Movie Talks Archives

Posted by: wildandhairy at February 14, 2006, 10:06 am

Topic: King Kong!! WOW! (Reviews) Forum: JoBlo

Big Red 760, I guess we're getting off King Kong a bit, but who cares? I assume you have seen the 'restored' Pat Garrett, which does open with Pat getting blown away. For me Peckinpah was a glorious but self destructive director who was mostly screwed by the studio system. Major Dundee (I still have not seen the restored version) is a classic example of studio interference. I first saw The Wild Bunch before it actually was in a theatre. My next door neighbour had a 16mm print, and I had a Bell & Howell projector. As it turned out, it was an anamorphic print and I did not have the lens to widen out the image appropriately. So the image was squished, kind of like when you see credits for a widescreen film which have been squished to a full screen tv format. However, even though William Holden was kinda like a reedy teen (although Ernest Borgnine never looked slimmer) we watched the whole film--it was that powerful, especially at the time it came out. As you would know, before The Wild Bunch when someone was shot in a western, they put their hand on their chest and then fell down. The Wild Bunch was one of the first films which showed violence with 'real' blood. I can not any longer remember if Cornell Wilde's 'Beach Red' came out before or after--that was a gorier film, to show the horrors of war, with the occasional leg lying around, etc. Before those films, no one had probably heard the word 'squib'. They led directly to the use of violence much more realistically than films had previously dealt with. one can always debate whether this was good or bad. Films are entertainment, and these days have we progressed very far from the 1600's, when Shakespeare would delight the crowd during death scenes--when someone was stabbed in a Shakespearean play, they had a goat bladder full of coloured liquid under their clothes, so that "blood" would spurt out. It is an interesting debate as to whether we are any better than the Romans who attended the gladitorial combats--is the fact that our gladiators are only actors something which makes us superior? People have always been obsessed with violence. To a degree that brings us back to King Kong, both old and new. From my point of view, for example the 1933 King Kong emphasized spectacle. It was violent spectacle, but spectacle first. What you saw on the screen was so exciting it did not have to be hoked up with fancy editing. And remember, as others have noted before I ever thought of it, the original KK was the Jurassic Park of its time. The only feature which prominently used stop motion animation before it was also Willis O'Brien's The Lost World (Cooper always had the idea of doing a movie about a huge gorilla being brought to New York, and when he got the reins at RKO he discovered Cooper, who was working on Creation, another dinosaur project. Creation was cancelled and Cooper and his team were put to work on King Kong. One tragedy of King Kong is O'Brien's. Although he clearly was a phenomenal talent, most of his working life was spent developing projects which were never filmed. After the embarrassing Son of Kong follow up, later in the same year after King Kong, Cooper continued to work but rarely got a true chance to show his stuff. A volcano blowing up Pompeii was good, but just not really the same. It was not until 1948 or so, fifteen years later more or less, that O'Brien got to really show his stuff on Might Joe Young. But that film, which is actually pretty good, has always been put down as a 'junior' Kong, comparisons which were invited because that Young is a movie also about a giant ape. After Might Joe Young, that was pretty much it for any class A projects. O'Brien was reduced to working on very small budget films, some of which, like The Black Scorpion, ran out of money and had to use cartooning instead of stop motion. I do believe I have gotten off track.

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