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 oppresses 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.
If you have Turner Classic Movies and you've never seen Jean Harlow take a bath in a barrel before, be sure to tune in tomorrow, Saturday, April 3, 2010 at 9 a.m. for Red Dust. I've only mentioned it tangentially a couple of times, but Red Dust will figure in the next go-round of Katie Awards so you don't want to miss out.
Here's what TCM says about it:
9:00am [Romance] Red Dust (1932) A plantation overseer in Indochina is torn between a married woman and a lady of the evening. Cast: Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Gene Raymond, Mary Astor Dir: Victor Fleming BW-83 mins
You'll be glad to know that on NCIS tonight, not only was the great Douglas Fairbanks mentioned, but two of the characters, Tony and Ziva, sat down to watch the silent Fairbanks classic The Black Pirate at the end of the show. (Yes, the Monkey occasionally watches something other than movies.)
Perhaps Doug has been courting the writers of NCIS with the same enthusiasm with which he lobbies his case here at the Monkey. Or maybe they, like us, know quality when they see it.
Anyway, why should two fictional characters have all the fun? Pull up a chair and join Anthony DiNozzo, Ziva David and yours truly as we watch this legally-available copy of the Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler classic, The Black Pirate.
Thingy of the blog "Pondering Life" (I read it every day) has admitted to having a thingy for Errol Flynn.
Flynn made his first movie in 1933 and his first great one, Captain Blood, in 1935 (and then a slew of great ones after that, especially The Adventures of Robin Hood). If we can look ahead to Jean Harlow, we can look ahead to Errol Flynn.
I think when Martin Scorsese made The Aviator, his bio-pic of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, he created the impression that Hughes's 1930 World War I adventure yarn Hell's Angels might be a good movie. It isn't. I coughed up nine bucks or so for the dvd, because I wanted to see Jean Harlow's debut and because Hell's Angels has a reputation of featuring some of the best aerial duels of movie history.
Well, I can tell you, Jean Harlow was beautiful, she gave us the line "Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?" (changing from a humdinger of a backless evening gown to a loosely tied robe and nothing else), but she was as raw as a newborn foal struggling to find her legs beneath her, and what you're going to see is the work of a promising amateur offering up only the hint of what was to come after.
The aerial footage? Hughes was right that filming airplanes on a cloudy day gives you a better sense of how fast the planes are moving. And there is a scene with a German zeppelin that is both eerie and bizarre (wait until you see how the desperate Germans lighten their load to gain altitude—talk about taking one for the team!). But that's not the same as saying the dogfights are well staged or that the zeppelin scene makes a lick of sense. For an effective version of that sort of thing, track down 1927 best picture co-winner Wings.
As for the story, which unfort- unately takes up the other nine- tenths of the movie, it truly plays as if a schoolboy wrote it in the back of a notebook and then doodled pictures of airplanes in the margins. As the TV Guide online review so artfully puts it, "the story seems to have been written in crayon by Hughes." Which, trust me, is an insult to crayons everywhere. It's so bad it almost transcends itself and becomes campy fun.
Almost.
I found it for around $9 and it's no doubt available through Netflix. But you've been warned.
Note: I spent all day yesterday in a legal seminar, which if you've ever attended one is a lot like sitting in an airport waiting for a plane that never arrives. But there's nothing like trashing a bad movie while posting a picture of Jean Harlow to get you back into the ballgame. So here we go and hopeful tomorrow or the next day, I'll have my choice for the best director of 1929-30 ...
For best supporting actor of 1929-30, I had my pick from several standout performances, among others, Louis Wolheim as a grizzled soldier in All Quiet On The Western Front, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., as a cad with a conscience in Our Modern Maidens and Chico Marx as a particularly dim-witted con man in the comedy classic, The Cocoanuts.
Topping them all, though, was Wallace Beery as the unforgettable "Machine Gun" Butch Schmidt in the prison drama, The Big House, which was not just the best performance of the year, but the best Beery gave in a career that included work in classic movies such as Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight as well as an Oscar win for The Champ.
Yet as great as Beery was, he wasn't the studio's first choice for the role and it was only a sloppily-eaten plate of spaghetti that landed him the part at all.
The Big House is the story of three very different convicts thrown together by a deeply-flawed and indifferent correctional system: the young rich pretty boy, Kent Marlowe, played effectively by Robert Montgomery, recently sentenced to prison for vehicular homicide after a drunk driving spree; Wallace Beery as Butch, who is doing a life sentence for a trio of murders; and Chester Morris as John Morgan, a small-time forger, natural leader and the only man who can control Butch's homicidal tendencies.
In re- searching the back- ground for her story, screen- writer Frances Marion toured prison facilities and inter- viewed both prisoners and prison personnel, and while the screenplay exhibits her typical light touch, it is a scathing portrait of the American penal system. She won an Oscar for her efforts, becoming the first woman in a non-acting category to win an Academy Award.
Silent film star Lon Chaney was originally cast in the role of Butch but fell ill before shooting began and died later that summer. As his replacement, Marion persuaded MGM to cast Beery after seeing him eat spaghetti in the studio's cafeteria, saying later that something about the way he ate reminded her of the convicts she had interviewed at San Quentin.
Beery was a veteran of 183 silent movies, including The Lost World, Robin Hood, Beggars of Life and Buster Keaton's first feature length movie, Three Ages, but Paramount had dropped his contract as part of a wholesale purge at the end of the Silent Era and he hadn't worked in a film in more than a year.
Marion's choice turns out to have been inspired.
Although the story centers on Chester Morris, who must find personal redemption without betraying his fellow inmates, it's Beery who has the pivotal role. He must be menacing enough to present a very real danger while being charming enough to give the audience a rooting interest in his fate. Beery essays the part brilliantly, turning Butch into a hulking, conniving, yet likable sociopath who often seems perplexed at his own brutality.
"I shouldn't have slipped her that ant poison," Butch laments while reminiscing about his late love Sadie, "I should have just batted her in the jaw."
Beery is solid in his first few scenes, particularly when Montgomery's Marlowe gets off on the wrong foot by complaining to a prison guard that Butch has stolen his cigarettes, then takes command of the movie in a sequence that has been imitated and parodied many times since. At dinner in the prison mess hall, he explodes "I can't eat that stuff!" throws his plate, bangs his cup and starts a riot.
That a scene copied by everyone from James Cagney to Leslie Nielsen still holds its power nearly eighty later is a testament to Beery's ability as an actor.
The scene is typical of the movie as a whole, capturing the boredom and desperation of prison life, the casual cruelty, the lack of hope and purpose, yet so well-told and acted, that despite having a point to make, it never becomes a chore to watch.
The Big House is quite subversive, I think, as a study of the society that created such a prison system. The prison warden (Lewis Stone) is passive and ineffectual, rich kid Marlowe turns out to be a cowardly weasel, while two hardened criminals are strong, likeable and sympathetic.
The movie is also an indictment of a system that warehouses men in cells not much wider than Butch's shoulders without regard to the effect a sociopath such as Butch will have on a weak naif such as Marlowe, turning the later into a hardened criminal, a victim or both.
As Butch tells Marlowe on first meeting, "I'll learn you a lot of things before we're through with you in here." You just have to wonder whether they are the sorts of things we really want anyone to know.
During his years in Hollywood, Beery developed a reputation of being difficult to work with. Child actor Jackie Cooper (The Champ) called him "the most sadistic person I have ever known," and Jean Harlow, his co-star in Dinner at Eight, detested him. Louise Brooks, on the other hand, who could be scathing in her dismissal of those she didn't like, adored Beery, saying that while he was "the meanest bear alive on the set," he was "a honey bear" off it.
Maybe he was all of those things. Who knows.
In any event, after earning an Oscar nomination for The Big House, Beery co-starred with Marie Dressler in her Oscar-winning vehicle Min and Bill, won an Oscar of his own playing a broken-down boxer in The Champ, played key roles in Grand Hotel and Dinner at Eight, and was unforgettable as Long John Silver in 1934's Treasure Island. He worked steadily right up until his death of a heart attack in 1949 at the age of sixty-four.
"When my time is up," Machine Gun Butch boasts in The Big House, "I'll still be standing on my feet." The same could have been said of Beery himself.
The second in a series of brief essays about the Katie winners of the pre-Oscar era.
I've teased Gloria Swanson off and on for two lines of dialogue that her character, Norma Desmond, spoke in the Billy Wilder classic Sunset Boulevard—"We didn't need dialogue; we had faces!" and "I am big; it's the pictures that got small!"—but she really was one of the best actresses of the Silent Era and for her breakthrough performance in the Cecil B. DeMille drama Male and Female, I gave her the Katie for best actress of 1919.
The movie itself is an odd marriage of Upstairs Downstairs and Gilligan's Island—a group of English aristocrats and their servants are marooned together on a South Seas island where naturally the servants prove much more adept at survival than their indolent, self-indulgent counterparts. Initially, Gloria Swanson plays the most stubbornly indolent of them all, but when she falls in love with her butler, the real leader on the island, she gradually comes to realize what's truly important in life.
That is until they're all rescued and DeMille serves up one of the most reactionary endings in movie history.
That Swanson managed to make all this hokum believable was a testament to her skill as an actress. Overnight, both she and DeMille became major players in Hollywood and both were stars on their respective sides of the camera for the rest of the decade.
Swanson made such silent classics as The Affairs of Anatol and Sadie Thompson and seemed to make the transition to talkies successfully—she received an Oscar nomination for her first talkie, The Trespasser—but her career went into decline and, with one exception, she made no movies between Music in the Air in 1934 and her comeback in Sunset Boulevard in 1950, for which she received her third and final Oscar nomination.
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."
Actually the best Fun-Stupid movie of 1928-29 is Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Jr. But since this classic comedy has already won a couple of Katies (for actor and supporting actor) and I've written two compelling essays about it, you've by now no doubt already tracked down a copy and watched it—a couple of times if you're anything like me.
Okay, so nobody's anything like me.
Anyway, there's another Keaton comedy from 1928 you don't want to miss. The Camera- man is the story of a tintype operator who aspires to become a newsreel photographer for the same reason a Buster Keaton character usually aspires to do anything, to impress a woman, in this case, Marceline Day. There are great scenes involving a gang war in Chinatown, an oversize pair of swim trunks at a public pool and an organ grinder's monkey that not only saves the day but proves to be a better filmmaker than Keaton.
The Cameraman doesn't include the death-defying physical stunts that marked most of Keaton's comedies, and for that reason alone I'd say if you've never seen a Buster Keaton movie, don't start with this one, but it is chock full of great gags and also works quite well as a commentary on the experimental cinema of the era. Not to mention Keaton plays perhaps the most appealing character of his career.
On the other hand, if Buster Keaton isn't your porkpie hat full of tea, I suggest you check out the Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Iron Mask. Based on a pair of novels by Alexandre Dumas père, Twenty Years After and The Man in the Iron Mask, it's a sequel to Fairbanks's 1921 hit The Three Musketeers and features the return of D'Artagnan and his three compadres, Athos, Porthos and Aramis.
Fairbanks nabbed a well-deserved Katie nomination for his performance as the larger-than-life D'Artagnan, and as you would expect when the name Douglas Fairbanks appears above the title, the movie features plenty of action and swordplay. But it's also a great buddy movie and surprisingly touching. This was Fairbanks's last silent movie: I think he knew that his days as an action star were numbered and he wanted to go out on a high note. That he does.
Both movies (plus Steamboat Bill, Jr.) are available on DVD.
Striving always for balance in our coverage of the ongoing feud between silent film greats Lon Chaney and Douglas Fairbanks, we here at the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards present a movie poster of the latter's nominated feature, The Iron Mask.
Before you go to bed Monday night, be sure to set your recorder to tape King Vidor's classic anti-war movie, The Big Parade. It's on Turner Classic Movies on Tuesday morning, May 26, 2009, at 2:15 a.m. It's part of TCM's three-day Memorial Day marathon.
I'm sure you'll remember that The Big Parade turned up on my list of Twenty Silent Movies To Cut Your Teeth On. The scene where our boys march into the teeth of German sniper and machine gun fire at the battle of Belleau Wood is worth the price of admission alone.
There's also a nifty John Gilbert romance thrown in for good measure. That's for lupner.
The Big Parade is credited with being the first realistic war movie ever made. It was a huge hit in its day and was the biggest grossing movie of the 1920s, hauling in $22 million world-wide which considering that movie admissions cost, what, a nickel? is an astounding amount of money ...
When I first decided to hand out Katie awards for supporting actress (despite the fact that the Academy didn't create the category until 1936), I kicked around a number of choices for the first one—Mary Philbin and Olga Baclanova in the horror classic The Man Who Laughs, Gladys Brockwell as a hooker with a heart of stone in Oscar-winner Seventh Heaven, Louise Brooks in A Girl In Every Port, Margaret Livingston in Sunrise and even Norma Shearer who was uncharacteristically fun in The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg—but it was Clara Bow's turn in Wings that I kept coming back to.
Wings is the story of two pilots who have volunteered for the American Expeditionary Force headed for France and the First World War. They're both in love with the rich girl on the hill. She only has eyes for Richard Arlen but the third member of the triangle, a young and naive Buddy Rogers, is sure he's the one.
Ironically, Bow who was known as the "It Girl," the greatest sex symbol of the day, was not part of the triangle. Instead, she's on the outside looking in, playing an atypical role for her, the fresh-faced girl next door. She's been in love with Rogers ever since she was a kid, but he's never seen her anything other than a pal.
Clara Bow's part was not in the original story, penned by future Oscar-winner John Monk Saunders (The Dawn Patrol), but was instead inserted into the picture to take advantage of Bow's popularity. Director William Wellman, for one, was delighted—Bow's presence guaranteed a bigger gross at the box office.
As it turns out, it also guaranteed someone on the screen knew something about acting.
In order to achieve authenticity in the truly spectacular flying stunts, Wellman (himself a flyer during World War I) and special effects man Roy Pomeroy bolted cameras onto biplanes and hired actors based on their ability to fly. While the result is still some of the most spectacular aerial combat and trick flying ever filmed (Pomeroy won a well-deserved Oscar for his efforts), the acting, outside of Clara Bow's supporting role and Gary Cooper's three-minute star-making appearance, is spotty at best.
Bow, hopelessly in love with Rogers, follows him to France as a volunteer ambulance driver. While on furlough, she sees him with a Parisian hooker while he on the other hand is too drunk to recognize his old pal. In the best scene of the movie, Bow hustles him out of the bar just ahead of the MPs and takes him to a hotel room where he's too drunk to perform. As he sleeps it off, she sees a locket with the other woman's picture and finally realizes the truth about his feelings.
Victor Fleming, who directed Bow in two movies and who would go on to direct Gone With The Wind and The Wizard Of Oz, compared her talent to "a great violin; touch her, and she answered with genius."
Watching her in Wings (then in It and everything else I could get my hands on), I saw the same thing in Clara Bow that others saw in her at the time, that when she's on the screen, you simply can't take your eyes off her.
It's not that she was the most beautiful woman of the era; to be honest, she often wasn't even the most beautiful woman in whichever movie I was watching. But she had what all the great stars had, a quality that attracts attention no matter what else is happening on screen and an ability to make us root for her no matter what part she's playing.
Maybe in Bow's case that quality had something to do with the odds she had to overcome to succeed, both on-screen and off. Although she usually played a bubbly modern woman who knew just what she wanted, there was often (as there is in Wings) a vulnerability and pathos just below the surface. That contradiction—fighting for what she wanted when she's secretly afraid to—is called courage and that courage gives her characters a humanity her audience could relate to.
In what I suppose you could describe as proto-Method acting, Bow added depth to her characters by drawing on emotional memories of her horrific Brooklyn childhood—her mother was a mentally-ill prostitute who routinely assaulted Bow before finally trying to kill her; her father abandoned Bow at birth only to return when she was a teenager and rape her.
Those who worked with Bow said that whenever a scene called for tears, she would have someone play "Rock-A-Bye Baby" and real tears flowed. Given her childhood, I can only imagine what the song meant to her.
"All the time the flapper is laughing and dancing," she once said, "there's a feeling of tragedy underneath. She's unhappy and disillusioned, and that's what people sense. That's what makes her different."
I think Bow was describing herself.
Wings was a huge hit and won two Oscars, for best picture and for "engineering effects." In 1997, it was included in the National Film Registry.
Although she was one of the most popular actresses of her day, Bow was out of the movies within six years. Producer B.P. Schulberg of Paramount Studios shoved Bow into an interchangeable series of underwritten flapper and shopgirl parts then handled her transition to sound carelessly—MGM gave Greta Garbo two years to prepare for her first sound picture; Paramount gave Bow two weeks. Even though her Brooklyn accent was fine for the parts she played, Bow developed an odd phobia that left her terrified of the microphones that recorded her voice which led to numerous production delays.
In addition, Bow was a favorite target of the gossip columnists, particularly after she sued her personal secretary for embezzlement. Although she won the suit, the details of Bow's private life that emerged from the trial were scandalous and turned the public against her.
Schulberg took to calling her "Crisis-a-day-Clara" and dropped her from her contract when, exhausted from overwork and savage publicity, she suffered a nervous breakdown.
Bow made a brief comeback in 1932 for Fox and though both movies, Call Her Savage and Hoop-La, were critical and commercial successes, Bow was worn out from years in the public eye. She retired from acting at the age of 28, never to return to the screen.
"A sex symbol is a heavy load to carry," she later wrote, "when you're tired, hurt and bewildered."
At the time and for years after, Bow's notoriety obscured her talent. But she was, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it, "the real thing," and the more I see of her work, the more I am convinced she was one of the greatest actresses of the Silent Era.
In addition, I would say that more than with any other performer or picture so far, watching movies for this blog has completely altered my perception of Clara Bow. When I began writing, I saw her as the empty-headed glamour girl the gossip columnists of the time so gleefully tore into. Watching her movies, I realized she was actually something quite special.
It's a measure of the lasting damage celebrity gossip can do when we so casually tar someone with the brush of scandal. The tabloids of Bow's day recycled their rumors, sold their papers, wrapped fish in them the next day and moved on. But the perception they created has lingered now for eighty years.
Katie- Bar-The- Door and I took our own advice and went to see The General at the Kennedy Center last night. How often, when you're writing a chronological history of the movies, do you get a chance to see one of the films you've been promoting in a theater (with the National Symphony Orchestra providing the backing music, no less) and then review it in a timely fashion.
Some things we learned:
1) The General is just as good as I said it was, in fact, better—and you'll remember that I said it was the best movie of the Silent Era. I had seen The General many times before but never in a theater and certainly never with the National Symphony Orchestra sitting in front of it. It turned out to be a great Saturday night date movie, as much fun as the best fun-stupid movie, with the emphasis heavily on the fun.
2) Before the performance, the conductor noted that Buster Keaton had sent out cards with the movie directing the audience to "cheer the hero and hiss the villain," and to its credit, the enthusiastic audience tried hard last night to hiss the villain. The only problem is, in Keaton there really is no villain—other than fate, bad luck and miscommunication. It's as if Keaton had anticipated the French existentialists nearly two decades before Jean-Paul Sartre published Being And Nothingness and decided it's life itself that's our biggest adversary.
3) The Kennedy Center is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to walk there. Except we did, having eaten tapas at Jaleo's earlier in the evening and then walked down to the Tidal Basin to see the cherry blossoms. For all practical purposes, the Kennedy Center sits on an island surrounded by a sea of interstates, bridges and exit ramps. It was opened in 1971 when I suppose it seemed clear to urban planners that human legs would soon become vestigial to be replaced in the course of evolution by the automobile.
4) The steamed mussels at Jaleo's are terrific. So is everything else.
5) Tickets at the Kennedy Center are half-price if you buy them in person after 6 p.m. on the night of the show. We wound up with good orchestra level tickets for the price of an upper deck nose-bleed seat.
That's not a special effect, that's not a model, that's not computer-generated trickery. That's Buster Keaton dropping a real locomotive into the middle of a very real river.
I don't think I need to point out that he got this shot in one take ...
If you're only going to see one movie from what I'm calling the pre- Oscars Silent Era, then Buster Keaton's masterpiece The General is the one to see.
Not only is it one of the greatest comedies ever made, The General, which Keaton wrote, directed and starred in, is also an action film that puts most of its modern counterparts to shame.
Based on an incident from the American Civil War, the story—about a lovelorn engineer who finds himself battling spies who hijack his train—features a spectacular chase involving two, then three speeding locomotives, daredevil stunts, explosions, burning bridges, comic mishaps, sight gags, split-second timing, all while Keaton woos the girl.
This being the real thing (Keaton did all his own stunts and used full-sized trains, one of which wound up sitting in the bottom of a river for fifteen years), it's a wonder nobody got killed filming it.
Like in the best silent films, the lack of dialogue is almost irrelevant. The outline of the plot is easy enough to follow: war breaks out and to impress the woman he loves, Keaton tries to volunteer. But as an engineer for the Western & Atlantic Railroad, he is more valuable where he is than in uniform, so the army's recruiters reject him.
Of course, the army doesn't bother to explain the situation to Keaton or to anyone else. The girl assumes he is a coward and the rest of this brief, 75-minute movie involves Keaton proving otherwise.
In case you're afraid you don't have the patience to sit through a silent movie, I can reassure you the set-up takes only 14 minutes before the spies to show up, hijack Keaton's train—which, by the way, was based on a real-life Civil War era steam locomotive named "The General"—and kidnap the woman he loves. Even then, Keaton has already treated you to one of the most famous sight gags in movie history.
From there, the story unreels at breakneck speed.
In addition to the two separate train chases that bookend the movie, there's time for a daring escape, a battle between the two advancing armies, and an endless series of gags. Keaton's famously understated reaction to the chaos around him—he was known as "The Great Stoneface"—only adds to the modern feel of the production.
In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked Buster Keaton number 21 on its list of the greatest movie performers of all-time; Entertainment Weekly listed him as the seventh best director; and Roger Ebert has written "Today I look at Keaton's works more often than any other silent films."
Watching The General again, it's easy to see why. I'm giving it the Katie-Bar-The-Door Award for Best Picture of the Silent Era.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.)
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.
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.
"How did you ever get into this fix?" Denham asks.
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.
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.
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.
