Film #036 - King Kong (1976)
Fourteen years after Ishirô Honda opted to use a man in a suit instead of stop-motion to animate Kong in 1962’s King Kong vs. Godzilla, producer Dino De Laurentiis made the same decision for his big budget remake, King Kong. But, frankly, that’s not where this epic film falls flat. No, the suit is actually pretty good and makeup artist Rick Baker actually does a decent job emoting for the big ape.
Instead, it is in the story that the film fails. Not because of the excesses that bloated Peter Jackson’s 2005 rendition. No, here it is the shifting of the focus of the film in order to make some sort of environmental message that the whole thing falls apart.
See, instead of Carl Denham, larger-than-life filmmaker and Jack Driscoll, world-weary realist, we get Fred Wilson (Charles Grodin), oil company executive and Jack Prescott (Jeff Bridges), long-haired, hippie anthropologist. Right off the bat, this causes problems. While it was the most natural thing in the world for Denham, a showman, to decide to put Kong on display, Wilson’s logic that a giant ape would somehow make up for a failed oil-finding expeditionmakes no sense at all. Add to that the question of why the shipwrecked Dwan (Jessica Lange) would have been ever allowed on the island and the underpinnings of the whole film are shot.
And the details of the plot get lost in countless discussions about oil and corporate shenanigans, none of which helps advance the story one iota. It’s all so predictable, from Dwan and Jack feeling sorry for the ape (shades of Kongs to come) to Wilson’s sticky end.
Yet I rememebr being quite impressed with it back in the day. And it must be said that it was well recieved at the time. It is spectacularly shot and De Laurentiis may have gone crazy with the money, but he seems to have spent every last dime of it, cause everything looks great. Grodin, Bridges and Lange (in her screen debut, I might add) give it their best and occasionally help the material rise above its own mediocrity.
But the passage af the years has not been kind to King Kong. And things are worse since 2005, since now in addition to being outclassed in most areas by the original film, it is even outclassed visually by Peter Jackson’s. Still, for a fan of Kong (and I’m one), this is certainly a necessary entry. It’s interesting to see how, despite all the many changes, the basic flow of the film was left unchanged. It makes one wonder why they didn’t just do a period film and stick to the orginal characters. Jackson proved you can do an almost direct re-make and still skew the sentiment as far away from the original as you’d like.
In the end, this is the weakest version of King Kong. As far as overall quality, I’d put it behind even Son of Kong, which at least has the virtue of knowing what story its trying to tell. It’s still Kong and it’s still worth watching, but (with the probable exception of King Kong Lives) it’s the one you’re going to cue up least often of them all.