I've never seen this movie before, although I've certainly been aware of it for a long time. I did see the awful 1976 remake with Jessica Lange. I didn't expect the story to be great, but I did expect the original to be a better movie.
What I wasn't expecting was a comedy. This was one of the silliest movies I've ever seen — the native dances, the hilarious shots of Kong looking in windows, the great battle between Kong and the T-Rex which looked exactly like two men wrestling. Fay Wray was cute, but her acting skills consisted entirely of screaming.
On IMDB and other places, fans try to make this movie into something important, but I refuse to believe it ever amounted to more than a pleasant way to pass an evening in the middle of the Depression. I rated it a 6 for humor and historical interest.
If you've never seen it and want to, stop reading now.
Carl Denham, film director, takes a crew to a remote island to film the mighty Kong. Because of the danger, no actress will sign up. Undaunted, Denham scours the alleys of New York until he finds the starving Ann Darrow who agrees to go along.
When they arrive on the island, the find the natives doing a silly dance around a young woman who is destined to be the bride of Kong. When the chief sees Ann, he tries to buy her, then kidnaps her from the ship. She's staked out for Kong.
When the massive gorilla gets one look at the beauty, he falls in love and, instead of killing her, takes her back to his lair, fighting off a procession of prehistoric beasts along the way. Ann's love, Jack Driscoll, follows with the ship's crew. Kong dispatches most of them, but Jack manages to find Ann and lead her to safety. Kong follows and is knocked unconscious by a "smoke bomb."
Denham takes Kong back to New York to show him for money. When he sees photographers taking pictures of Ann, he breaks his chains and rampages around the city. He somehow manages to find the very room where Ann is hiding and grabs her. He creates some more chaos, then climbs to the top of the Empire State Building where he is dispatched by airplanes.
Here's some interesting stuff I found out about the movie from IMDB:
• The final line "Oh, no, it wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast" was voted the 84th greatest movie line by the American Film Institute.
• King Kong's roar was a lion's and a tiger's roar combined and run backwards.
• It was voted the 47th Greatest Film of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
• As a child, director Merian C. Cooper lived close to an elevated train which kept him awake at night when it clattered across the tracks. This was the inspiration for the scene where Kong destroys an elevated train.