The Greening of Old Kong

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

KING KONG

Directed by JOHN GUILLERMIN Screenplay by LORENZO SEMPLE JR.

This is the year's inescapable movie. Nothing anyone says about it is going to quell the curiosity of the multitudes regarding this, the biggest comeback of them all. Nor should it. The special effects are marvelous, the good-humored script is comic-bookish without being excessively campy, and there are two excellent performances. One is by Charles Grodin as the leader of the expedition that starts out looking for oil and ends up with this large, furry problem on its hands. Grodin plays the honcho as a hard-bailer of the sort that used to hang around the Nixon White House and creates a vicious, accurate parody of one of our more distressing contemporary types. The other is, of course, by that combination of men and machinery that create the Mighty Kong. The expressive range they have provided for him is far wider than that of any previous movie monster. Damned if one doesn't begin to feel for and with him, as his wicked capitalist captors exploit him in order to sell gasoline.

King Cupcake. It is a great technical achievement (TIME, Oct. 25). It is also an aesthetic mistake, particularly disappointing to those who had seen the movie's highly promising first half at press screenings earlier this year. It was Aristotle's prescription that tragedy should evoke a blend of pity and terror. In Kong the balance is tipped too far toward pity. He's such a nice guy, such a cupcake really, that one never feels that Jessica Lange, playing the light of his life, is in any true danger.

There was something darkly enigmatic about the original Kong. Fay Wray had stirred the softer side of his nature and forced him, as it were, to re-examine some of his premises. But no matter how tenderly he picked her up, one never knew whether he would lose control of his enormous strength and destroy what he seemed to love. The very blankness of his expression reinforced the anxiety. When the old Kong breaks loose in New York, he is angry--no question about it. He will have his vengeance on his captors and on those who come to gawk at his pain. The new Kong does accidentally mangle a few people, but there's no real rage in him.

It is technology that betrays the new Kong. He smiles, he frowns, he looks sad. He is, in short, capable of subtle responses, and so, one is neither puzzled by him nor genuinely frightened. In particular, this vitiates the movie's climax. When the first Kong got his lady friend up on top of the Empire State Building, it was a matter of some suspense as to whether his rage might extend to her. When he saw her to safe ty before turning to make his last stand against the biplanes, it was a definitive revelation of character, a supremely touching act. In the new film it has been established that he is one of na ture's noblemen, and will certainly save her. The movie's end has nothing like the power of the first version's climax, with its sudden resolution of conflicting emotions about him.

As the new Kong has marched relentlessly to the screen, defenders of the 1933 version have been insisting loudly that no matter how much new technique was lavished on the remake, it could not match the original. They were right. Kong is a primal dream work, a symbolization of some deep and basic special anxiety of the species--and the only one created directly for the movies, having no ready roots in literature or folk lore. The crudities, the enigma of the original Kong's expression, are part of that work's strength. The wowing Technicolor virtuosity of the remake reduces the tale's mythic resonances and turns it into a safe PG entertainment. It may be that though the legend of Kong works on something that is perpetually child like in everyone, it was never meant for children .

With King Kong set to swing into 2,200 theaters and 17 countries, the great ape's publicity agents have been beating their drums with predictable frenzy. To celebrate the Paris opening, Paramount workers in Hollywood dismantled a 40-ft. Kong model used in the film, shipped it on trucks to New York, then by cargo jet to France. Last week while crowds gathered, the reassembled simian superstar lay in state halfway up the Champs-Elysees with all the grandeur of an embalmed potentate.

West German publicists made do by wheeling 15-ft.-tall Kong statues into 25 of the country's biggest movie houses. In Britain there are King Kong competitions. Among the prizes is a free trip to Hollywood for the humanoid who best answers the question: "When was the last time people made a monkey out of you?"

In Italy full-page newspaper ads offered free Kong posters to anyone who returned the accompanying coupon. "I expected about 10,000 requests, and instead we've had more than 200,000," lamented Publicist Alberto Balestrazzi, who is now at the mercy of Italy's notoriously tardy postal system. Giveaway posters have been part of the campaign in the U.S. and Canada as well--all thanks to Paramount's massive $5 million to $6 million advertising budget for North America.

Retailers have been eying Kong's potential with .prehensile enthusiasm. It will soon be possible to drink King Kong cocktails made from grenadine, orange juice--and bourbon--from an ape-shaped Jim Beam bottle. For kids there will be stuffed monkeys in three sizes, board games, knee socks, T shirts, lunch boxes, chewing gum and a King Kong candy bar. Though most of this stuff will go on sale too late for Christmas, shopkeepers seem to be taking the news philosophically. After all, with Producer Dino de Laurentiis already at work on King Kong, Part II, the monkey business is likely to continue for some time.

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