T w e n t y S i d e d

If the end result is Godzilla, whom I would argue has made the most money of any giant movie monster and has generated by FAR the largest amount of screen time, we should probably look at the beginning. I’m going to leave off some of the more technical “this particular concept likely came from this very early German sci-fi film” details, although I find film history and its interaction with speculative fiction fascinating and informative. There are a handful of important films (and real-life events) that informed Gojira, although the true primogenitor of the genre is, of course, 1933’s King Kong.

I am not going to delve into the making of King Kong. There are tons of very good books and some great videos on YouTube about every possible aspect you could want to look at. And there are new facts emerging all the time. Lost test footage, production notes filed away with a forgotten expense report, great-grandma’s diary found in the attic; I was pleasantly surprised how much RECENT information has come to light. I *really* don’t want to get much into sociological views of the movie. I personally think there is something to be said for inherent biases and views fueling some subtext of the narrative, although I have no doubt most people involved with the film never gave any conscious thought to such concepts. “It was a product of its time” is never an appropriate DEFENSE of a moral failing of any degree, but it IS an important part of understanding the nature of the beast.

However…

There are specific plot-points of “giant monster” movies that recur. They are fundamental to making stories like this work. And of course they are just adaptations of the same kind of questions that have to be answered for ANY story, but that doesn’t make them less valid in a monster movie. The three most important are: “Why is there a giant monster,” “why is it attacking us,” and “how do we make it stop?” Those three questions must be answered compellingly for the movie to work at even a minimal level. The better you answer them, the better the movie will be. If you surround the story of the monster with compelling stories of people, you can elevate the movie further. This directive is VERY IMPORTANT and will come up again shortly. Lastly, a good framing device is *usually*, but not always necessarily at least beneficial.

Kong has a framing device that works because of the era in which the movie was created. It is the early days of American cinema, and an industrious filmmaker has found success filming “adventure” movies in jungles around the world. His latest project is sailing to an all-but-unknown remote location known as “Skull Island.” He hires a boat to take him there, and at the last minute recruits a down-on-her-luck young woman at a homeless mission to replace his absent actress. No actors, no crew. He was just going to sail to a jungle and film an actress in distress in the jungle. Keep in mind that this type of thing was ONLY JUST being relegated to “shorts” before the REAL movie in 1933. In the previous decade such content would fill ranks of hand-crank nickelodeons at carnivals, fairs, side-shows, arcades, and boardwalks.

The action of the movie proceeds from that. On Skull Island the crew, filmmaker, and actress discover “aboriginal natives” that worship a giant ape. The natives sacrifice women to the ape to keep it placated. They want to sacrifice the beautiful, blonde, white woman really badly; because that would be an extra special sacrifice (as no native women are blonde or white). Our heroes escape the island and return to the boat; the natives sail to the boat and kidnap the actress. GIANT APE APPEARS. The ape becomes fascinated/falls in love with the actress and fights off many prehistoric giant monsters on the way back to his cave in the mountains. The heroes kidnap the woman back and manage to subdue the giant ape and take it back to NEW YORK CITY. King Kong becomes enraged when he perceives the actress to be threatened, breaks his bonds, kidnaps the actress, and climbs to what was then the highest point in the city, THE EMPIRE STATE BUILDING. State-of-the-art United States Marine Corp Curtis Helldivers fill the giant criminal with 7.62mm lead. Kong falls to the ground below, absolutely decimating 5th Avenue and prompting one of the most famous closing lines in film history:

The framing device is quite good…practically novel for the time period. But let’s ask our questions of the monster. Why is there a giant ape on Skull Island? While the Legendary King Kong is part of a kind of “Hollow Earth”/Titanoverse backstory, the original Kong exists because Kong is the kind of thing that CAN exist ON SKULL ISLAND. Giant monsters are just a THING on Skull Island, so why not a giant primate that is, apparently, the apex predator. Other than homo sapiens, great apes generally don’t fill the role of apex predator in their environment; but great apes aren’t typically fifty feet tall. Why does King Kong attack? On Skull Island, he isn’t really shown to attack anyone out of aggression. He is basically “summoned” to come pick up his sacrifice, then is shown fighting defensively until captured. Neither does he attack in New York. He is said to perceive an attack on the actress which causes him to kidnap her and attempt to take her to “a safe place,” which he equates as up the nearest “mountain.” How do we make the giant ape “stop?” Shoot it with machine guns until it falls down and goes boom. Simples. As for the “compelling human stories” I’m afraid we’re out of luck. Our lead “human” is the actress. She is placed in a questionable situation, then spends the rest of the movie screaming and being rescued. She has no story arc beyond falling in love with the ship crewman who talks to her a couple of times. He has less of an arc, as he has no backstory, let alone story. The filmmaker instigates almost all of the action. His motivation is making money, yet his own story is unresolved and he merely comments on what he sees.

We see in the end that King Kong 1933 is truly the definition of an FX Movie. The spectacle is the point. While Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion creatures were clearly the draw, pioneering use of traveling mattes, armature puppets, and rear-projection along with superb matte paintings, cinematography, and editing created an astounding visual masterpiece. The modern scholarship on subtext exists to explain why the utter lack of “characters” and almost non-existent story doesn’t bog this movie down…but again I’m going to leave that alone.

Nine months later, still in 1933, RKO released a sequel: Son of Kong. Made by the same team that created King Kong for a little over 1/3 of that film’s budget, Son of Kong utilized leftover props and puppets, and some footage from the first film. Willis O’Brien was given less time and money to create stop-motion animation and other FX, but utilizing knowledge gained from creating Kong, it’s hard to spot deficiencies. At the box office King Kong made back over seven times its budget of approximately $700,000; Son of Kong disappointed RKO by not quite managing to triple its budget of $270,000. I will aptly make the argument that Son of Kong is actually a clearly superior film, thereby once again reinforcing the argument that spectacle opens more wallets than substance.

The framing device of Son of Kong picks up only months following the end of the first movie. THE FILMMAKER from the first movie is being sued into oblivion for, you know, bringing a fifty-foot tall monster into the middle of New York City, that escaped and wrecked the place. Carl Denham, deservedly named in this movie because he’s now a real character, is played once again by Robert Armstrong and is now the ACTUAL protagonist of the story. Dodging journalists, lawyers, and kneecappers, Denham meets with ship Captain Englehorn from the first movie with an idea for the two to escape their Kong-related troubles by free-trading in the South Seas. This idea doesn’t really work, and they end up lamenting their woes in a Dutch-controlled port. The two take in a dancing monkey show that concludes with a song by a captivating young woman. The next day the two run into a shady Dutch Captain, Helstrom, who previously sold Denham the map to Skull Island. Helstrom suggests to Denham that Skull Island was home to treasure, not a giant ape. This bit is played up to the viewer as an obvious ploy to escape the port town, as unknown to Denham and Englehorn, Helstrom is not only confined to port do to questionable activities, but he is responsible for the death of the father of the singer from last night. After making a deal with Helstrom to take him to Skull Island with them, Denham runs into the singer, Hilda, played by Helen Mack. After hearing about the death of her father, he gives her some cash; but despite her begging, refuses to take her with them. Due to having bad experiences with women on boats, you see. But, of course, Hilda stows away, is confronted by Helstrom after being discovered, and is threatened by him to remain silent about his role in her father’s death. Upon reaching Skull Island, a pro-worker “communist” mutiny instigated by Helstrom gives the crew control of the ship and sets Englehorn, Denham, and Hilda off toward the Island in a rowboat. Charlie the Chinese cook and resident comic relief chooses to accompany them. Lastly, as Helstrom attempts to assume command, he learns his lessons in communal authority were TOO successful and he is thrown overboard as well. The group of five are chased away from the shore by the natives because of Denham’s previous actions: without the protection of Kong the island’s other monsters prey on them relentlessly. Finding a sea cave on the other end of Skull Island, the group ends up discovering a fifteen-foot tall albino great ape, the titular Son of Kong. Officially unnamed, but referred to as “KiKo” by the cast and crew, the “small” giant ape is never a threat to Denham and Hilda, who are the only people to interact with him after the group gets separated. Helstrom constantly seeks to gain advantage over Englehorn, usually stopped by a quick but comic observation or action by Charlie. Hilda is clearly quite taken by Denham, who ably fills the role of quick-witted, quipping “normal guy who shouldn’t be doing adventure-type stuff.” The final act is triggered by Denham finding a rough necklace of huge, rough-cut diamonds on an alter. Removing them causes the island to begin sinking, and ABSOLUTELY NO ONE MANAGES TO LINK THE CAUSE TO THE EFFECT. It’s just a bizarre coincidence that the island decided to sink RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT. As the last few feet of island disappear, KiKo, his foot caught in a crevice, lifts Denham above the crashing waves so the rest of the party can row to him. Following rescue days later, Denham expresses his sorrow for how badly he screwed up the island and killed both King Kong and the Son of Kong. But he DID get some diamonds, so at least he can go back to being happy. THIS IS ACTUAL PARAPHRASED DIALOGUE. He also realizes he gets the girl after Hilda essentially spells it out for him.

Son of Kong has some problems, especially, as you can see, in the closing moments of the film. Yet it’s obvious you can’t shove this story in an envelope and ignore it. While the narrative of King Kong could be changed in thousands of ways and result in the same movie, Son of Kong presents a much-more fleshed out world. The characters are deeper. Denham has an actual story arc…a flawed one thanks to the “at least I’m rich now” ending, but the story DOES have him realize his culpability in a tragedy. He even *almost* pays for it with his life, which is on par with most movies of the genre. Likewise, Hilda is given at least SLIGHT motivation for her relationship. Helstrom, abandoning the group when the island starts collapsing, is eaten by an Elasmosaurus (yes, it’s real) when he tries to take the rowboat. Charlie survives the movie, marking this as an adventure film and not a horror film.

So we have a believable and interesting framing device. We have actual human characters experiencing stories wrapped around the story of the monster. But what of the monster itself? Why is there a mini-King Kong? That’s simple. Just as Skull Island is the type of place that COULD have a King Kong, it COULD have a smaller, albino Kong. Questions of actual lineage and biology are JUST BARELY avoided by not providing enough information to prove or disprove methods of genesis or reproduction for ANY animal on the island. And then it is destroyed, so there’s no reason to keep thinking about it. Why is the Son of Kong attacking? It doesn’t, really. Even more than in King Kong, the monster in this movie fights defensively and is never even attacked by men. How do you “stop” the monster? Again, avoided. Not only is there no need, the monster becomes the savior…a theme that will become common decades later.

Contemporary accounts of the public reception to Son of Kong seem to indicate that both reviewers and the movie-going public were expecting another minimally-plotted, thrilling FX extravaganza. Son of Kong provided very little “wow” with its minimal budget. The lighthearted melodrama may have been a well-told, well-written story; but clearly the cameras were pointed in the wrong direction. Viewers wanted more giant ape fights; RKO wanted a low-budget cash-in (which precluded “more giant ape fights.”) I’ve never read anything suggesting RKO blamed the filmmakers for Son of Kong not succeeding to the same degree as King Kong. It really seems like they were simply hoping the viewing public would…be a bit more willing to part with their money based solely on brand identity.

Honestly, not much has changed in the past 100 years.

Kong, with the exception of knock-offs, rip-offs, and name-dropping, would disappear from theaters until 1962. Although, if you wanna get real finicky, the 1949 production of Mighty Joe Young is 100% a spiritual “third” King Kong movie. But it really fits better into a different genre, so I won’t be covering it.

But I *WILL* cover the second movie that most directly inspired Godzilla, and a movie that most heavily influenced the genre as movie-making headed into the 1960’s.

Paige Francis He/him