Katie-Bar-The-Door and I continue to binge-watch cult television, following up three seasons of Veronica Mars with Joss Whedon's sci-fi western, Firefly. Set five hundred years in the future, the story centers on the Firefly-class spaceship Serenity and its crew of would-be pirates who smuggle contraband between the outlying worlds and their moons, some of them technologically advanced, others as primitive as the 19th century American West.
Nathan Fillion (TV's Castle) was the swashbuckling captain, Gina Torres his first officer, Adam Baldwin, the brawny but brainless hired muscle. The chief engineer was a fresh-face farm girl with no formal training, the pilot a loveable goof who played with toy dinosaurs.
To pay the freight, they also ferried passengers hither and yon, including a high-priced courtesan, a preacher with a shady past (Ron Glass of TV's Barney Miller), and a doctor and his mad-genius sister, the latter two fugitives from the law. A three-hour tour, it wasn't—there were no space zombie cannibals on Gilligan's Island that I can recall—but it was great fun, filled with action, witty dialogue, and more cows than you'd expect, considering how much of it took place in outer space, sort of a steampunk cross between Star Wars and The Wild, Wild West.
To say that the Fox executives who commissioned the project didn't get it would be an understatement. They took one look and promptly buried it on Friday nights where its core audience was unlikely to see it. To make matters worse, they refused to air the two-hour introductory episode, showed the rest of it out of order and pre-empted it frequently for the baseball playoffs. Premiering in September 2002, it was off the air for good by New Year's Eve.
And then like another misunderstood sci-fi classic, the show refused to die, eventually winding up in the theater as a movie. That it failed to spawn multiple sequels and spinoffs, ala Star Trek, is not to say it wasn't worthy.
The film begins six months after the television series ended. The Alliance—the not so much Evil as too well-meaning for its own good Empire that runs the known galaxy—is determined to keep its citizens happy whether they like it or not. And for reasons even she doesn't understand, the girl mad-genius is a threat to that stability. To track her down, the Alliance brings in "the Operative" (Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor), the worst kind of assassin, a true believer who wants to create a world so perfect there won't be any place in it for people like him.
This presents a problem for Captain Malcolm Reynolds. He fancies himself a hard-nosed cynic and would like to give the girl the boot, but like Humphrey Bogart in most of his good films, he always finds himself fighting for lost causes. "They'll swing back to the belief that they can make people better," he says of the Alliance. "And I do not hold to that. So no more runnin'. I aim to misbehave."
So guns blazing, he takes on the Alliance, the Operative and a horde of space zombies known as Reavers, and goes in search of an answer he's not sure he's going to like when he finds it.
If you haven't seen the series, don't fret—writer-director Joss Whedon wrote this as a stand-alone feature requiring no previous experience with the television show. Not that watching the series requires much of a commitment (there are only fourteen episodes) and doing so will add an extra layer of insight and understanding, but then maybe you aren't binge-watching fools and you're just looking for some top-notch fun-stupid. Serenity falls on the smart, fun, well-made end of the fun-stupid scale.
My ratings: Firefly 4.5 stars out of 5 Serenity 4 stars out of 5
Note: I've written about Whedon before. Better known for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Avengers, his low-budget, modern dress production of William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing was one last year's best movies. You can read my review of that one here.
[To read Part One of this essay (a review of The Birth of a Nation, click here]
Les Vampires—The Best Movie(s) Of 1915 Almost from cinema's beginning, recurring characters were popular with filmmakers and theatergoers alike. With the actor's persona—Max Linder's comically clumsy bon vivant, for example—clearly established before the film had even begun, audiences knew what to expect and could make their choices with some confidence; directors meanwhile could dispense with character exposition, which ate up precious film time, and get right to the action.
The progression from films featuring recurring characters to films with interlinked stories that starred those characters was a natural one, and the concept was as old as the serialized fiction that was sold in magazines, one chapter per issue, in the nineteenth century.
"Serials extended one story line through a dozen or more chapters," Daniel Eagan wrote in America's Film Legacy, "much like the daily and weekly comic strips that were growing in popularity around the turn of the twentieth century. A film that didn't end but continued on, that required viewers to return to theaters to find out what happened next, seemed like a gold mine to producers and exhibitors."
Typically, any given chapter of a film serial would feature plenty of action, and end with the hero (actually, almost always the heroine) in danger, with their predicament not resolved until the next episode. In fact, so often was the heroine left hanging by her fingernails from a cliff at the end of a given episode, the term "cliffhanger" came to mean a suspenseful situation left unresolved at the story's end.
Unless you want to count the multi-part Passion Play produced in 1903, the first serial may have been Victorin-Hippolyte Jasset's Nick Carter series, which ran in French theaters in 1908. Thomas Edison popularized the concept in the United States with his What Happened to Mary? series in 1912, George B. Selig's The Adventures of Kathlyn (1913) was the first to truly link episodes together into a single plotline, and The Perils of Pauline and The Exploits of Elaine, both starring Pearl White, were among the most popular movies of 1914.
Serials were most popular during the silent era, but continued to be a staple of Saturday morning matinees until the advent of television.
The greatest director of serials—the one who turned genre escapism into lasting art—was the Frenchman, Louis Feuillade. Feuillade (pronounced "Foo-yaad") had already had a big hit in 1913 with Fantômas, five interlinked feature films based on a series of novels about a murderous master criminal, one of film history's first anti-heroes.
Even better was Les Vampires, a ten-part, seven hour serial released in France between November 13, 1915, and June 30, 1916. Not only is it the best serial ever produced, it's on a short list of the best films of the silent era. Inspired by the vicious exploits of the real life Les Apaches and Bonnot gangs that terrorized Paris during the Belle Époque, Les Vampires (pronounced "lay vam-peer") tells the story of a criminal organization, The Vampires, whose reach extends into the highest levels of French government and society, corrupting those it can, terrorizing and murdering those it can't.
With the justice system unable or unwilling to bring the Vampires to heel, an enterprising newspaper reporter, Phillipe Guerande, teams up with a turncoat member of the gang itself, and takes on the Vampires himself, first by exposing its secrets, then through direct confrontation.
"All the roots of the thriller and suspense genres," David Thomson wrote, "are in Feuillade's sense that evil, anarchy and destructiveness speak to the frustrations banked up in modern society. ... Not only has Feuillade's pregnant view of grey streets become an accepted normality; his expectations of conspiracy, violence, and disaster spring at us every day."
The first episode—ominously titled "The Severed Head"—finds Guerande framed for fraud and murder. The second episode sees his fiancee poisoned and Guerande kidnapped and sentenced to death by the Grand Vampire himself.
And this isn't even the good stuff.
Both episodes are slam-bang and lots of fun, but they barely hint at the invent- iveness of the serial which doesn't hit its stride until the arrival in the third episode of the sinister, seductive Irma Vep, one of the greatest characters in the entirety of silent cinema.
Played by Musidora in the style of screen vamp Theda Bara, Irma Vep—which, as a lobby card outside a music hall reveals when it magically rearranges the letters of the name, is an anagram of Vampire—puts the fatal back in femme fatale. Although in terms of screen time, she fills what amounts to a supporting role, Irma Vep is, as Fabrice Zagury wrote in his essay "The Public is My Master: Louis Feuillade and Les Vampires, "the one pulling the strings," using the power of seduction—and murder, too—to bend the putative leaders of the Vampires to her will.
You can't take your eyes off her. It's my favorite performance of the year.
"Musidora," wrote Tom Gunning in his essay The Terrifying Yet Scintillating Origins of IRMA VEP, "clothed in her close-fitting black bodysuit, her maillot de soie, robbed, kidnapped, and murdered, and seized the imagination of a generation. For the devotees of Musidora’s silent films, that fascination survived for decades. The surrealists worshiped her amoral sexuality, and the revolutionary poet Louis Aragon later claimed that Irma Vep’s dark bodysuit inspired the youth of France with fantasies of rebellion."
Indeed, Feuillade consciously subverts the morality of his cops and robbers tale by casting against the alluring Musidora the dullest of dull actors, the blandly handsome Édouard Mathé, as the putative hero, and the delightfully hammy Marcel Lévesque as his bumbling, Clouseau-like sidekick, Oscar Mazamette. Only because you'd hate to see any harm come to Mazamette can you sympathize with the heroes at all.
That Feuillade's criminals were sexier, more intriguing and, perhaps more to the point, more successful than their law-abiding conterparts was not lost on French authorities. Paris police halted production and banned release of the serial on the grounds it glorified crime (which it most certainly does), a decision that wasn't reversed until Musidora herself showed up at the chief of police's office to do a little one-on-one lobbying.
"Surrealists [such as André Breton and Luis Buñuel] discovered in Les vampires a form of subversion that was fully compatible with their own aesthetic designs," wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1987 for the Chicago Reader (reprinted here on his own website.)
It's no wonder the surrealists loved Feuillade—his Paris is simultaneously whimsical and deadly, a place where you can lean out a second-story window and wind up with a lasso around your neck, where every cupboard hides a body, every hatbox a head, and your neighbor's loft conceals a cannon. There's no sense of safety—or sanity—anywhere. People are murdered on trains, in cafes, and even in their own beds. Perhaps that's why I, as a 21st century movie fan, find Feuillade's work so engaging—he anticipated the anxieties that came to define the 20th century and continue to plague us to this day: violence, paranoia, alienation, conspiracy, terrorism.
It also has a wonderfully nutty quality, the sense that anything could happen and often does.
"Feuillade's cinema," said Alain Resnais, "is very close to dreams—therefore it's perhaps the most realistic."
"[T]he orginality of Lang and Hitchcock" (Thomson again) "fall into place when one has seen Feuillade: Mabuse is the disciple of Fantômas; while Hitchcock's persistent faith in the nun who wears high heels, in the crop-spraying plane that will swoop down to kill, and in a world mined for the complacent is inherited from Feuillade." Both Lang and Hitchcock (as well as Buñuel) were directly influenced by Feuillade's work.
Equally subversive in the eyes of its original audience, Zagury points out, (if lost on viewers today) is Irma Vep's ability to move freely between the various classes that make up French society. That Irma can so easily pass herself off first as a chambermaid then as an aristocrat and then even as a man was a direct affront to the ruling elite's faith that it was imbued with special qualities that justified its exalted position in the nation's power structure. (George Bernard Shaw explored a similar theme in his comedy Pygmalion.)
In making my case for the films of Louis Feuillade, I want to avoid the tendency of many writers to simultaneously dismiss the contemporaneous works of D.W. Griffith, whose The Birth of a Nation was released the same year, to argue, as Rosenbaum does, that "Feuillade is as cool and hip as Griffith is overheated and square," or as Thomson does, that Feuillade's camera work is "relaxed, subtle" while "Griffith's is pompous and prettifying."
The fact is, both Griffith and Feuillade were indispensable in defining what we see when we go to the movies, and it took both men to give us, say, Alfred Hitchcock, whose certainty that anything could and should happen on screen was inherited from Feuillade while his masterful use of the classical Hollywood editing style to show us his often surreal action he inherited from its chief pioneer, Griffith. Fortunately, we know (don't we?) that film history isn't an either/or proposition—it's an and/and one. And thus, the choice isn't Griffith or Feuillade, Chaplin or Keaton, or even silent film or sound. It's all of them, and I want to see all of them, and you should want to see all of them, too.
Feuillade continued to direct right up to his death in 1925, including two more masterpieces of the crime genre, Judex, which I have seen, and Tih Minh which I have not.
Like Phillipe Guerande, Feuillade began his career as a reporter, and after he made the jump to movies, he drew on his own experiences to shape his stories. Feuillade was a workaholic, writing and directing over 700 short films between 1906 and 1924, working like a man chased by some unseen demon. "I haven't a minute to lose," he often said while turning down requests for interviews.
Although convinced film was an art form rather than a pure novelty, Feuillade believed his first duty was to entertain. "I consider cinema as a place for rest, cheerfulness, soft emotions, dreams, forgetfulness. We don't go to the movies to study. The public flocks to it to be entertained. I place the public above everything else."
His attitude did not endear him to the generation of French filmmakers who followed him. "The interest of the young filmmakers of the time," René Clair said later, "was diametrically opposed to commercial entertainments made by the prolific author of Judex of which they talk mostly with disdain."
As a result, Feuillade was largely forgotten after his death in 1925 until Henri Langlois—the same film historian who helped make Louise Brooks famous—resurrected his reputation. Along with the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, Feuillade is now revered as one of the founders of French cinema.
His Les Vampires is also proof that no matter how old, a great movie, like all great art, is timeless.
While The Real Musidora Please Stand Up? Here, by the way, is probably the most famous picture of Musidora, the one that always crops up when people post pictures from Les Vampires on the internet:
There's only problem—that's not Musidora, it's Stacia Napierkowska who plays Guerande's fiancee Marfa Koutiloff in the second episode. She's on screen for maybe five minutes, dancing in a ballet about vampires.
The second most popular picture of Musidora isn't Musidora either; it's Maggie Cheung essentially playing Musidora in the 1996 movie Irma Vep:
This is Musidora. You can perhaps see where the confusion arises.
But now you know. Just another in a long line of services we provide free here at the Monkey.
And the Prophet said, "And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead."—An Old Arabian Proverb
Is there anyone here who doesn't know at least the gist of King Kong's plot—a giant ape falls in love with a beautiful blonde and winds up on top of the Empire State Building as a squadron of airplanes plays pin the tail on the forty-foot monkey. It's one of Hollywood's most enduring stories, inspiring two big-budget remakes, several sequels and countless imitations. But in all its various iterations, none of have had the lasting impact of the 1933 original. It's fun, it's stupid, it's a landmark, it's iconic—and it's my choice as the best drama of 1932-33.
Depending on which of producer-director Merian C. Cooper's tall tales you believe, the plot of King Kong was either the product of a nightmare in which a giant gibbon attacked New York City or it came to him full-blown after he watched an airplane fly past the city's skyscrapers. Whichever its origins, the idea certainly appealed to his sensibilities. Raised on tales of adventure and exotic locales, Cooper had already filmed documentaries in Persia and Siam, as well as traveling to Africa for an adaptation of The Four Feathers, and had pondered filming a drama inspired by a family of baboons he had observed while filming the latter movie, going so far as to write an 85,000 word monograph on the subject.
Too, Cooper had been a pilot in the U.S. Air Service in World War I, later flew seventy combat missions for Poland during that country's intervention against the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, and in 1927, became a founding member of Pan American Airways. Surely the thought of flyers shooting up downtown Manhattan had occurred to him at least once.
In any event, Cooper pitched the story to Jesse Lasky at Paramount at the end of 1930. Lasky thought Cooper was nuts and that any resulting picture would likely bankrupt the studio, but David O. Selznick, who had just taken a job at RKO-Radio Pictures, decided the maverick producer was just what his struggling studio needed to goose its lackluster box office. Cooper didn't disappoint him. After producing a successful adaptation of Richard Connell's short story The Most Dangerous Game (with direction by Ernest B. Schoedsack and Irving Pichel), Cooper turned his attention to his giant gorilla movie in earnest. He commissioned special effects wizard Willis O'Brien to shoot two test scenes of the giant ape, and best-selling mystery writer Edgar Wallace to draft a screenplay.
A veteran of the 1925 silent version of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, O'Brien was the foremost expert in stop-action animation (the process of creating the illusion that an object is in motion by moving it incrementally between individually-photographed frames of film). He and Cooper conceived two test sequences, one of the ape attacking a crew of sailors as they cross a deep gorge, the second of the ape battling a Tyrannosaurus rex as a woman looks on in terror.
To people the test footage, Cooper borrowed two cast members from The Most Dangerous Game, Robert Armstrong in the role of Carl Denham, and as the heroine, Fay Wray, promising the latter a chance to work with "the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood." (She thought he meant Clark Gable.) When Game's third star, Joel McCrea, balked at performing the necessary stunts, Cooper substituted bit player Bruce Cabot. Fleshed out with footage of a Triceratops killing a man that O'Brien had prepared for an aborted film project called Creation, Cooper presented the test to RKO's board which immediately approved the project.
With frequent collaborator Ernest B. Schoedsack directing the live-action sequences and Cooper supervising the special effects work, filming was set to begin in August 1932.
Now all Cooper needed was a story.
Edgar Wallace wrote the first draft of the screenplay in just five days at the beginning of 1932, but died of pneumonia a month later. To replace Wallace, Cooper brought in James Ashmore Creelman who had written the screenplay for The Most Dangerous Game. Creelman made the ape more fierce and played up the beauty and the beast aspect of the story, adding the famous final line, "It was Beauty killed the Beast." Schoedsack's wife, writer Ruth Rose, then streamlined Creelman's script, eliminating, for example, an explanation of how the captured gorilla is ferried to New York. She also added autobiographical elements of her experiences with Cooper and her husband when the pair worked on those documentaries in Persia and Siam.
Among those autobiographical elements Rose added was the fictional movie director, Carl Denham, who heads the expedition to find Kong and film the encounter. Characterized as "crazy" and with a reputation for "recklessness," Carl Denham is not a man cursed by self-awareness and only his own half-crazed dreams can make his eyes light up. "It's money and adventure and fame!" he's after, the cost to those around him be damned.
"If he wants a picture of a lion," one character says, "he just goes up to him and tells him to look pleasant."
Armed with a cargo hold full of guns, explosives and gas bombs, Denham and a crew of "tough mugs" have everything needed to shoot a movie except an actress, but no matter how much he's willing to pay, no reputable agent will work with Denham and he winds up hiring a homeless waif right off the streets of New York—Ann Darrow, played by Fay Wray, of course. Going on nothing but a tale told by a Norwegian sailor in a Singapore bar, they set sail for an island "not on any chart" in search of a mythical beast, with Ann along in the role of Beauty—or perhaps bait.
"[T]his low-rent monster movie," Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert wrote for his Great Movies series, "and not the psychological puzzle of [Citizen] Kane, pointed the way toward the current era of special effects, science fiction, cataclysmic destruction, and nonstop shocks. King Kong is the father of Jurassic Park, the Alien movies and countless other stories in which heroes are terrified by skillful special effects."
King Kong is one of the most aggressive examples of a movie that bypasses your rational mind to work directly on the emotional centers of your limbic system, and much of the plot is a hodgepodge of cliches, culled from a variety of sources—Beauty and the Beast, King Solomon's Mines, The Lost World, The Perils of Pauline, and even the films of silent era director D.W. Griffith. (Indeed, in some ways, King Kong plays like a parody of the by-then passe Griffith, whose movies, when stripped of their art and their politics, can be seen as celluloid records of Griffith's neurotic dread that someone somewhere was about to relieve preternaturally pure Lillian Gish of her virginity, with Kong standing in for the freed slave, the Chinese shopkeeper, the Southern rogue and the French aristocrat of The Birth of a Nation, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm, respectively. Cooper even drove the joke home by having Denham put Ann through a series of cheesy silent-era poses while filming her with an old hand-cranked movie camera of the sort directors hadn't used since the advent of sound.)
But smarter stories have been told and instantly forgotten and a smart, sensible story isn't the point of King Kong anyway—fun-stupid terror is, and after a long tension-filled build-up, Kong finally makes his first appearance, thrashing through the jungle toward a screaming Fay Wray whom island natives have staked out as a sacrifice to their terrible gorilla god. KING KONG 1933 -
The wait is well worth it—Kong's entrance is one of the greatest in film history.
To create the special effects at the center of King Kong, O'Brien designed a half-dozen eighteen-inch models of the gorilla, using jointed armatures of aluminum for the skeleton, covering it in cotton and rubber for the muscles, latex for the skin, and rabbit fur for Kong's hair. (Sculptor Marcel Delgado, working from O'Brien's designs, objected to using rabbit fur, fearing it would retain the impression of his fingertips as he moved the model between shots—it did—but RKO executives were thrilled with the result. "Look!" one exclaimed watching the test footage, "Kong is angry—his fur is bristling!")
For close-ups of Kong eating islanders and New Yorkers alike, E.B. Gibson built a full-size bust of Kong's head from wood and cloth with an air compressor to move the metal hinges of his jaws. Similarly, a hand mounted on a crane was built of steel, rubber and bearskin. The various models of Kong scaled out to eighteen, twenty-four, forty and seventy feet, depending on the scene, a fact which drove the meticulous O'Brien to distraction but which satisfied Cooper's dramatic instincts, and moviegoers knew only that Kong was as big as he needed to be at any given moment to scare them out of their wits.
In post-production, Murray Spivak, the head of RKO's sound department, created the sound for all the movie's special effects sequences, which had necessarily been recorded silently. For Kong and prehistoric creatures, Spivak recorded animals at the Selig Zoo, slowing the recordings to deepen their growls and stitching recordings together to make them longer. For Kong's grunting, Spivak recorded his own voice through a megaphone. Kong's chest-beating was the sound of Spivak hitting his assistant Walter Elliott with a drumstick while holding the microphone against Elliott's back. Spivak also provided all of the screams in the movie, with the notable exception of Fay Wray's.
Another innovation, one we very much take for granted these days, was Max Steiner's heart-pumping score which underlined the action and ratcheted up the tension. As hard as it may be to believe now, at the time producers such as Irving Thalberg were firmly opposed to the use of a musical score in a film. He and others believed that music playing in a film from a source not immediately obvious—from a radio, in a nightclub—would only confuse the audience. A quaint notion now, but it took films such as King Kong to prove Thalberg and his ilk wrong. (Check out the blog A Shroud of Thoughts for an interesting article about Steiner's score.)
The real technical achievements, though, involved the processes necessary to integrate the models into the live-action sequences so that instead of dwarfing an eighteen inch model, the actors were battling a full-size ape. Sydney Saunders of the RKO paint department developed a new process for rear-screen projection (used for the first time in Kong's fight with the Tyrannosaurus). Linwood Dunn engineered a new optical printer that made composite and "traveling matte" shots (for example, Kong pushing open the gate at the wall of the native village) practical and economical. And O'Brien himself patented a projector that allowed full-scale live-action footage to be mixed with the miniature on a frame-by-frame basis. Each of these breakthroughs in optical effects technology quickly became the industry standard for decades to come, and while the film's effects are dated by today's lights, personally I find them more satisfying than many of the computer-generated images that have dominated the film industry for the last decade or so. (For a fuller discussion of Kong's groundbreaking special effects, check out Ray Morton's book King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon From Fay Wray to Peter Jackson.)
If I were handing out a complete set of alternate Oscars, I'd give King Kong awards for sound, score, special effects, visual effects, art direction/set decoration (what, at the time, was called interior decoration) and film editing, which along with the award for best drama, comes to seven, making it the biggest winner of the year.
Of course, none of these innovations would have meant much if King Kong hadn't fulfilled its basic promise of scaring the pants off its audience, and it most certainly accomplished that, with stories of audience members fainting in the aisles during the film's screening. Whether you congratulate Cooper, Schoedsack, O'Brien, et al. for their achievement or blame for the thousand pale imitations that followed is up to you.
Which brings us to the acting.
I can't say I disagree with Stephen Hunter's assessment, who for Washington Post wrote that "Bruce Cabot [who played the nominal hero, first mate Jack Driscoll] gave what was probably the worst performance in a great movie on record—he seemed more wooden than a tobacco store Indian and not nearly as colorful." (Indeed, Cabot played "Sam the Indian" in John Wayne's 1971 western, Big Jake.) And Robert Armstrong as Carl Denham isn't much better, although his eyes do shine with the evangelical fervor of a true believer.
But I do take issue with James Berardinelli's assertion that the overall acting is "barely adequate." As I've said before, Fay Wray made a vital contribution to the horror genre, teaching a generation of damsels in distress how to scream—and scream she did. Think about it: just six years before King Kong's premiere, it hadn't even been possible to hear an actress scream in a movie. After Fay Wray, we knew it was the only proper way to enjoy a horror movie. And while she couldn't bring to the table the nuance a talent like Naomi Watts brought to the 2005 remake, ultimately Wray brought something better—fear. And fear, after all, is what we go to a horror movie to experience.
Still, the most likeable and sympathetic character in the entire film, and the only one who feels completely original, is a stop-action model of a forty-foot gorilla.
And that, ultimately, is the genius of King Kong. I suspect that audiences of the time, mired as they were in the worst economic Depression in American history—25% unemployment, a third of the nation "ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed," the stock market worth only ten percent of its previous value—saw in Kong a reflection of their own plight, first as a representation of those outside forces we can't understand—the tornado, the flood, the economic turmoil that punishes the just and unjust alike—but then, as Kong is uprooted from the only home he's ever known and dragged in chains halfway around the world for the jaded amusement of Upper East Side popinjays, as the farmer who has lost his land, the man who has lost his job, the descendant of a slave oppressed by Jim Crow, the recent immigrant adrift in a hostile culture he doesn't comprehend.
"How did you ever get into this fix?" Denham asks.
Speaking for people the world over, Ann replies, "Bad luck, I guess."
In deeply anxious times, King Kong allowed audiences to express their anxieties without confronting them directly, and afforded them, in addition fun-stupid escapism of the first order, a satisfying emotional catharsis.
King Kong opened in New York City on March 2, 1933, to rave reviews and enthusiastic crowds, with lines stretching around the block to see the sold-out show at the 6,500 seat Radio City Music Hall. The film's Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theater featured a seventeen-act stage show as well as the forty-foot "big head" bust of Kong which was placed in front of the theater. Mordaunt Hall of the New York Times called Kong "fantastic" and "compelling," Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times dubbed it "sensational," and Relman Morin, writing for the Los Angeles Record wrote that "King Kong is the supreme product of the coordination of human imagination and human skill."
The film was a solid winner at the box office, too, grossing $2 million in its initial run, enough for ninth on the year's list of top movies. More importantly to RKO executives, the film helped the studio turn its first profit in five years, rescuing RKO from receivership.
After the success of King Kong, Merian Cooper worked primarily as a film producer, first as the vice president of production at Pioneer Pictures, then as the vice president of Selznick International Pictures. During the Second World War, Cooper joined the United States Army Air Force and was stationed in China, eventually rising to the rank of brigadier general. After the war, he formed Argosy Productions with John Ford and produced some of that legendary director's most beloved films, including The Quiet Man, The Searchers and the cavalry trilogy.
Ernest B. Schoedsack continued to direct, working on sixteen movies in all, including the Oscar-winning King Kong knock-off Mighty Joe Young. He and his wife, screenwriter Ruth Rose, remained married for fifty-two years, until her death on Schoedsack's eighty-fifth birthday. He died a year later, in 1979.
Willis O'Brien continued to work as a special effects expert and he was the "Technical Creator" on the 1949 film Mighty Joe Young which won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects. Although no individuals were officially named on that award—it went to "RKO Productions"—O'Brien did receive a statue from the Academy.
Max Steiner went on to compose some of the most famous film scores in history, including those for Gone With The Wind and Casablanca. His scores were nominated for Academy Awards twenty-four times, winning three.
Of the lead actors, Fay Wray remained the most visible, appearing in ninety-nine movies, though never again in a movie of King Kong's renown. "At the premiere," she said later, "I wasn't too impressed. I thought there was too much screaming. I didn't realize then that King Kong and I were going to be together for the rest of our lives, and longer." She was to have made a cameo in the 2005 remake directed by Peter Jackson, cast to speak the famous final line, but passed away before the scene was filmed.
Both Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot also worked steadily, but aren't much remembered today outside of the context of King Kong. Indeed, the actor connected with the movie who fared best was Joel McCrea, who turned down the part of Jack Driscoll. He went on to star in such classics as Sullivan's Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The More The Merrier and Ride The High Country.
In 1991 the Library of Congress selected King Kong for preservation in the National Film Registry. The American Film Institute has twice listed Kong as one of the fifty best films of all time (in 1975 and again in 1998) and in 2008, ranked it as the fourth best fantasy film ever made.
Trivia: The "Great Wall" set from King Kong appeared in several other movies over the next five years then was redressed as Atlanta and burned to the ground for the filming of Gone With The Wind.
More Trivia: Look for director-producer Merian Cooper as the pilot of the plane that finally kills Kong and Ernest Schoedsack as the gunner.
In honor of Bela Lugosi's birthday today, I am moving my choice for the best fun-stupid movie of 1930-31 ahead by a few days.
The brain child of Oscar-winning producer Carl Laemmle, Jr., Dracula was the first of Universal Studios' classic "monster" movies, a series that included Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Black Cat and Bride of Frankenstein and continued well into the 1950s (see, e.g., Creature From the Black Lagoon). The title character was played by Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian film actor who had had a huge success on Broadway with a stage adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel. Although Lugosi was not Universal's first choice to play the title character (Lon Chaney was reportedly set to play the role until his untimely death; also considered were Conrad Veidt and Paul Muni), he became so closely associated with the role, he rarely appeared in any other kind of movie.
The story, based more on the stage play than the novel, is by now a familiar one. A young British lawyer (Dwight Frye in the movie's other great performance) journeys to Transylvania to arrange Count Dracula's sea journey to London. Once there, Dracula begins to prey on beautiful young women, first Lucy Weston then Mina Harker—famously conflating sex, seduction, virginity and horror, soon to become staples of the genre—until that old vampire hunter Professor von Helsing arrives and divines Dracula's true nature.
The movie was a big box office hit upon its release in February 1931 and continues to enjoy acclaim today. Just last month, the London Telegraph included Dracula on its list of the twenty-five best book to film adaptations in movie history. The American Film Institute chose Lugosi's Dracula #33 on its list of the fifty greatest villains, ranked the movie #85 on its list of the 100 top thrillers and voted the line "Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." one of the top 100 movie quotes of all time. In 2000, the Library of Congress selected Dracula for the National Film Registry.
Lugosi himself didn't fare as well. Although he continued to work right up until his death, even appearing posthumously in Ed Wood's camp classic Plan 9 From Outer Space, most of his roles after the early 1930s were in campy, low-budget horror films for poverty row studios. He did have a supporting role as a Russian commissar in the 1939 comedy Ninotchka and in the 1945 Val Lewton adaptation of Robert Lewis Stevenson's short story The Body Snatcher with Boris Karloff. Lugosi died of a heart attack in 1956.
Martin Landau won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lugosi in Tim Burton's comedy Ed Wood.
Will you find Dracula scary? Not unless you under the age of four. I mean, the guy's wearing a tuxedo for crying out loud—how scary can he be? I'm not even sure audiences in 1931 found this movie scary and certainly by the time Bela Lugosi reprised the role for Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein he was playing the part strictly for laughs. But while it's true that one generation's horror becomes the next generation's camp, the appeal of Dracula has always rested not on its shock value but on its ideas and it's there you will find the lasting power of its horror.
You have to know what kind of a movie fan you are. If you're a sit back, arm's crossed "show me something" kind of viewer, you may find Dracula slow and campy. But if you're willing to give yourself up to it, particularly with Halloween just around the corner, I think you will find it fun. At least I did.
My choice for the best Fun-Stupid movie of 1929-30 is a pretty easy one: the first Marx Brothers movie ever and one of their best, The Cocoanuts.
For the "Why A Duck" routine alone it would be a must-see.
As good as it is, it's hard to imagine now the impact it had on audiences of the day. This being a very early sound picture, it's safe to say no one had ever seen (or heard) such a display of verbal wit on the big screen before. The resulting movie was a tremendous hit, one of the biggest of the Marx Brothers' career.
The story, as if it matters, revolves around an incompetent hotel owner and a crooked land deal, but in fact, the plot is just an excuse for Groucho Marx to torment Margaret Dumont and for Chico and Harpo to torment Groucho. Throw in some songs and a romance between two people you couldn't care less about, and you've pretty much described the plot of every Marx Brothers movie ever made.
But as Roger Ebert often points out, you don't judge a movie based on what it's about but on how it goes about it. And the Marx Brothers go about it here as well as they ever went about anything in their career.
I have to admit, this represents an evolution of my opinion of The Cocoanuts. Being a rather conventional person, I had always subscribed to the conventional wisdom that the Marx Brothers started well but steadily improved and peaked somewhere around 1933-35 with Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera. I had always thought of The Cocoanuts, being the first Marx Brothers movie, as essential for a devoted fan such as myself, but a bit too saddled with plot and minor characters to recommend to the first timer or casual fan.
But in working on this blog, I've now re-watched the movie two or three times, and I have to say, I've now come around to the notion that The Cocoanuts is up there with Animal Crackers, Duck Soup and A Night At The Opera. Because they first performed most of this on stage (only the scenes where Harpo eats a phone and a flower were new), the comedy is the most polished of the entire Marx Brothers' oeuvre. Yes, there's too much plot and too many non-Marx Brothers moments, but when it's good, it really is great.
Question: While researching the Marx Brothers, I read the following statement at a website called "The Golden Age of Hollywood": "Zeppo, the youngest brother was considered the funniest offscreen but played a bland, juvenile straight man onscreen." It's not an unheard of phenomenon—for example I am brilliantly witty on the printed page, as you well know, but mind-numbingly dull in person—and it's possible that while Zeppo was undisputedly bland on screen, he was a hoot off it. Does anybody know? I encourage those readers who have read more about the Marx Brothers than I evidently have to leave a comment confirming or denying the assertion that Zeppo was "the funniest offscreen."
Katie-Bar-The-Door and I just got back from a Thursday afternoon matinee (which somehow sounds dirty, but isn't)—Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. I won't say too much about it here since I'll no doubt be writing about it at length ten years from now when we get to 2009 ("Isn't it already 2009?" Katie asked reasonably), but I will say Inglourious Basterds is my favorite kind of movie, one where you can use the words "Fun-Stupid" and "Cinematic Masterpiece" in the same sentence. If you're a fan of Rio Bravo, The Good, The Bad and The Ugly or North by Northwest, you know what I mean.
I mention Inglourious Basterds here because as Katie said after the show, "Quentin Tarantino has been reading your blog." Which is to say that the movie is chock full of references to G.W. Pabst, Emil Jannings, German Expressionism and an allusion to Louise Brooks ("There is no Dietrich, there is no Riefenstahl, there is only von Hammersmark!").
The first in a series of essays about the Katie winners of the pre-Oscar era.
He was called "The King of Hollywood" and if any actor during the Silent Era might credibly have claimed to be more popular than Charlie Chaplin, it was Elton Thomas Ullman, better known to his adoring public as Douglas Fairbanks.
The star of forty-eight movies, including some of the greatest action films of all time, he was, along with Chaplin and his wife Mary Pickford, one of the three highest-paid and most-popular actors of his day. On his honeymoon with Pickford, Fairbanks and his bride drew crowds of 300,000 in Paris and London. At home in their mansion, dubbed "Pickfair," the two threw lavish parties and routinely entertained the world's most sought-after celebrities. To receive an invitation to Pickfair was to receive the social blessing of Hollywood royalty.
But Fairbanks was more than just a regular feature of the gossip columns and party circuit. He was also a fine actor and virtually created the modern action hero in a series of swashbuckling adventures that showcased an infectious joie de vivre and an extraordinary flare for stuntwork.
His lead performance in The Mark of Zorro, for which I awarded him a Katie as best actor of 1920, was his first foray into the genre of the period-costume action-adventure. Already a star of comedies, audiences responded with such enthusiasm to Fairbanks's new role that he cheerfully ended up playing variations on it for the rest of his career.
The per- formance was both ground- breaking and one of the most influential in movie history, esta- blishing many of the superhero and action hero conventions we now take for granted. His physique later served as the model for the comic hero Superman and the mask, secret hideaway and foppish alter ego inspired the creators of Batman.
As a co-founder of United Artists, Fairbanks had complete creative control over his pictures and he produced a string of action-adventure classics—The Mark of Zorro, The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, The Thief of Bagdad, Don Q Son of Zorro, The Black Pirate, The Gaucho—before saying farewell to the genre with The Iron Mask. On each of these movies, he worked not just as an actor but also as a writer (under the name Elton Thomas) and a producer.
The Thief of Bagdad was the best of these movies, one of the finest of its type ever made. Loosely based on stories from One Thousand and One Nights, The Thief of Bagdad is the tale of a pickpocket who falls in love with a princess and who then sets off on a fantastic adventure to prove himself. With the graceful and athletic Fairbanks at its heart, The Thief of Bagdad is as fluid as a ballet while at the same time serving up a rip-snorting yarn filled with the best special effects 1924 could offer.
I selected it as the best picture of 1924 over such classics as Greed, The Last Laugh, The Navigator and Sherlock, Jr. and feel completely justified in doing so. The American Film Institute voted The Thief of Bagdad the ninth best fantasy movie of all time, the only silent film on the list, and along with City Lights, one of only two silent movies on any of the AFI Top Ten lists. In my opinion, it was the best fantasy movie made before The Wizard of Oz in 1939, and was probably the best action-adventure movie before 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Fairbanks continued making swashbuckling adventures until the dawn of the Early Sound Era when he put down his foil and returned to the genre that had given him his start, comedy. He made four movies, including one, The Taming of the Shrew, with his by-then estranged wife, Mary Pickford, then retired from acting altogether.
He later received a commemorative Oscar in recognition of his work as the first president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and his "outstanding contribution ... to the international development of the motion picture."
Douglas Fairbanks died of a heart attack in 1939 at the age of fifty-five. His last words were "Never felt better."
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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