ROBERT ARMSTRONG AND HIS APE MOVIES

It was in 1932 that Robert Armstrong became acquainted with an ambitious and adventurous pair of Hollywood filmmakers. Both were World War I fliers, big-game hunters and animal trappers, and partners in high adventure documentaries, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack had found a friend in rising producer David O. Selznick, who brought them on board at RKO, with Cooper as production idea man. Schoedsack was the technical side of the pair, knowledgeable about the actual physical and technical side of filmmaking, and became the actual director of their projects, with Cooper as an associate producer and sometime co-director. They turned out what would be the first of a string of horror-tinged adventure movies, "The Most Dangerous Game" (1932), with Armstrong having a part in it, albeit a less dimensioned character who had an early demise--the film centered on Joel McCrea and still young silent screen veteran Fay Wray. Cooper saw much of himself in Armstrong's general personality and wanted him for a film that he had been wanting to make for quite a few years, an adventure yarn dealing with the stories he had heard during his years making films in jungles all over the world of giant, vicious apes.

The resulting film, "King Kong" (1933), would put Armstrong at stage center as big-time promoter Carl Denham (very much Cooper himself). The film also began co-star Fay Wray on the road to stardom. With Copper and Schoedsack co-directing and the legendary Willis H. O'Brien heading up a visual effects team supporting his for-the-time astounding animated miniature sequences, the film was a treasure trove for RKO, bringing newfound respect for a studio known mostly for its "B" action films and westerns. It was Armstrong's defining moment and set the stage for the plethora of leading man and second lead roles he would play through the 1930s.

A sequel, "Son of Kong" (1933), followed almost immediately with the same production team and, though not achieving the critical or box-office acclaim as its predecessor, showcased another Armstrong strength--a great sense of comedic timing that had been evident, but not really traded upon, in previous films.

Cooper--gorillas still on his mind--came calling for Armstrong again for his "Mighty Joe Young" (1949), which he made about midway in his association with partner John Ford in their Argosy Pictures venture under the wing of RKO. Armstrong was again a reincarnation of Carl Denham as Max O'Hara, a fast-talking promoter looking for a sensation in "Darkest Africa". The Ford touch is perhaps seen in the cowboys who go along with young Ben Johnson as romantic lead to enthusiastic--to say the least--Terry Moore with her pet gorilla Joe (about half as big as King Kong but definitely no ordinary gorilla). It is a great little movie, with more light-hearted tone than "Kong" and a red-tinted fire scene recalling silent films...

HOLLYWOOD URBAN LEGEND: FAY WRAY

URBAN LEGEND: Was actress Fay Wray supposed to appear in Peter Jackson's remake of King Kong?

ANSWER: According to Peter Jackson - YES!

In 2004, Wray was approached by director Peter Jackson to appear in a small cameo for the 2005 remake of King Kong. She met with Naomi Watts, who was to play the role of Ann Darrow. She politely declined the cameo, and claimed that the original "Kong" was the true "King." However, according to director Peter Jackson, he implored on her to make an appearance in his movie. Fay Wray was supposed to appear at the very end of the movie and say the iconic line "It was not the airplane that killed Kong, it was beauty that killed the beast".

Before the filming of the remake commenced, Wray died in her sleep of natural causes on August 8, 2004, in her apartment in Manhattan, five weeks before her 97th birthday. The movie was released on December 14, 2005...

KING KONG REVISITED

I was born over 40 years after the classic RKO movie King Kong came out, and as a young boy growing up, it scared me as if I was seeing a brand new film on the screen. If you ask any film maker today they will all concur that King Kong was light years ahead of other movies, especially for 1933. The film is as fresh today as it was in 1933, but I do not think it could have been made today. Sure the big budget sequel that director Peter Jackson made in 2005 was great, but the original movie did not have the lavish budget and special effects technology that the remade had. What it did have was black & white, which really gave the movie and eerie look to it with the use of shadows. It also had one of the best actresses ever to grace the silver screen – Fay Wray. Without Wray, King Kong would merely be an angry monkey.

The story is also legendary. The story of King Kong parallels that of Beauty and the Beast where a gruff, monstrous entity risks his life for the woman he loves. Of course, in the 1976 version and the 2005 version, the relationship between Anne Darrow and Kong is much more drawn out, but in the 1933 version, Kong's just a normal ape who falls in love with a girl who was originally supposed to be sacrificed to him. Anne Darrow, portrayed by Fay Wray comes off as a screaming bimbo who doesn't really do anything to make Kong like her. Every time he comes around and picks her up, all she does is scream bloody murder. It's no wonder why some considered Wray a "scream queen". But then again, she is a pretty individual and we don't want to see her in any kind of peril. She's just your typical damsel in distress, something drastically changed about her character in later adaptations. The other characters are fine too, and Anne's love interest is a likely goofball who doesn't seem to admire her at first but comes to admire her as the film unfolds.
                                       

Kong is just an incredibly sight. Every time I see him, a get a good snicker out of him. He's just a normal, wild ape who acts out of instinct and at times doesn't know what to do with himself. But the scene where he's strapped down for all the citizens of New York to see and he gives off that cheesy grin, I just get a funny feeling inside. Maybe Kong is more human than we originally thought. He's willing to do anything to protect Anne and when he climbs the Empire State Building, he's attempting to fight off the planes solely to protect her from any harm. It goes to show that any animal, even animals of extreme height and weigh have emotions and in their own ways, motivations. This of course was elaborated on in the various remakes, but I think the original gets the point across more. Kong may seem like a threat to the citizens of New York, but deep down, he's just a creature with love in his heart and a determination to protect the one he loves, even if the humans don't see it. Why else would he break the jaw of the T-Rex. Why else would he take down a bloodthirsty pterodactyl. All these elements make his death at the end much more compelling.

From the start of the picture, its clever screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose (based on a story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace) suggested the coming terror. The film was shot during the spring and summer of 1932 in the confines of the studio. Due to their limited budget for sets, Cooper and Schoedsack used the jungle locale from the latter's previous film The Most Dangerous Game (1932) - an adventure film that also starred Fay Wray. When released, it broke all previous box-office records. Its massive, money-making success helped to save RKO Studios from bankruptcy.

Even though King Kong is one of my favorite movies of the 1930s, the movie is not perfect. There are some errors if one looks closely enough. In close-ups of his face, King Kong has more teeth than he does when his whole body is shown. The apparent size of Kong changes from 18 feet to 24 feet. This was a conscious decision of director Merian C. Cooper, who felt that Kong's size wasn't impressive enough in New York. The publicity materials would later state Kong's height was 60 feet, almost 3 times the average height as he is actually depicted in the film. In the wide shot of Kong climbing the Empire State Building, he is climbing the western face of the structure. The financial district is visible to the south in the background. The shot of him atop the tower shows the Chrysler Building directly behind him. That building being to the ESB's north east, that puts Kong on the southern face of the building. When he falls, in the closer shot, he falls back to the south east. Back in the wide shot, he falls off the western side.

The list could go on and on of errors, but what this movie manages to do – flaws and all was to captivate audiences in 1933 which were weary from the horrors of the Great Depression. In a weird way it made them forget their own problems and think it could be worse, they could be chased by a giant ape. To audiences in 2015, it continues to amaze and scare and entertain. The film makes probably had no idea some 80 years later people would still be writing and talking about this amazing film of the 1930s...

MY FIVE FAVORITE MOVIES OF THE 1930S

The decade of the 1930s was a tough era in American History. The Great Depressed had paralyzed society, and millions of people were out of work. Still though, the movies were a great escape for people. The movies of that era kind of reflected  a lot of the fantasy and escapism that the country needed. Here are my five favorite movies of that decade:

5. FREAKS (1932)
It is one of the most bizarre films I have ever seen, but I can not stop watching it. The movie was unavailable for years, but it is widely available now and shown on TCM often. Directed and produced by Tod Browning and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the cast was mostly composed of actual carnival (funfair) performers. The film was based on Tod Robbins' 1923 short story "Spurs". Director Browning took the exceptional step of casting real people with deformities as the eponymous sideshow "freaks," rather than using costumes and makeup. The film was panned when it was released in 1932, but beginning in the early 1960s, Freaks was rediscovered as a counterculture cult film, and throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the film was regularly shown at midnight movie screenings at several movie theaters in the United States.

4. CITY LIGHTS (1931)
Even though I have many Charlie Chaplin movies on my list of favorites, I think this silent film is actually one of the best the movie genius ever filmed. Although "talking" pictures were on the rise since 1928, City Lights was immediately popular. Today, it is thought of as one of the highest accomplishments of Chaplin's prolific career. Although classified as a comedy, City Lights has an ending widely regarded as one of the most moving in cinema history. The plot of City Lights gradually grew from this initial concept. Chaplin first thought of the film's famous final scene where the newly cured blind girl sees the Little Tramp for the first time. Chaplin wrote a highly detailed description of the scene and considered it to the the center of the entire film. Chaplin officially began pre-production of the film in May 1928 and hired Austrian art director Henry Clive to design the sets that summer. Chaplin eventually cast Clive in the role of the millionaire. Chaplin came up with the idea for the movie at the same time his mother passed away, and the viewer can see the tenderness and sadness in the movie.

3. THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939)
It is hard to write something new about The Wizard Of Oz. What more can you write about a movie that is this beloved and this written about. The film is mostly in Technicolor, but its opening and closing sequences are in sepia-tinted black-and-white, including all of the film's credits. It was directed primarily by Victor Fleming. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, but there were uncredited contributions by others. The lyrics for the songs were written by E.Y. Harburg, the music by Harold Arlen. Incidental music, based largely on the songs, was by Herbert Stothart, with borrowings from classical composers. Although the film received largely positive reviews, it was not a huge box office success on its initial release, earning only $3,017,000 on a $2,000,000 budget. The film was MGM's most expensive production up to that time, but its initial release failed to recoup the studio's investment. Subsequent re-releases made up for that, however. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It lost that award to Gone with the Wind, but won two others, including Best Original Song for "Over the Rainbow". MGM wanted Shirley Temple to be their Dorothy, but Judy Garland ended up getting the role. I can not picture the movie without her.

2. FRANKENSTEIN (1931)
There has been many movie incarnations of Mary Shelly's famous 1818 novel, but I think this early talkie with Boris Karloff as the Monster is about the best. The 1931 film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and adapted from the play by Peggy Webling, which in turn is based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley. The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff and features Dwight Frye and Edward van Sloan. The Webling play was adapted by John L. Balderston and the screenplay written by Francis Edward Faragoh and Garrett Fort with uncredited contributions from Robert Florey and John Russell. The make-up artist was the great Jack Pierce. Even though the film was made in the pre-code era before 1934, many scenes were controversial for its time. The scene in which the monster throws the little girl into the lake and accidentally drowns her has long been controversial. Upon its original 1931 release, the second part of this scene was cut by state censorship boards in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and New York. Those states also objected to a line they considered blasphemous, one that occurred during Frankenstein's exuberance when he first learns that his creature is alive. The original line was: "It's alive! It's alive! In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!" Now 80 years after the movie's release, the short 71 minute movie is considered pretty tame, but it was ground breaking in 1931.

1. KING KONG (1933)
Another movie that has been remade countless times, King Kong is a Pre-Code 1933 Giant monster Adventure film directed and produced by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The screenplay was by Ruth Rose and James Ashmore Creelman from a story by Cooper and Edgar Wallace. It stars Fay Wray, Bruce Cabot and Robert Armstrong, and opened in New York City on March 2, 1933 to rave reviews. The film tells of a gigantic island-dwelling ape creature called Kong who dies in an attempt to possess a beautiful young woman. Kong is distinguished for its stop-motion animation by Willis O'Brien and its musical score by Max Steiner. Before King Kong hit the silver screen, a long tradition of jungle films existed, and, whether drama or documentary, such films generally adhered to a narrative pattern that followed an explorer or scientist into the jungle to test a theory only to discover some monstrous aberration in the undergrowth. In such films, scientific knowledge could be turned topsy-turvy at any time and it was this that provided the genre with its vitality, appeal, and endurance. Merian C. Cooper wanted King Kong to be more of an ape, but Willis O'Brien wanted King Kong to be more of a human being. A compromise was met with King Kong being made into an apeman. This was Brien's third time creating an apeman, as he had previously created an apeman for his short film The Dinosaur and the Missing Link: A Prehistoric Tragedy and The Lost World. The movie made actress Fay Wray a star, even though the real attraction was the ape. One of my favorite movie lines of all time in the line spoken by Robert Armstrong  at the end of the film after Kong was dead. He commented "Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes...it was Beauty killed the Beast."


I never realized that the 1930s were such a prolific year for movie making. A lot of tremendous movies were made, and although Gone With The Wind (1939) is one of the most popular films of all time, it has never been a favorite movie of mine. Here are some of the honorable mentions for the 1930s: The Public Enemy (1931), 42nd Street (1933), Show Boat (1936), The Hunchback Of Notre Dame (1939), and Of Mice And Men (1939).

CLASSIC MOMENTS: KING KONG

One of the greatest movies ever made was the original KING KONG(1933). Here is a terrific tribute to the King Kong movie...complete with the famous line by Robert Armstrong at the end...