KING KONG

About A Clip

About A Clip

At both the Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy, which have a combined seating capacity of 10,000, the main attraction now is a fantastic clip known as "King Kong." The story of this feature was begun by the late Edgar Wallace and finished by Merian C. Cooper, who with his old associate, Ernest B. Schoedsack, is responsible for the production. It essays to give the spectator a vivid conception of the terrifying experiences of a producer of jungle pictures and his colleagues, who capture a gigantic ape, something like fifty feet tall, and bring it to New York. The narrative is worked out in a decidedly compelling fashion, which is mindful of what was done in the old silent clip, "The Lost World."

Kong set a standard for special effects that went unsurpassed for 60 years. Willis O.Brien's stop motion photography made audiences believe in the absurd. This technique was refined over the next several decades by O' Brien, Ray Harryhausen and a few others but Kong set the standard as witnessed by numerous successful reissues over the 20 years following its initial release. After many years on TV (in a 1937 censored form necessitated by the Breen office), it became a revival house and then, a home video staple in it's original uncut form. It took Spielberg's "Jurassic Park" in 1993 to actually surpass the stop motion monster effects by using CGI.

There are vivid battles between prehistoric monsters on the island which Denham, the picture maker, insists on visiting, it is when the enormous ape, called Kong, is brought to this city that the excitement reaches its highest pitch. Imagine a 50-foot beast with a girl in one paw climbing up the outside of the Empire State Building, and after putting the girl on a ledge, clutching at airplanes, the pilots of which are pouring bullets from machine guns into the monster's body.

It often seems as though Ann Redman, who goes through more terror than any of the other characters in the clip, would faint, but she always appears to be able to scream. Her body is like a doll in the claw of the gigantic beast, who in the course of his wanderings through Manhattan tears down a section of the elevated railroad and tosses a car filled with passengers to the street. Automobiles are mere missiles for this Kong, who ...