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| King Kong (1976) |
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  (7/10)
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Runtime: 134 |
| Public Rating: 8.45 (20 votes) |
Director: John Guillermin |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Horror/Fantasy/Action |
Year: 1976 |
| Writer(s): Lorenzo Semple Jr. (based on the 1933 screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose) |
| Distributor: Paramount Studios |
| Reviewed by: Mel Valentin |
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Bombastically billed as "The most exciting original motion picture event of all time," Dino De Laurentis' remake of King Kong was released in 1976 to (mostly) critical opprobrium and middling box-office numbers (it wasn't the failure most assumed, but it fell short of De Laurentis' expectations). De Laurentis hope to match or surpass the box-office success of the previous summer's blockbuster (generally acknowledged as the first of its kind), Steven Spielberg's Jaws. De Laurentis' famously stated that audiences would feel emotion (actually cry) when Kong met his tragic fate, as opposed to the elation audiences expressed toward the demise of the killer shark in Jaws. Of such hubris, criticism is bound to follow (and it certainly did).
Most fans of the original King Kong approached the remake with either trepidation or outright hostility. They found much to disparage, starting with the uneven, campy tone, the overt sentimentality, and dodgy special effects. As inelegant as the original King Kong appeared, he was the product of then state-of-the-art special effects, thanks to stop-motion animation pioneer Willis O'Brien. Gone was the stop-motion animation that made the original a unique, if dated, experience. In was the equally crude (or more crude, depending on your perspective) man-in-suit makeup effect. The pre-release hype promised revolutionary effects, effects that focused on a full-sized mechanical robot created by creature designer Carlo Rimbaldi. The end result was, to put it mildly, a bust, used in only a handful of scenes. The mechanical robot's failure and the extensive use of a man-in-a-suit unsurprisingly contributed to the backlash against De Laurentis' film. The designer and man in the suit was none other than Rick Baker, a future Academy Award winner for his makeup work. His Kong, although anthropomorphically expressive (thanks to the use of innovative animatronics), still falls short of verisimilitude (for one, this Kong is a biped, not a quadruped).
Production history aside, the remake of King Kong updates the storyline to a contemporary setting. In the original, one of the central characters, Carl Denham, fleeing business creditors, voyages to the South Pacific to shoot an adventure film (presumably the authentic locations will increase the commercial prospects for his film). There, he discovers African natives who worship a giant gorilla, King Kong, inhabit the island. In De Laurentis' remake, Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin), is an oil company executive risking his reputation (and his company's money) on finding oil on the uncharted island. The island is uncharted because it sits in an ever-present fog bank, which Fred and his associates ascribe to the effects of a massive oil reserve on the island (the fog is supposedly caused by burning oil mixing with evaporating seawater surrounding the island).
Enter Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), a bearded, hippie, paleontologist who stows away on Wilson's ship, the Petrox Explorer. Prescott intends to investigate rumors of the island's unique species. After Prescott more or less announces his presence to Wilson, he's thrown in the brig. On the way back to the brig after an inconclusive interview with Wilson, Prescott spies a raft floating in the ocean. The raft is carrying a single, unconscious occupant, Dwan (Jessica Lange, in her debut, delivering her lines in a breathy, Marilyn Monroe whisper). Dwan, an aspiring starlet, is the sole survivor of a yachting accident (or so we come to learn). Not surprisingly, her presence awakens the unwanted attention of the all-make crew (her skimpy outfits don't help matters), but she begins to develop an interest in Prescott. He, of course, reciprocates.
On the island, Prescott, Dwan, Wilson, and Wilson's men encounter a giant gate and the natives, in mid-ritual. Apparently, the natives are about to sacrifice one of their women to their island god, King Kong. The native chief spots the fair-skinned, blonde-haired Dwan and naturally offers to trade five native women for Dwan. Prescott, Wilson, and Dwan refuse, returning to the ship after scaring off the natives. Soon thereafter (i.e., the same night), the natives find the ship and kidnap Dwan, setting up her first, fateful meeting with King Kong. Prescott and Wilson arrive too late to save Dwan, leading Prescott and some of Wilson's men to embark on a search-and-rescue mission.
Anyone familiar with either version of the King Kong story knows what happens next. After King Kong and Dwan spend some quality time together, he becomes besotted with her (the word "impossible" comes to mind, given their size and species differences). Just as Kong fights off an oversized predator (actually a rubber snake), Prescott arrives to save Dwan, Kong is captured by Wilson and his men, and brought back to New York as a trophy and for public display, followed by mayhem, destruction, and a final confrontation between a frightened, angry Kong and a military eager to dispose of a threat to New York City, with the monolithic World Trade Center towers substituting for the Empire State Building (and helicopter gunships substituting for the biplanes of the original).
The surface similarities between the two versions, however, fail to capture the significant, and in some cases, subversive differences between the two films. The screenwriter, Lorenzo Semple, Jr., apparently attuned to at least some of the political concerns of the day, gives King Kong a pro-environmentalist, anti-capitalist message, partly through the admittedly caricatured character of Fred Wilson, a profits-first, people-second oil executive, but also in its obvious sympathies for Kong-as-victim. Kong is, after all, kidnapped from his natural habitat and put on garish display as a marketing gimmick for Petrox. When Kong strikes back in the penultimate scene against his oppressors, Prescott responds with an emotional, expletive-filled cheer in support of Kong (Prescott has also been betrayed by the city's duplicitous officials who promise to capture, not kill, Kong).
King Kong is worth recommending for other reasons as well, beginning with the character complexity not found in the original. Although Wilson is a one-dimensional character, neither Prescott nor Dwan are. Prescott is typed as a hippie academic, but he suffers a crisis of conscience when Wilson seduces with promises of money and prestige. As a character, Dwan is partially limited to the damsel-in-distress stereotype (being blonde and ditsy doesn't help either), but her ambitious nature (she wants the fame and wealth that a career as an actress promises) makes her an ambivalent character, in large part because she develops a sympathetic relationship with Kong. There's even an admittedly odd erotic charge that develops between Dwan and Kong, including one scene where she swoons after an encounter with Kong. The romantic subplot between Dwan and Prescott also takes a surprisingly downbeat, bitter turn in the final scene (uncommon in a big budget, Hollywood film).
King Kong does have flaws beyond the dodgy, dated special effects. King Kong isn't introduced until almost an hour into the film's running time and when he is, he's bound to disappoint most viewers. Prescott and Dwan's introduction seems unnecessarily convoluted, stretching credibility unnecessarily. In Prescott's case, why he's in Indonesia, and why he puts stock in rumors of an uncharted island and a beast-god are left unexplained. Dwan's introduction also makes little sense. We're expected to believe she's the lone survivor of a yachting explosion that occurred in the middle of a violent storm at sea and that somehow she found an inflated life raft (once aboard the all-male ship, Dwan surprisingly finds several changes of clothes, all of them revealing or tight-fitting). It would have made more sense to have both Prescott and Dwan join the crew before Wilson's ship leaves the Indonesian port, rather than afterwards. In addition, when the natives take her from the ship, it takes little effort and there's no night watch to alert the crew of her kidnapping. It's also hard to look beyond the casual, unconscious racism implicit in the depiction of the natives (a carry over from the 1933 version).
Still, for a much-maligned, denigrated film, King Kong is certainly not as bad as its detractors have vociferously argued, and while it does have multiple flaws, it makes significant, substantive departures from the original to stand on its own. For some, the risible special effects makes King Kong strictly of camp value (Semple's occasionally awkward, cheesy dialogue doesn't help matters), but for other viewers already invested in the King Kong mythos, not to mention Peter Jackson's upcoming remake, which is likely to make Kong a far more sympathetic character than he was in the original, De Laurentis' take has more than a few guilty pleasures to offer.
© Mel Valentin, 20th November, 2005
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