'King Kong' Review: No Job for a Cook
A mass-murdering monkey made a huge impression upon my psyche as a child. But is 'King Kong' a horror movie?
Update 10/24: I realize that I completely forgot to explain the headline! If you know the movie well, you may have recognized that Charlie the Chinese Cook (uncredited, but played by Victor Wong) volunteers to go to Skull Island and help rescue Ann, but is rebuffed by a white crew member, who tells him that it’s '“no job for a cook.” Wong’s screen career began just before King Kong with another uncredited role in Shanghai Express. He reprised the role in Son of Kong, receiving screen credit. Of his 37 screen roles, 30 (?!) were uncredited.
As I've mentioned before, I have no compelling desire nowadays to watch modern horror movies, with the qualifier that money changes everything (i.e., I’m a writer for hire). That might seem like a huge challenge in the month of October, when it seems like every streaming service is relentlessly pushing their horror and horror-related titles.
Yet, as I've also mentioned before:
What initially drew me to horror films was not the 'horror,' per se, but the suspenseful thrills that accompanied the various horrors that were depicted.
That drew me back to an early memory of watching a movie filled with suspenseful thrills that nowadays may or may not be classified as a horror movie: King Kong (1933). Sometime in the 1960s, I watched the movie via a local (Los Angeles) television station. Despite the advertising breaks -- which I don't remember at all -- and the small screen-size, I was transfixed.
Watching it again this week on a much bigger-sized television screen, I was again transfixed. Over the past 50 plus years, I've lost count of how many times I've watched the movie, but once again, I was surprised by how effectively many scenes simply work by virtue of the talents of Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Willis O'Brien, and their many collaborators.
Max Steiner's magnificent musical score really kicks in when Ann Darrow (Fay Wray), whose unwilling sacrificial offering has been accepted by Kong, is pursued through the jungle by Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), and a dozen or so hapless crew members, who are eaten and/or tossed off a log bridge by Kong.
Note 1: Neither Denham nor Driscoll are ever truly brave in this sequence. Driscoll is kinda brave for running after Ann alone, though foolhardy may be a better descriptor, and when he sends Ann down the cliff rope to escape Kong, it's Ann who lets go of the rope first when Kong starts pulling it back up. (Sidenote: who made that escape rope and affixed it to the cliff in the first place? A previous unwilling sacrificial offering?)
Note 2: Denham survives only because his sleeve got caught on a tree branch while he was running, which is more clumsy than brave. He shoots Kong with a gas bomb only after he's invited the native people to help The White Guys, whereupon Kong cruelly punishes, eats, and stomps the native people to death, simply for trying to help.






By this point of the movie, I realized that King Kong was much more of a horror movie than I remembered it to be, especially after the mass-murdering monkey broke free of his chromium-steel chains in the 1,000 seat theater. (Again, Denham and Driscoll are to blame more than the photographers, since Denham invites the photographers on stage, "reassures" the crowd that the chromium-steel chains make Kong secure, and sets up the situation so that Kong, who has already shown himself to be besotted with Ann, is taunted by the sight of Ann. Her fiancee, Driscoll, then puts his arms around her, as if to protect her, while also signaling to Kong that he now claims Ann as his property, which is sure to enrage the territorial animal.)
Once Kong escapes his bonds, he searches for Ann, first picking up a innocent man for no reason at all, other than his desire for a quick snack. Then he climbs for a bit, sees a sleeping woman who might be Ann -- hint: never sleep with the lights on -- grabs her out of bed, pulls her outside in her night clothing, turns her upside down, inspects her, realizes she's a brunette and not a blond, and promptly dumps her to her death.
Yeah, this is a horror movie. Or is it?
Kong is not finished, though, as he soon tears apart elevated railroad tracks and picks up a train full of completely innocent people who weren't even bystanders; they were just trying to get home. And why? He already had Ann.
He's just a mean, mass-murdering monster monkey.
Driscoll, who gets knocked out when Kong sticks his dirty paw into the hotel room to grab Ann, which raises the question: Ann, are you sure you want to marry this guy? Driscoll then gets the bright idea that airplanes are the best way to get Kong, resulting in even more deaths when his bright idea gets at least two more men killed by Kong.
Note 3: The planes vs. Kong battle is more effective than I remembered because the score drops out at the start. All we hear are the planes circling Kong and Kong roaring. It's brilliant and took my breath away. When Kong has been wounded, and feels that death might be approaching, he desceneds from the very top of the Empire State Building to where he left Ann and the music resumes, only now it's sad and mournful.
The giant monkey picks up Ann. She whimpers a little. Kong touches her and places her back. The music swells as he's fatally wounded and falls to his death, hitting the building hard twice before the street and allowing Driscoll to get the final line.
It's still a great movie, in my estimation. In my childhood, it scared and scarred and moved me. Even today, more fully aware of its cultural prejudices and technical limitations (in comparison to what's possible today), I was thrilled.
In my mind, it's a great suspense thriller. But not, in the final analysis, a horror movie.
It's a much better film than much of what is being made now, and that's saying something. In the studio system era, they made movies that were truly built to last.
Plus the fact that it's been referenced and parodied by everyone from "The Simpsons" to Sir Terry Pratchett, and the callback reference is always clear to the audience...