King Kong (1933)

At some point, someone, somewhere, thought it would be pretty cool to unleash a giant animal in the streets of a modern city.

The original King Kong may not have been the first, but it was certainly the most memorable.  The movie has, after all, been remade twice, to say nothing of letting the big ape hang out with Godzilla, and served as inspiration for every large ape that ever climbed a skyscraper with a woman in his hand, or in the case of author Terry Pratchett's Discworld humor/fantasy novel series, had a giant woman climb a tall building with an ape in her hand.  By the standards of modern movie making, Kong doesn't hold a candle.  He's clearly created in a more claymation-style effect as opposed to the 1970s guy-in-an-ape-suit or Peter Jackson's CGI overlaying of Andy Serkis, but there's something to this, the original Kong, that still packs a punch.

What may be most interesting is how little Kong is actually in his own movie.  He doesn't leave the screen for very long once he appears, but you have quite a wait for that.  The movie clocks in at just under an hour and 45 minutes, with an overture, and Kong appears sometime after the 45 minute mark.  All the really memorable stuff with Kong happen in the last hour of the film, and aside from the promotional material, audiences seeing the movie for the first time in 1933 probably had no idea what Kong was.  Certainly the characters in the movie do not.  Producer/director Carl Denham, playing by the fast-talking Robert Armstrong, only knows of a mythical god-like thing on a mysterious island known as "Kong".

As much as I really enjoy this movie, there's a lot the audience needs to take with the metaphorical grain of salt.  Denham is apparently making a movie with himself as the only crewmember, no script, and one actor, the just-off-the-streets Ann Darrow (playing so memorably by Fay Wray).  Anyone who knows anything about dinosaurs knows most of the ones seen on Skull Island were not carnivorous, plus basic science tells us no gorilla could ever get that big without being crushed to death by the weight of its own body.  Plus, no one stops Denham with the basic thought that whatever it is he wants with a giant gorilla that has been anything but friendly could possibly be a good idea.  His arrogance causes a lot of death and destruction, none of the which the movie faults him for (perhaps the sequel Son of Kong does, but I haven't seen it in a while).

What the movie has, though, is a highly memorable monster in the form of the title character.  The first 45 minutes are rather slow, and don't seem to be going anywhere.  It's largely stuff that is important to the plot, such as Denham's luck with finding a girl for the voyage to a place only he knows about, his finding and recruiting of Ann, what he has on board, some screen tests and other character-based stuff to establish Ann and love interest John Driscoll's (played by Bruce Cabot) personalities and some sort of 1930s film idea of love and courtship.  Once Kong emerges from his jungle retreat, the movie turns to straight action as Kong takes on and defeats all comers on his island, is brought to New York, goes on his famous rampage, and dies the iconic death fighting some biplanes.

While Denham's final line on how beauty killed the beast is indeed noteworthy and memorable, I was inclined to see an inadvertent environmental message here:  importing a nonnative species to a region that's never seen anything like it before is a really bad idea.  Keep the rabbits out of Australia and the King Kongs out of Manhattan and everyone will be better off in the long run.