About

The classic action-thriller-adventure that is the original 1933 King Kong follows 'alpha male' director Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), his team of explorers and actress Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) to the mysterious Skull Island. Using Ann as both leading lady and bait, Denham hopes to lure Kong, a giant ape rumoured to exist on the island, in front of his camera and into his latest film. When Denham sees the monster, however, he decides to capture it for live shows back home, leading to one of cinema's most unforgettable sequences – King Kong's epic dual to the death atop the Empire State Building in New York.

King Kong was conceived by Merian C Cooper as a Beauty and the Beast story, and draws on his own maverick film-making expeditions (such as his adventures in Grass: A Nation's Battle 1925 also screening in this program). The film harnessed the special talents of Willis O'Brien, who achieved all of King Kong's animation sequences with six half-metre kinetic models, rear projection, a giant gorilla hand and foot, and an enormous Kong head. He face was the most complex; it was almost two metres wide with 85 motors and was operated by six men. Unresolved and often contradictory representations of race, slavery, humankind and monster underpin the adventure storyline. Revisited now, Skull Island's prehistoric dinosaurs, mythical beasts and drum-beating 'natives' speak volumes about the anxieties and desires of 1930s depression-era America.