Who Killed King Kong?
Kennedy, X. J.
THE ORDEAL and spectacular death of King Kong, the giant ape, undoubtedly have been witnessed by more Americans than have ever seen a performance of Hamlet, Iphigenia at Aulis, or even...
...Such a wish is gratified in that memorable scene in Kong that opens with a wide-angle shot: interior of a railway car on the Third Avenue El...
...In his simian way King Kong is the hopelessly yearning lover of Petrarchan convention...
...But even television has failed to run King Kong into oblivion...
...And Kong is perhaps the most disinterested lover since Cyrano: his attentions to the lady are utterly without hope of reward...
...We do not die on a tower, New York before our feet, nor do we give our lives to smash a few flying machines...
...Perhaps this popularity may simply be due to the fact that Kong is one of the most watchable movies ever constructed, but I wonder whether Negro audiences may not find some archetypical appeal in this serio-comic tale of a huge black powerful free spirit whom all the hardworking white policemen are out to kill...
...A Negro friend from Atlanta tells me that in movie houses in colored neighborhoods throughout the South, Kong does a constant business...
...King Kong does this for us...
...It is true, I'll admit, that Kong outdid every monster movie before or since in sheer carnage...
...And so with Kong...
...When he gives her a big feed and a movie contract, the girl is magic-carpeted out of the world of the National Recovery Act...
...Women shriek...
...THE TRAGEDY of King Kong, then, is to be the beast who at the end of the fable fails to turn into the handsome prince...
...Producers Cooper and Schoedsack crammed into it dinosaurs, headhunters, riots, aerial battles, bullets, bombs, bloodletting...
...The machine-guns do him in, while the manicured human hero (a nice clean Dartmouth boy) carries away Kong's sweetheart to the altar...
...In Fay Wray—who's been caught snitching an apple from a fruitstandhis search is ended...
...Many a rival network vice-president must have scowled when surveys showed that Kong—the 1933 B-picture—had lured away fat ,segments of the viewing populace from such powerful competitors as Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, and Bishop Sheen...
...He wants to hurl his combination radio-alarmclock out the bedroom window and listen to it smash...
...Intentionally or not, the producers of King Kong encourage this identification by etching the character of Kong with keen sympathy...
...Again and again he expires on the Empire State Building, as audiences of the devout assist his sacrifice...
...THE ORDEAL and spectacular death of King Kong, the giant ape, undoubtedly have been witnessed by more Americans than have ever seen a performance of Hamlet, Iphigenia at Aulis, or even Tobacco Road...
...What subway commuter wouldn't love—just for once—to see the downtown express smack head-on into the uptown local...
...He climbs the Empire State Building because in all New York it's the closest thing he can find to the cliff top of his jungle isle...
...And so we kill him again and again, in much-spliced celluloid, while the ape in us expires from day to day, obscure, in desperation...
...But it seems to me that the abiding appeal of the giant ape rests on other foundations...
...This is the conviction that the scriptwriters would leave with us in the film's closing line...
...We watch him die, and by extension kill the ape within our bones, but these little deaths of ours occur in prosaic surroundings...
...None of the plodding mummies, the stultified draculas, the white-coated Lugosis with their shiny pinball-machine laboratories, none of the invisible stranglers, berserk robots, or menaces from Mars has ever enjoyed so many resurrections...
...Remarkable is his sense of chivalry...
...yet year after year, from prints that grow more rain-beaten, from sound tracks that grow more tinny, ticket-buyers by thousands still pursue Kong's luckless fight against the forces of technology, tabloid journalism, and the D.A.R...
...WHAT is cutuous is that audiences of 1960 remain hooked...
...He's impossible to discourage even though the love of his life can't lay eyes on him without shrieking murder...
...Coffeeinthe-lobby cinemas still show the old hunk of hokum, with the apology that in its use of composite shots and animated models the film remains technically interesting...
...In a window of the car appear Kong's bloodshot eyes...
...Though Kong may die, one begins to think his legend unkillable...
...For the ape is a figure in a tradition familiar to moviegoers: the tradition of the pitiable monster...
...It is not for us to bring to a momentary standstill the civilization in which we move...
...And she, the ingrate, runs away every time his back is turned...
...As Kong's corpse lies blocking traffic in the street, the entrepreneur who brought Kong to New York turns to the assembled reporters and proclaims: "That's your story, boys—it was Beauty killed the Beast...
...He dies, a pitiful dolt, and the army brass and publicity-men cackle over him...
...Landscapes of the depression are glimpsed early in the film when an impresario, seeking some desperate pretty girl to play the lead in a jungle movie, visits souplines and a Woman's Home Mission...
...And when, in the film's climax, Kong smashes that very Third Avenue landscape in which Fay had wandered hungry, audiences of 1933 may well have felt a personal satisfaction...
...His forced exit from his jungle, in chains, results directly from his single-minded pursuit of Fay...
...King Kong, it is true, had special relevance in 1933...
...We think of Lon Chaney in the role of Quasimodo, of Karloff in the original Frankenstein...
...Straphangers are nodding, the literate refold their newspapers...
...His simian nature gives him one huge advantage over giant ants and walking vegetables in that an audience may conceivably identify with him...
...Kong's appeal has the quality that established the Tarzan series as American myth—for what man doesn't secretly imagine himself a huge hairy howler against whom no other monster has a chance...
...He fondles her, then turns to face the Army Air Force...
...Kong lives for a time as one of those persecuted near-animal souls bewildered in the middle of an industrial order, whose simple desires are thwarted at every turn...
...Yet however violent his acts, Kong remains a gentleman...
...There's far more truth about upper-middle-class American life in King Kong than in the last seven dozen novels of John P. Marquand...
...As he roars in his chains, while barkers sell tickets to boobs who gape at him, we perhaps feel something more deep than pathos...
...Unknown to them, Kong has torn away a section of trestle toward which the train now speeds...
...They see him chloroformed to sleep, see him whisked from his jungle isle to New York and placed on show, see him burst his chains to roam the city (lugging a frightened blonde), at last to plunge from the spire of the Empire State Building, machine-gunned by model airplanes...
...And no other monster in movie history has won so devoted a popular audience...
...His death is the only possible outcome to as neat a tragic dilemma as you can ask for...
...Kong picks up the railway car as if it were a rat, flips it to the street and ties knots in it, or something...
...After all, between a five-foot blonde and a fifty-foot ape, love can hardly be more than an intellectual flirtation...
...He smashes a Broadway theater when the notion enters his dull brain that the flashbulbs of photographers somehow endanger the lady...
...They show the thing in Atlanta at least every year, presumably to the same audiences...
...Kong has, first of all, the attraction of being manlike...
...As we watch the Frankenstein monster's fumbling and disastrous attempts to befriend a flower-picking child, our sympathies are enlisted with the monster in his impenetrable loneliness...
...No clearer proof of his hold upon the popular imagination may be seen than what emerged one catastrophic week in March 1955, when New York's WOR-TV programmed Kong for seven evenings in a row (a total of sixteen showings...
...Atop the Empire State Building, ignoring his pursuers, Kong places Fay on a ledge as tenderly as if she were a dozen eggs...
...Whenever a fresh boa constrictor threatens Fay, Kong first sees that the lady is safely parked, then manfully thrashes her attacker...
...The motorman spies Kong up ahead, jams on the brakes...
...Heroine Fay Wray, whose function is mainly to scream, shuts her mouth for hardly one uninterrupted minute from first reel to last...
...It is also true that Kong is larded with good healthy sadism, for those whose joy it is to see the frantic girl dangled from cliffs and harried by pterodactyls...
...Though machines speed him to the scene of his daily grind, though IBM comptometers ("freeing the human mind from drudgery") enable him to drudge more efficiently once he arrives, there comes a moment when he wishes to turn upon his machines and kick hell out of them...
...But greater forces than those of the screaming Lady have combined to lay Kong low, if you ask me...
...Passengers hurtle together like so many peas in a pail...
...Every day in the week on a screen somewhere in the world, King Kong relives his agony...
...To any commuter the scene must appear one of the most satisfactory pieces of celluloid ever exposed...
...We begin to sense something of the problem that engaged Eugene O'Neill in The Hairy Ape: the dilemma of a displaced animal spirit forced to live in a jungle built by machines...
...His perilous shinnying up a skyscraper to pluck Fay from her boudoir is an act of the kindliest of hearts...
...Since RKO-Radio Pictures first released King Kong, a quarter-century has gone by...
...If Tarzan recalls the ape in us, then Kong may well appeal to that great-granddaddy primordial brute from whose tribe we have all deteriorated...
...For in the heart of urban man, one suspects, lurks the impulse to fling a bomb...
...0, the misery of it all...
...WHY DOES the American public refuse to let King Kong rest in peace...
Vol. 7 • April 1960 • No. 2
