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Nostalgia March 2017

Silver Screen, Golden Years

King Kong –Adventure and Innocence

By Jacqueline T. Lynch

But when we think of the Empire State Building, we think of a fictional monster and a different tragedy, an enduring symbol of our lost innocence, more than of the terrors of our imagination. That innocence is the reality to which we choose to cling.

Reckless movie director Carl Denham, played by Robert Armstrong, wants to capture a mythical giant gorilla as a publicity stunt in King Kong (1933). He is Ahab to Kong’s Moby Dick, but Denham is less righteous and haunted than Captain Ahab. He is really more like Daffy Duck, pursuing a mound of jewels with dollar signs in his eyes. Mr. Armstrong gets to deliver the famous last lines of the film, “It wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”

He laments that his true-life adventure films are dismissed by the Hollywood critics. “Isn’t there any romance or adventure in the world without having a flapper in it?”

Interesting use of the word “flapper” carried over from the 1920s, here in the depths of the Great Depression. We meet lovely Fay Wray whose haunting dark eyes explore the camera’s gaze from under the brim of her battered cloche hat.

The South Seas adventure begins with standard Terry and the Pirates stock images of a stereotyped Chinese galley cook, and Armstrong onboard a ship in a yachting cap and a white suit, later in tropical kit and a slouch hat that make him look a cross between Indiana Jones, Curious George’s “Man in the Yellow Hat,” and Christiane Amanpour reporting from the field. He has some terrific jungle sets to get lost in, mostly left over from the previous year’s The Most Dangerous Game.

The interesting paradox here is the film presents stark reality on a backdrop of make believe. Except for the fact that King Kong was fictional, the journey to find him in the movie was realistic for its time. A good part of this world was still uncharted in those days. When the United States went island hopping after the Japanese Empire in World War II, most of those islands were previously unknown to us. As author William Manchester noted in his narrative history, The Glory and the Dream, “The U.S. Navy started the war with obsolete eighteenth-century charts…the Marines had to survey King Solomon’s Isles as they went along…Most of what the public did know about the Pacific had been invented by B movie scriptwriters.”

That might be astounding to believe in today’s world when people who travel no further than the grocery store have a GPS unit in their SUVs.

It was the world of real-life adventurer Frank “Bring ‘Em Back Alive” Buck, and of real-life wildlife photographers and naturalists Osa and Martin Johnson. It was an era when kids read the adventures of Jack London and were transported to a world far more dangerous and imaginative than a child encounters today playing a video game.

Another paradox is that what is unreal about the film, i.e. King Kong himself, which we know is not a real gorilla but a series of models and stop-motion animation, even this unreality is successful and appropriate. Monsters aren’t meant to be realistic; they are largely creatures of our imagination. If we rationalize them, they lose their mystique.

The dinosaurs Kong fights are also creatures of the imagination. Though we know they existed, we have never seen a photo of one. When Kong fights a T-Rex over Fay Wray, it is as exciting as a match between James J. Braddock and Max Baer.

Finally, of course, Kong is captured and put on stage, where the marquee tells us the tickets are $20. Pretty steep when you could have seen Helen Hayes on Broadway for around $6. But then, she was only five feet tall.

Another paradox is that where our duo ended up, the symbol used to illustrate man’s pinnacle of modern achievement — the Empire State Building — was only two years old when this film was made, and it was buzzed by World War I biplanes. In another eight years, we would be going to war again, with B-52 bombers. A B-25 Mitchell bomber would become embedded in the Empire State Building in a fog in 1945, and 14 people would die.

But when we think of the Empire State Building, we think of a fictional monster and a different tragedy, an enduring a symbol of our lost innocence, more than of the terrors of our imagination. That innocence is the reality to which we choose to cling. Fay Wray understood, bemusedly once telling an interviewer late in her life:

“Every time I’m in New York, I say a little prayer when passing the Empire State Building. A good friend of mine died up there.”

 

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Movies in Our Time: Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century, available online at Amazon, CreateSpace, and the author. Website: www.JacquelineTLynch.com.

Meet Jacqueline