everything above ground for the pleasure of doing even worse to us...
...Nevertheless, De Laurentis's film never allows us to lose sight of the fact that Kong is also the victim of himself...
...That is a long way from the "more somber" view of Russian intentions in the current NIE, if it is really as somber as reports describe it...
...He is everything, and Everyman...
...But the atmospheric analysis of an oncharted island which Fred takes as evidence of oil turns out instead to be the exhaled breath of a mammal...
...What topples him off the World Trade Center is not finally either the helicopters or the papparazzi, but the fact that his own passion knows no bounds...
...Kong is the all-possessing American hero who yawps in Whitman's "Song of Myself," Do I contradict myself...
...It is as though, having attacked Dwan, the papparazzi have killed Kong...
...They begin in some hinterland and take us by surprise...
...Their origins are obscure the way the authorship of the Bible is, or of the 1933 King Kong, which almost certainly didn't originate with the writer, Edgar Wallace, who shares the screen credit for it...
...How, then, are journalists to judge its accuracy, much less its honesty, when they are blocked from all the detailed intelligence data which are the basis of the estimate, insofar as it has a basis...
...Another mythical beast of our own creating, Puff is an appropriate nemesis for Kong...
...But when he lies dying later, those same papparazzi storm up his chest like the Marines onto Iwo Jima to photograph his death agony...
...and when participants in the debate will give only cryptic or garbled accounts of what it's all about...
...But instinct is not much to go on, is it...
...It's so true...
Vol. 104 • February 1977 • No. 3
