Director: Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack
Cast: Fay Wray*, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot, Frank Reicher
Have I Seen It Before?: I’m having to guess and say I have. I’ve seen the 2005 remake (but not the 1976 one). I’ve seen every shot of the film that have become ubiquitous of the ape reaching for Fay Wray and being barely contained on Broadway.
Did I like it?: Strip away all the iconic imagery—also try your best not to think about that this was reportedly a favorite film of Adolf Hitler, despite it being banned in Germany during the Third Reich—and this is a very basic, very pulpy story. Some unspeakable thing is out in the jungle. Humans capture it. It escapes. It wreaks havoc, and then is destroyed, despite the chaos not truly being its fault.
It’s unfair to say that age has been unkind to the film. Age has been at least marginally unkind to films like Gone with the Wind (1939) and even Citizen Kane (1941). This one suffers more because—for all its technical innovation—there were decades of trash made with the same tools displayed here. Stop-motion articulated puppets have been duking it out while process shots and trick editing of actual humans trying to react to such phenomena have been playing out for years. When implemented by someone like Harryhausen or even occasionally by Tim Burton, it can have whimsy. All too often, it just looks cheap.
It’s important to remember that while the artistic methods for this film were largely invented here, as well as in The Lost World (1925). Were Willis O’Brien still working in movies, he probably would have moved from stop-motion. He’d be inventing new ways of showing us the impossible.
I’d like to think he’d avoid CGI, though. Then again, I can’t quite imagine what things beyond CGI would be. Might be why I’m not Willis O’Brien, and Willis O’Brien is.
*With a name like that, she was going to become an assassin, a superhero/villain, or a movie star.