In March 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression, crowds queued around Radio City Music Hall and the neighbouring RKO Roxy in New York to see a monster. The monster was fifty feet tall on screen, roaring atop the world's newest skyscraper while biplanes buzzed around him. In the workshop where he had been born, he stood about eighteen inches high and was made of aluminium and steel joints wrapped in foam rubber, latex and trimmed rabbit fur. King Kong is one of the great magic tricks in cinema: a creature of overwhelming emotional force conjured from a doll that had to be nudged forward one photographic frame at a time.
The film was the vision of two adventurer-filmmakers, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, who had made their names shooting documentaries in far-flung and dangerous places. Cooper wanted a giant gorilla picture, and RKO — a studio in deep financial trouble — gambled on it. The gamble paid off spectacularly. Kong was a sensation, reportedly rescuing RKO's balance sheet at a moment when the whole industry was reeling.
One frame at a time
The man who made the impossible move was Willis O'Brien, the pioneer of stop-motion animation. His technique was painstaking beyond modern imagining. The Kong models were built around articulated metal skeletons — armatures — with ball-and-socket joints that could be locked into position. To create a second of screen movement, an animator adjusted the model by a tiny increment, exposed a single frame of film, adjusted again, exposed another, and repeated the process twenty-four times for every second of finished footage. A few seconds of Kong swatting at aeroplanes could represent a full day of hunched, unblinking labour, and the fur, being handled constantly, visibly shimmers as unseen fingers disturbed it between exposures — an accidental effect that only adds to the creature's living presence.
O'Brien did not work alone in film history. He had animated the dinosaurs of The Lost World back in 1925, and he would later mentor a young enthusiast named Ray Harryhausen, who carried stop-motion into the era of Jason and the Argonauts and beyond. The line of descent from Kong runs straight through the golden age of movie monsters.
Layering the illusion
Stop-motion alone would not have sold the scale. Kong works because O'Brien and his team combined it with a battery of other techniques in the same shot: rear projection, in which live actors were filmed in front of a screen showing the animated Kong; miniature rear projection, an innovation that let animated figures and pre-filmed live action share a single miniature set; matte paintings for the jungle vistas of Skull Island; and full-size props — a giant hand and arm — for close-ups of Fay Wray in Kong's grip.
Wray, playing the screaming heroine Ann Darrow, is the film's human anchor. She was told before shooting that she would have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood; she imagined a matinee idol and got a fur-covered puppet. Her performance, and especially her screaming, became so iconic that she was forever after known as the original scream queen. The showman Carl Denham, played by Robert Armstrong, delivers the film's thesis in its closing line, standing over the fallen giant: it was not the aeroplanes — "it was Beauty killed the Beast."
The finale that built a genre
The climb up the Empire State Building was a canny piece of timing. The skyscraper had opened only in 1931 and was the tallest building in the world, a gleaming symbol of a wounded country's ambition. Setting the tragic finale there — Kong setting Ann safely on a ledge, swatting at the fighter planes, then plummeting from the summit — married the ancient fairy tale of beauty and the beast to the most modern structure on earth. The scene has been imitated, parodied and remade for ninety years.
Two more elements deserve their due. Max Steiner composed a lush, wall-to-wall symphonic score, a relative novelty at the time when many films used little original music; his work on Kong is often cited as a foundation of the Hollywood film score as an art form. And the sound design gave Kong his unforgettable roar, created by manipulating recorded animal cries — reportedly lion and tiger sounds played backwards and slowed down.
King Kong endures because it feels genuinely alive despite — or because of — the visible labour behind it. Modern audiences know exactly how it was done, and it still works. That is the paradox O'Brien achieved: a creature assembled from wire, sponge and fur, photographed in ten-thousand tiny movements, who nonetheless seems to grieve, rage and, at the very end, look down with something like sorrow before he falls. He was the eighth wonder of the world, the showman promised. For the medium of visual effects, he very nearly was.
Quiz nuggets
- King Kong premiered in New York in March 1933 and was directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO.
- Kong's on-screen movement was created by stop-motion pioneer Willis O'Brien using models roughly 18 inches tall built on jointed metal armatures.
- Fay Wray played Ann Darrow and became known as cinema's original scream queen.
- The climactic scene was set atop the Empire State Building, completed in 1931 as the world's tallest building.
- The film's closing line — "it was Beauty killed the Beast" — is spoken by showman Carl Denham, and Max Steiner wrote its pioneering orchestral score.