GROSS/23 1933 - on Skull Island as on Manhattan Island it's all business
1933's top-grossing film moves at a blistering pace and cares only for money.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
KING KONG, MERIAN C. COOPER & ERNEST B. SCHOEDSACK, RKO RADIO PICTURES, 1933, 100 MINUTES
King Kong is a business movie, like The Big Short or that one about Beanie Babies. The first character we hear from is a theatrical agent. Straight away we’re into a conversation about production insurance, the practical difficulties of making a film in the tropics and the demands of exhibitors and distributors. It’s all business, from the first moment.
Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), film producer - actually a kind of Attenborough, specialising in docs from wild places - has assembled a crew (and a lot of weapons) on a ship in New York harbour. Someone told him there’s a huge ape, feared by the natives, on an uncharted island to the West of Sumatra - he’s acquired the only map. The situation’s got ‘hit movie’ written all over it. He’s got a track record for bringing impossible projects home, he just needs to get to the island before the rainy season. Denham’s immediate problem, as the skipper’s inflexible 6 a.m. sailing time approaches, is that he has no leading lady. No one is ready to take a chance and travel to location unknown with this pirate-entrepreneur.
Snapping into solution mode, our producer hits the streets of New York and quickly locates a starlet. He’s barely out of a cab on Skid Row when he spots waif Ann Darrow (Fay Ray) pathetically failing to steal an apple. She’s hired on the spot. There’s no agent in this casting, of course, and this actor is desperate - she faints from hunger as Denham shoves her into the cab - so we can assume that if there’s a fee at all it doesn’t include a share of the box office.
Dollar signs
This is a bluntly American film. It’s about adventure and money. Every scene dramatises either a threat to life or an economic challenge, sometimes both. Once Denham and his crew have arrived on the island they’re concerned with survival and with getting the shot, wrapping before the rains come.
Of course, between Denham the extractive capitalist and the resource he seeks to exploit there are some people - the natives of Skull Island, who worship Kong and placate him by providing him with ‘brides’. There’s uncomplicated, segregation-era racism. It’s thickly-applied. Nothing about the portrayal of the islanders is humane or even rational. It’s grim, comic-book stuff.
But the islanders can’t believe their luck. The idiots on the boat have brought a blonde with them (they call her “the golden woman”) - ideal bride material for the next ceremony. Ann is lifted from the ship in darkness and, before the crew even know she’s gone, she’s given to Kong in a spectacular ceremony - the centrepiece of act two. He takes her off into the forest and wedges her into the top of a dead tree - one of many perilous spots in which Fay Ray is required to scream (there’s so much screaming).
The first rescue attempt doesn’t go well. Have you seen Predator? Half the ship’s crew is quickly killed (everything happens quickly in this film) - they’re tossed into ravines, crushed or bitten in half by Kong - but when Ann is finally brought to safety - by love interest first mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) - everyone immediately agrees the ape must be captured and taken back to America for the dough - “We’re millionaires boys, I’ll share it with all of you” shouts Denham, lying.
On Broadway
What Denham does - what the makers of King Kong do - is crudely racist but we’re also getting colonial capitalism in microcosm. In defeating and then abducting the beast, taking him back to New York, the producer has ripped through Skull Island like United Fruit through Guatemala, leaving a trail of corpses, a settlement in ruins and a people stripped of its culture. We hear nothing more from the Skull islanders, of course, and the action switches back to NYC in a single edit - one of several startling elisions in this film. How did the crew get unconscious, five-storey Kong back to the ship? How was he contained on the long voyage home? Who cares? Denham the over-achiever snaps his fingers and it’s done.
In this instantaneous transition Kong switches from free creature and apex predator to asset of an American entertainment business, a worker in the harsh economy of Manhattan, chained up for a life on stage, and it’s honestly too Rousseau to be true. Denham subjugates the beast, removes him from his pre-modern paradise: “he’s always been king of his world - we’ll teach him fear.” Of course, Kong won’t have it. He teaches New York fear, passing up the lure of a Broadway career for one spectactular, exhausting final show, in the crossed searchlights, shot to death by American fighter aces, at the top of the tallest building in the world.
Even in the finale, with Kong dead in the street at the foot of the tower and indelibly traumatised Ann Darrow still in the lift on the way down, Denham can’t stay out of it. “Let me through, officer, my name’s Denham.” There’s excitement in the gathering crowd - “that’s the man who captured the beast!” Our producer-adventurer, who has now destroyed lives and property on two continents, has a predictable rationalisation “Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes, it was beauty killed the beast.” We laugh, of course: typical capitalist, trying to pin the blame for his catastrophic misadventure on some kind of instinctual urge. Get lost, Denham, you’re the real beast.
There’s a real continuity between the film and Denham’s film-within-a-film. The men who jointly produced and directed King Kong - Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack were genuine adventurers. Both served in the first world war and Cooper was held as a prisoner of war twice, once by the Germans and once by the Soviets when he was flying for the Polish air force later. Both went on to live extraordinary lives.
You might expect a Beauty and the Beast vibe. It’s here but it’s thin. Kong obviously forms some kind of bond with Ann but it’s half-expressed, peremptory. The film’s too dynamic, too fast-moving to dwell on these fairytale ideas. Mostly it’s business.
I’m not the only one who thinks Denham is the real beast. In his terrific ‘Have you Seen?’ collection, David Thomson says: “Some people are afraid of Kong, but me, I’m afraid of Carl Denham. He is the reckless, fearless showman who is prepared to leave Skull Island and its civilization in tatters if he can bring Kong back to New York as the eighth wonder of the world. And the more you look into the history of this phenomenal cultural event, the less interested it seems in large monkeys and the more helpless it is with Denham.”
It’s hard to take King Kong seriously from this distance but so much about this film was new. Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion animation and elaborate models must have been wildly exciting for audiences not used to them. The film moves at a fantastic pace and the music throws us around like rag dolls. Max Steiner’s score is really the first of the modern kind, accompanying and enhancing the action, joyfully exploiting the potential of sync sound. The monster moves to the beat, his actions are amplified by thunderous percussion and swelling strings. It’s thrilling.
The film’s New York is vivid, detailed and spectacular, at street level and above - Skid Row, Times Square, the elevated railway, the Empire State Building.
Fay Ray is 25 when the film is released but she’s already a veteran - King Kong is her 60th movie. Robert Armstrong’s filmography runs to two columns on Wikipedia - over 120 films. These guys never stopped working.
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list and here’s another top-grossing list.