King Kong
King Kong is a 1933 film (made prior to the establishment of the Hays Code in 1934) about a giant prehistoric gorilla, the movie's title character, that lives on Skull Island. The movie premiered on March 2, 1933 at two theatres in New York City, Radio City Music Hall and the RKO Roxy, followed by a Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre on March 23 and then a general release on April 10 of that year. It was one of the first notable movies to make use of stop-motion animation special effects, decades before the advent and use of CGI digital technology for movie and television special effects.
A group of explorers, led by filmmaker Carl Denham, and including actress Ann Darrow, travel to the island where Ann is captured by the natives and sacrificed to King Kong. The giant gorilla captures her and takes her back to his cave, but on the way there he fights and kills a Tyrannosaurus Rex (and breaks its jaw), a giant Elasmosaur and a Pteranodon when each prehistoric beast tried to attack Ann. Eventually her lover, Jack Driscoll (the ship's first mate) finds her and gets her back, but Kong follows and, after a rampage where he kills several of the natives, is knocked unconscious with gas grenades and captured. They take him to New York City and put him on public display at a large theatre, but when he is startled by the flash-bulbs of the reporters trying to get a picture of Ann, he goes berserk, escapes from the theatre and goes on a rampage in the streets, killing several people. After mistaking another woman for Ann and then dropping her to her death in the street below, Kong captures Ann at a hotel, then destroys an elevated train and kills many of its passengers before he takes her to the top of the Empire State Building, where he is gunned down by biplanes and falls to his death.
King Kong was a success for its production company Radio Pictures (later RKO Radio Pictures), earning $2.8 million in its initial release (adjusted for inflation to $51 million in 2017 dollars) and was re-released in 1938, 1942, 1946, 1952 and 1956, with cuts made to the movie for violent and gruesome scenes in those later re-releases due to the Hays Code. It was followed by a sequel, Son of Kong, made an appearance in two Japanese films from Toho Studios, King Kong vs. Godzilla and King Kong Escapes, and was remade twice; once in 1976 by director Dino de Laurentiis for Paramount Pictures (with stuntman Rick Baker donning a King Kong suit to play the giant ape), and again in 2005 by director Peter Jackson for Universal Studios (with actor Andy Serkis playing Kong via motion-capture and rendered via CGI into Kong's appearance). Another movie in the King Kong franchise, Kong: Skull Island, produced by Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros., had its world premiere in London on February 28, 2017 and will premiere in North America on March 10, 2017. The original movie was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1991. A digital restoration of the movie, with all previously-cut scenes restored, was released by Warner Bros. on DVD in 2005 and on Blu-ray in 2010.
External links
- King Kong (1933) on IMDb
