King Kong (Merian C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)

King Kong is a deeply weird and transcendent work of imagination that exists outside of age and time, a permanent thumbprint-on-the-subsconcious film-dream, and a vulgar spectacle/frozen time capsule piece that shows off the full derangement of the white male American brain (I have one of those, and I've been nuts since birth). It's also a lot of damn fun and must have been mindblowing to audiences walking in cold in 1933.

I can't remember a part of my life where I wasn't aware of King Kong. Both the 1933 and 1976 film versions were on television constantly when I was growing up (though the '33 version was mostly relegated to early Sunday mornings, where the '30s and '40s films were often dumped in the early '80s), and one of the first comic books I repeatedly devoured after learning to read was an oversized, full-color adaptation of Kong that my mother or grandmother bought for me at a garage sale when I was in preschool. Like Sesame Street, King Kong was just something that always existed, a foundational piece of my childhood mind.

By now, after multiple film, television, and comic book adaptations, sequels, and rip-offs, the story is familiar to most of you, so I'll forego the plot synopsis. What I'll attempt to describe instead is the odd sensation of childhood memory and adult experience crashing into each other while watching Kong in the present.

As a child, the film's opening scenes were just something one had to endure until the ship makes it to Skull Island, the conversation of adults sounding to my young ears the way the grownups sound in the Peanuts cartoons. Quit making with the yakety-yak and get to Skull Island, you jabronis. As an adult, these scenes are hilarious, skillfully paced, and great at building atmosphere, mood, and character. Cooper and Schoedsack poke fun at themselves, masculinity, show business, and the stereotype of the rugged action/adventure director who would do anything to get his pictures made, especially put the lives of his cast and crew in danger.

The sexism is so ridiculously over-the-top that it's obviously, at least in part, meant as self-parody. Director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) laments having to include a woman in one of his films for the first time because of the beauty and the beast angle he envisions for his latest story. A crew member on the ship replies, "You've never had a dame in any of your other pictures. Why put a dame in this one?"

Sailor John Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) initially resents the presence of Ann Darrow (Fay Wray, who worked with co-director Schoedsack and actor Armstrong on another weird island movie, The Most Dangerous Game, the previous year) on his usually all-male sea voyages and gives her the business every time he sees her. Until, of course, he falls in love with her. When he gets the nerve to profess his love, Ann says, "But you hate women!" to which Driscoll shyly replies, "Aw, you ain't women." Wray is famous for her full-throated screaming in Kong, but she's a likable, funny, and natural actor in the early scenes with a luminous beauty and charisma that the camera loves.     

The early scenes on Skull Island filled me with awe when I was a kid, but the racism bums me out as an adult. So much entertainment I consumed as a kid depicted black people from Africa and island nations as superstitious, easily frightened, barbaric primitives who could not be trusted around white women. They were simultaneously novelties, threats, and expendable pieces of a story. I internalized so much of this without noticing, and King Kong is unfortunately a part of that, even as the powerful images and the scale of the sets and extras in these scenes still visually leave a great impression. These scenes don't read as malicious, just ignorant, and a few of these characters get human moments, but it's the part of Kong that has aged the worst.

The remainder of the film is a whirlwind of action and incredible images from Skull Island's giant monsters, lush wildlife, and rugged terrain and Kong's tragic adventures in the streets and on the skyscrapers of New York City. The New York scenes, especially, continue to astonish. The scenes of Kong in chains on a Broadway stage, his giant face peeping in the windows of apartments, the attack on the high line train car, and his ascent up the Empire State Building and the plane's-eye-view zooms toward him as he stands atop it are almost frightening in their visual power and presence and have lost none of their strange beauty. I felt a fusion of my childhood and adult selves while watching the film's second half, and I'm still amazed at how much emotion the special effects team managed to create in the face of a stop-motion animated ape-gorilla hybrid. 

The 1933 King Kong is still the greatest of the Kong film adaptations, a complex, weird stew of sexuality, comedy, horror, adventure, fantasy, male and racial anxiety taken to artistically absurd lengths, show business spectacle, and the vicarious thrill of a giant creature smashing things to bits, with some of the most expressive dream images of Manhattan ever committed to celluloid (yes, I know it's mostly studio sets). So familiar, so eternally strange.