The Once And Future King

A very long time ago, in the year 1933, a motion picture was made in Hollywoodland in California. The film told the bittersweet story of the impossible love that developed between two strangers who met by accident on a distant tropical island, and then get reacquainted in Manhattan, another island where dreams come true, only to have their hopes shot down once again.

Perhaps the relationship was doomed to fail, the leading man being a dark, moody and aggressive individual and the leading lady being prone to melodrama and histrionics. Their union was perhaps simply not meant to be, and their love, like many fictional characters, was star-crossed. He was seemingly from another time, an individual willing to slay dragons to defend his true love’s honour, but she, by contrast, was the archetypal modern woman, not wishing and probably unwilling to be swept off her feet and be carried away by her paramour.

Then again, it may not have worked on a purely physical level, due to the undeniable fact that he was a 40ft tall mutant male mountain gorilla and she was a 5'2 blonde-haired, blue-eyed human female. The motion picture was King Kong, and the title character was played by a poseable metal and rubber model, less than sixteen inches in height and covered in rabbit fur. This model of Kong was positioned and photographed one frame at a time, in stop-motion animation style, and when his filmed movements were spliced with those of his flesh-and-blood co-stars in a special matte process, the 16-inch puppet ape seemed to come alive as the 40ft-plus King Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Creating this visual trickery was both painstaking and frustrating, and although the special effects seem primitive and unrealistic, if one compares them to the computer generated digital imagery of modern film, one must keep in mind that to the audiences of 1933, the illusion was nothing short of spectacular and terrifying. It was a celluloid fantasy with a special mixture of mayhem and magic, with dinosaurs, derring-do and drama. The economically depressed cinema-goers of the era ate it up like a brontosaurus chowing down on sailors.

At the end of this year, 2005, the Oscar-winning New Zealand director of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Peter Jackson, will release a new cinematic version of the tale. It will be the second remake of this film classic, the first one an abysmal failure made in 1977 whose only redeeming quality is the fact that it introduced the notable talents of actress Jessica Lange and the effects makeup wizardry of Rick Baker to the world of film. Peter Jackson has kept his Kong production quite private, with very little media hype so far. No images of his King Kong have yet been made available.

The new film has a cast that includes the capable and versatile Australian actress Naomi Watts and the comedic American actor Jack Black. Apparently, Jackson has remained quite loyal to the 1933 screenplay, so purists like myself await the mighty Kong’s third treatment with impatience and hope. I hope it is a good film. But more than anything, I hope that Jackson’s King Kong will differ in at least one way from the original. I hope it has a different ending.

I first saw the 1933 King Kong when I was nine years of age, and I must have watched it at least three hundred times since then and every single time I do, I always want that big ape to survive. I never have thought it was fair to Kong, (who is simultaneously both the hero AND the villain of the tale) to have travelled that great distance to be with his true love only to get shot down. He gets killed in the 1977 production as well, in that version taking a header off of the top of the ill-fated World Trade Center’s twin towers (only to be resurrected in the equally awful sequel, appropriately titled ‘King Kong Lives’).

Then again, I suppose that the original concept of the massive beast perishing in the film’s finale is probably the only part of this wonderful fantasy story that is completely believable, as anyone who has ever been in a tragic romance and has had their heart broken can attest to.

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