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"A fool for risk" and the dreamed colossus, a history of cinema. The visionary is a showbiz daredevil (Robert Armstrong), along for the voyage is the starving starlet (Fay Wray) who pantomimes horror in her screen (scream) test. "The public, bless 'em, must have a pretty face to look at." Skull Island emerges out of the fog, and the flatness of the overture gives way to a remarkable pictorial density—torches atop vast wooden portals at night, multiple planes of activity in the jungle, mysterious textures of foliage and fur and scales. The great beast materializes like Poe's Sphinx to seize the sacrificial blonde in his paw, his main rival is the strapping seaman (Bruce Cabot) in hot pursuit. Deep into the primordial soup everyone goes, something "worth more than all the movies in the world" to the adventurer who'd castigate a cameraman for fleeing a charging rhino. Captured in his kingdom, chained on Broadway, crumpled on the pavement. "We'll teach him fear." An inexhaustible fountain of pulp poetry, erected by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack on the divide between documentarian and fantasist. The Tyrannosaurus with the cracked jaw and the ithyphallic serpent in the cavernous lair, denizens of an oneiric landscape where the marvels of Willis H. O'Brien's effects retain their handmade quality (vide the rippling hair on Kong's jerky musculature). Unleashed masculine id, revenge of the Third World oppressed, country lad lost in the city, a wounded titan confronting his reptilian foes and sniffing his human doll. Doré for the island, Goya for the urban rampage, a glorious Max Steiner symphony throughout. The proximity to L'Age d'Or and Scarface is especially palpable in the climax. "I hear it's some kind of gorilla." "Gee, ain't we got enough of them in New York?" The best remakes are the unofficial ones, Citizen Kane, La Belle et la Bête, White Heat, The Creature from the Black Lagoon... With Frank Reicher, Sam Hardy, Noble Johnson, Steve Clemento, James Flavin, and Victor Wong. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |