Who would have thought the story of a rampaging giant gorilla could have such lasting resonance? The story of King Kong has attained the status of a modern myth with interpretations ranging from the destruction of the natural world by technology to the exploitation of African-Americans in the US.
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There have been sequels and spin-offs and even a stage musical. The original story has been filmed three times and each version has its own strengths and weaknesses.
The 1933 film that set the template isn't perfect to modern eyes. The story setup makes sense: a film crew led by Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) is heading to mysterious Skull Island with aspiring actress Ann (Fay Wray) to make a film about a creature reputed to be there. And what they find is far more than they expected.
However, a lot of the acting and scripting seems corny now, albeit sincere. The film does take a while to get going but once it does the excitement hardly lets up (and at about 100 minutes it's the shortest version by far).
Some of the special effects look a bit creaky nowadays but the intricate combination of methods - miniatures, mattes, stop motion, glass paintings, rear screen projections - inspires admiration for what could be achieved at the time, often taking a lot of work. Much of it is still quite spectacular including the climactic battle between Kong on the top of the Empire State Building and bullet-spraying aeroplanes.
Willis O'Brien's stop-motion animation gives life to Kong and makes him a real character, brutal but oddly sympathetic. And the classic and influential score by Max Steiner is a highlight.
Dino De Laurentiis's 1976 King Kong was an expensive, difficult and much-hyped production. It began with two studios - Paramount and Universal - both wanting to film the story: De Laurentiis was with Paramount and, after much legal wrangling, agreed to pay a percentage of the profits to Universal if they dropped their plans.
De Laurentiis ballyhooed the project in full P.T. Barnum style: it was absurdly advertised as "The most exciting original motion picture event of all time". Much was made of the fact that special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi was designing a 12-metre high mechanical Kong, with the implication it would be fully able to move and emote and would be used throughout.
This would be impossible even today and in the mid-70s should have been beyond belief. But De Laurentiis and his associates persisted with the ruse, which served its purpose, gaining lots of publicity for the production.
In this version, the story setup is a bit more arbitrary: the ship travels to the island in search of oil and just so happens to come across shipwreck survivor Dwan (weird name) en route and then Kong.
The script lurches awkwardly between the campy and the serious: Dwan calls Kong a "male chauvinist pig ape" at one point but on top of the World Trade Centre tower begs him not to put Jessica Lange down so he won't be killed. This emotional bond between the lady and Kong was one element that worked and would be taken up by the next adaptation.
John Barry's score, particularly the love theme, is noteworthy but the Oscar-winning special effects are disappointing, especially given Star Wars with its far superior technology would be released the following year.
The full-size Kong seems to have been used in only one scene, and then only briefly: it's when Kong is revealed to the public for the first time. The mechanical Kong is stiff, barely moves, is frozen-faced and looks nothing like the Kong costume designed and (primarily) worn by Rick Baker, with technologically advanced heads providing different expressions.
The giant arms aren't bad but the compositing work is often poor and the giant snake Kong fights on the island is ludicrous, nowhere near as exciting as the Tyrannosaurus rex battle in the original. This Kong ran 134 minutes - already long - and was extended to three hours for its TV premiere.
Speaking of overlength, Peter Jackson's 2005 film was all too obviously a labour of love, an homage to a movie Jackson had loved since he first saw it at the age of nine. But his passion led to a loss of perspective.The filmmaker's all too frequent inability to respect the admonition "kill your darlings" or to recognise "less can be more" - obvious in his Tolkien films - is apparent here. This King Kong runs for more than three hours (with 13 extra minutes in the extended edition). It really didn't need to be anywhere near that long.
The CGI in this big-budget movie is mostly impressive, helping to develop convincingly the growing bond between Kong (played by Andy Serkis via motion capture) and Ann (Naomi Watts) that the 1976 film explored.
But inexplicably, the scene of a dinosaur stampede is not very convincingly done: the actors and the CGI don't combine well.
And speaking of the actors, while Watts is good as Ann, neither Jack Black as the movie maker Carl Denham nor Adrian Brody as Jack Driscoll (a screenwriter this time) seems aptly cast, though both have done excellent work elsewhere.
What has driven this long-lasting fascination with the character of Kong for both audiences and filmmakers? De Laurentiis was on to something when he said, "No one cry when Jaws die but when the monkey cry people gonna cry."
Kong, with his quasi-human characteristics and removal from his own environment to one he cannot understand or deal with that ultimately destroys him, evokes empathy and arouses deep feelings in a way that a killer shark never could, Everyone can identify with feeling like an outsider.
