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Films & Filming review
KING KONG
- Directed by John Guillermin.
- Produced by Dino De Laurentiis.
- Screenplay by Lorenzo Semple Jr.
- Director of photography, Richard H Kline.
- Editor, Ralph Winters.
- Music, John Barry.
- Production designed by Mario Chiari, Dale Hennesy.
- King Kong Creators:
- Designer, Carlo Rambaldi;
- Special effects, Glen Robinson;
- Hair design, Michaeldino;
- Molding, Don Chandler.
- Supervisor of photographic effects, Frank Van Der Veer.
- Distributed by EMI. American. Panavision.
- Metrocolor. Cert A. 134 mins.
- Dwan, JESSICA LANGE;
- Jack Prescott, JEFF BRIDGES;
- Fred Wilson, CHARLES GRODIN;
- Captain Ross. JOHN RANDOLPH;
- Bagley, RENE AUBERJONOIS;
- Carnahan, ED LAUTER;
- Timmons, MARIO GALLO;
- Garcia JORGE MORENO;
- Perko, JACK O'HALLORAN;
- Bean, JULIUS HARRIS.
GORDON GOW
In terms of the story, things with the new Kong are much the same as
for the original in 1933. The only consequential difference is that the
Robert Armstrong substitute (wryly played by Charles Grodin here) is no
longer a showman in search of a sensational attraction but an oil man
looking for new depths on Skull Island; not finding them, he compensates
by abducting Kong and putting him on display back home to symbolise the
strength of the product in the petrol pumps. The giant ape, beset by humans
who intrude upon his stamping ground, gets his own back when he breaks
his captive bonds in New York and begins to tear the city apart. He is
motivated once again in his major passion by love for a human blonde,
a mere handful, but one that makes his ape-heart full to brimming. Poor
Kong. We still must grieve for him. But do we believe in him quite so
readily as we do when we look, admittedly with nostalgic eyes, at his
former manifestation in that romantic-horror classic of the thirties?
Hardly.
Ape for ape, the comparison is variable. The entrance of the new Kong
is indubitably an improvement. There is a marvellous close-up of the eyes,
a tremendous subjective stagger towards the tethered blonde, and brilliant
long-shot of the beast towering above the beauty. Moreover, Kong's nose-crinkling
in close-up, and the expressions in his eyes as well, are from
time to time reminiscent of numerous classical actors. Against which one
must set the moments when the ape face freezes into a mask, and the horrendous
bit where he struts towards the camera for all the world like a man in
a monkey suit (as report has it he sometimes was).
What keeps one watching is the unexpected similarity between details
of Kong-now and Kong-then. Again he twirls the log athwart
a chasm, toppling the men astride it into the abyss. Once more he decimates
an elevated railway, but in this business the earlier film won by brevity,
for this time we notice the contrivance rather than the realism, and in
this sequence perhaps more than any other we have cause to grumble that
technology has evidently not advanced as far as we might reasonably have
supposed it would.
Maybe there is a greater effort to endear Kong to us. He is, as apes
go, better looking than his historic predecessor. He doesn't chew people
up anymore - just tramples them underfoot, one of them purposely, the
others mindlessly. And the hero-figure, transmuted into a zoologist, disdains
to jab him with a knife, as Bruce Cabot did, and even cheers him on at
the climax when the beast is attacked not only by aircraft but also by
dastardly flame-throwers.
Our hero is played by Jeff Bridges, blond-maned and bearded. His is the
hardest role, because, having admirably delivered himself of a refined
melodramatic warning in the early part, he is required to play straight
while all around him are sending the whole show up with coyness that defeats
its purpose. Figures of fun cannot at a snap of the ringers become people
worthy of our serious concern, which is what the film-makers seem to think
feasible. Certainly my heart did not go out to Jessica Lange as the blonde.
Attacking the role with the port de bras of a fashion model, she
broaches her encounters with Kong in a manner uncertainly placed between
the vulnerable and the hard-boiled, mouthing some improbably wisecracking
lines that are occasionally funny in themselves but are forever going
against the horror-vein. Anyway, she's not Fay Wray - alas.
Yet one is seldom bored, because it is intriguing to see how closely
the precedent is followed. In the end, however, one realises that nostalgia
and cinema history will draw one back again and again to the original Kong, whereas this new version is at best viable for a casual night
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