Common Sense Note
Parents need to know about abundant violence, not only monster-on-monster fights (inevitably ending in death for one of the combatants), and also that many innocent bystanders are brutally killed, both in the jungle and in New York City. The natives (who are black) are portrayed as face-painted, bone-wearing tribesmen.
Families can talk about how later generations of admirers read a lot of messages into this movie about civilization vs. the primal jungle, about the poignancy of the tropical ape-giant brought captive to modern Manhattan. The old-fashioned point-of-view here doesn't seem to make any obvious objections to the brash white-hunter heroes and their not-very-scientific mission. You can ask kids if they think Kong is a sympathetic character who should have been left alone or a raging monster who had to be destroyed, and compare Kong to the genetically-engineered dinosaurs of the "Jurassic Park" series.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Charles Cassady, Jr.
KING KONG was intended by its creators -- co-directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, documentarians and real-life explorers -- as the greatest movie adventure ever. It fulfilled that hype for entertainment-hungry audiences in the Great Depression and long afterwards. Before the era of TV and home-video, King Kong played in theaters for decades, and remains a beloved monster movie for all ages, though kids watching today might find its outlook, dialogue, and special effects a little out-of-date. Know that in the 1930s almost nothing like this had been seen before (though early Tarzan films and comics had certainly whetted the crowds' appetites).
It opens with an expedition preparing to leave Hoboken docks for the South Seas, with an unusually large crew and a cache of weapons. A showman named Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) heard that natives worship and fear something called "Kong," and he wants to get it on movie film and make a fortune. Before leaving, though, he recruits a literally starving actress off the streets, Anne Darrow (Fay Wray), explaining over the crews' objections that the public always wants a pretty girl in the picture.
They reach the uncharted Skull Island, where a huge wooden wall separates the natives from a land of surviving Mesozoic-era prehistoric monsters. Kong is a 50-foot-tall gorilla, to whom the tribe periodically sacrifice a maiden (what Kong will do with them is never discussed in detail). The tribe wants blonde Anne as their next offering, but Denham refuses. They kidnap her anyway, and Kong is fascinated by the novelty of the golden girl. He heads back toward his mountain home with her screaming in his paw.
The sailors follow their jungle trail, none more so than Jack (Bruce Cabot), who has become a sort-of-boyfriend to Anne. After Kong saves Anne from attacks by numerous dinosaurs intent on making a meal out of her, Jack gets Anne back safely to the ship. Correctly figuring that Kong will return searching for her, Denham knocks the monster unconscious with gas bombs and sails back to New York City with Kong in chains. He tries to exhibit "King" Kong in a Broadway-style setting, but Kong breaks loose and, following his jungle instinct, takes Anne to the highest ground in the metropolis -- the Empire State Building, for a classic climax with WWI-style fighter-biplanes (Cooper and Schoedsack cameo as the pilots!). No matter how old KING KONG gets, that great Hollywood moment always thrills.
Though it was remade in 2005 by director Peter Jackson with all the modern talent and special effects of the 21st century, the 1933 King Kong moves at a lightning pace. If the stop-motion animation seems primitive, sometimes amusingly so (Kong's fur bristles constantly, due to the invisible special-effects artists touching him; full-scale, clearly puppet Kong head looks lifeless in its closeups), they are still very watchable, and the savage Kong does have a primal fury about him that makes him a real threat, even if his lovelorn looks to Anne turn him into a slightly more sympathetic monster.
The human characters are fairly one-dimensional by comparison. Anne screams a lot, famously so, faints, and that's about it for her womanly survival skills. Denham doesn't seem to have learned any lessons in the end, and may be a stand-in for the Cooper-Schoedsack team, who in a recent biography have been quoted as having racist-imperialist attitudes, typical for their era, about the supremacy of the white culture over all others. On that note, modern black activists have denounced the old-school portrayal of face-painted, bone-wearing tribesmen, though it's a surprise that the Skull Island natives fight back against the rampaging gorilla-god, and a black baby is one of the few characters of any color snatched safely from beneath the primate's trampling feet.
Though later generations of admirers got messages out of King Kong about civilization vs. the primordial wild, about the poignancy of the tropical captive in modern NYC, the unenlightened POV here doesn't seem to make obvious objections to the brash humans and their profiteering mission. You can ask kids if they think Kong is a tragic character who should have been left alone or a raging monster who had to be destroyed, and compare Kong to the genetically-engineered dinos created just to be theme-park attractions in the much later "Jurassic Park" series.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentKong peels the clothes off his female captive. He seems to stop at her underwear, but a minor furor over the scene in bygone days has given rise to urban legends of censored sequences with more explicit nudity. |
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ViolenceFrequent peril for the ever-screaming heroine. Considerable monster-on-monster fighting, not to mention human beings being stomped into the ground, flung to their deaths, trampled and even chewed by dinosaurs and other primordial creatures. A streetcar crash is caused by Kong, and the giant ape is himself jabbed with spears and knives, and peppered with gunfire from planes before he falls to his doom. |
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Social BehaviorHeroine Anne Darrow is a helpless figure throughout, needing rescuing by both man and ape. Though initially woman-hating, sailor Jack Driscoll turns into a fearless savior for the heroine. The other white male characters come across to modern viewers as pretty exploitive and insensitive. The black extras lean heavily toward barely-differentiated native-savage stereotypes. |
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