King Kong (dir. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933)
The 1933 King Kong is a film whose ubiquity, influence, and importance has made is difficult to talk about in any meaningful way. You can’t add anything new to the discourse. You don’t even need to see the film at this point to know the rough outline of it because it’s been referenced, excerpted, ripped off, parodied and remade so often in the last 85 years. You should watch it at some point, though, so why not this Halloween season? Sure, it doesn’t really fit the theme, but it’s a monster movie and Filmstruck categorizes it as horror, so go ahead.
Having seen King Kong several times over the years, though, I decided to watch it with the commentary. Not just any commentary, though, but the first commentary track ever recorded onto a film: film historian Ronald Haver’s lecture made especially for the LaserDisc release in December 1984. Unfortunately I cannot recreate the mildly irritating experience of having to flip the disc 64 minutes into the film as I am watching it on streaming, but these are the sacrifices we must make when we give up physical media [1].
So how is King Kong with commentary? Illuminating. Havers says that he has seen the film over 200 times, an amount usually only achieved by small children and their miserable parents in this age of monitored screening. After a brief explanation of what this new technology even is, Havers spends about twenty minutes going over the crazy story of Merian C. Cooper’s pre-film life. Highlights include time pursuing Pancho Villa with the National Guard, being a fighter pilot in the Great War and serving in the Polish Air Force after, nine months in a Soviet prisoner of war camp where he wrote an unpublished autobiography at the age of 27, a daring escape to Latvia, globe trotting journalism, and research work for the American Geographical Society.
For perspective, the most exciting thing that happened to me today is that I used a 25 dollar gift card at a gas pump and managed to get a whole extra 50 cents out it before I felt like I was stealing and stopped.
The rest of Haver’s commentary is concerned with the production history of the film: its origins in a vision Cooper had a giant ape attack New York City; how Fay Wray’s last minute casting in the film mirrored that of her character Ann Darrow; the innovative special effects and stop motion animation that brought Kong and the other creatures to life; how the film shared a set and was produced simultaneously with The Most Dangerous Game, also starring Robert Armstrong and Fay Wray; the various edits for content made to this after the the Hays Code actually began being enforced in the mid-1930s; and how its box office success saved RKO Pictures from financial penury. Haver mostly shies away from analysis, which is unfortunate as he’s clearly an insightful critic.
Listening to Haver talk is also a little sad. It was recorded 34 years ago when some members of the cast and crew were still alive. He refers to interviews he’s done with them over the years for his books and critical work. Haver himself passed away in 1993. It’s strange how a commentary track on an old film itself is a relic of the past, but there it is: the passage of time.
[1] How often do people listen to commentary tracks these days anyway? Oh, sure, there are things like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Rifftrax, but that’s as much comedy as it is commentary. When I was first buying DVDs for films that I’d already seen and liked, I would check them out, but now? Almost never. The last time was in September when I rewatched Slacker with Richard Linklater talking over it, but the time before that was perhaps Roger Ebert on Casablanca in, I think, 2008.
October 22, 2018
oliveresque 