Movie theatre poster advertising the showing of
King Kong (RKO Radio Pictures, 1933)
I.
Whether informing the punk aesthetic as conceived by Malcolm McLaren [1] or the radical feminist theory produced by Virginie Despentes to challenge traditional expectations around sex and gender [2], there is no disputing that King Kong is one of the greatest of all cinematic monsters and that the 1933 film directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack is forever locked into our cultural imagination.
II.
Apparently, Cooper would have been quite happy to have made a movie about a giant gorilla struggling against prehistoric lizards on a long-lost island. The screenwriters, however, had other ideas and persuaded him to lean into the classic Beauty and the Beast motif.
Thus it is that the film opens with an Arabian proverb (fabricated by Cooper):
And lo! The Beast looked upon the face of Beauty, and it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.
And thus it is the film ends with the famous final line spoken by Carl Denham (played by Robert Armstrong) after Kong is mortally wounded by machine gun fire and plummets from atop the Empire State Building to the ground a thousand feet below:
It wasn't the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.
III.
And that fatal beauty was the struggling actress Ann Darrow, played by 24-year-old Canadian Fay Wray - cast only when Blonde Bombshell Jean Harlow became contractually unavailable for the part.
The iconic role as Kong's human love interest - for which Wray was paid the sum of $10,000 - made her a star. And after she died in 2004, aged 96, the lights of the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in her memory.
Before filming, Cooper teased Wray that she would work with the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood. She optimistically envisioned Cary Grant or Clark Gable, before discovering it was Kong. This is amusingly echoed in the film when director Carl Denham recruits Ann Darrow to his new project, promising her the thrill of a lifetime.
Initially, Wray regarded her role as just another acting job and felt the movie relied too heavily on her screaming [3]. She wondered why people made such a big deal out of a film that wasn't exactly Shakespeare. However, Wray eventually embraced her role in King Kong and came to appreciate the film's majesty.
Finally, we might note that Wray - a natural brunette - wore a blonde wig for her role as Ann Darrow; the producers insisting that her character needed to be blonde in order to create a stark visual contrast against the dark fur of the giant ape.
The natives of Skull Island refer to her as the golden woman - a detail that directly invites discussion of the movie's complex racial politics ... [4]
IV.
Many modern critics and scholars interpret King Kong as a tale that reflects the racial politics of the period, playing on anxieties about black masculinity and fears of interracial relationships.
And it is certainly difficult to watch Kong shackled in chains, transported to America, and exploited for profit without seeing reflections of the transatlantic slave trade. Similarly, the film's depiction of the dark-skinned natives of Skull Island as primitive and savage, also aligns with 1930s colonial attitudes and racist tropes that Hollywood was only too happy to tap into.
Yet Cooper always maintained that he didn't consciously conceive of Kong as a racial symbol and simply wanted to make an exciting adventure film about a giant ape. And while an artist's intent doesn't completely erase the subconscious cultural anxieties baked into their work, reducing Kong to a singular metaphor is intellectually lazy.
It may not be Shakespeare, but King Kong is a far cry from the crude exploitation films of the era like Ingagi (1930) [5].
V.
King Kong premiered in New York City on 2 March, 1933, to rave reviews.
Praise was particularly directed towards Willis H. O'Brien for his groundbreaking special effects [6], and Max Steiner for his impressionistic musical score inspired by Debussy and Ravel, with pioneering use of the Wagnerian leitmotif.
During its initial run, the film earned a profit of $650,000 (around $16.7 million today), but it has continued to rake in the dollars ever since: what we might call cash from King Kong's chaos.
Because the film was made before the strict enforcement of the Hays Code began in 1934, the original cut was able to get away with things that would later be deemed morally unacceptable.
However, censors got to work to ensure that when the film was re-released, several scenes were either edited or cut altogether - including ones in which King Kong carefully undresses Ann Darrow [7] and deliberately kills people who get in his way or annoy him (either by biting them in half or crushing them underfoot).
Interestingly, the censors in Nazi Germany were even more outraged by King Kong, describing the film as a violation of German race feeling. However, they changed their tune once it was discovered that the Führer loved the film and the ban on the film was lifted [8].
VI.
As indicated at the beginning of this post, King Kong quickly achieved the status of cultural icon and modern myth [9]. A figure loved by everyone - including European intellectuals ...
The Surrealists in particular were huge fans, regarding Kong as a supreme manifestation of irrational desire disrupting the boring and repetitive nature of civilised modern life. They also favourably viewed Kong's obsessive, doomed devotion to Ann Darrow as a primal expression of l'amour fou.
In his seminal essay À propos de King Kong, Surrealist critic Jean Ferry meticulously catalogued the film's many absurdities. But, rather than condemning them as flaws, he argued that these logical glitches enhanced the experience of watching the film by investing it with a violent, oneiric power.
M. Ferry also emphasised the film's monstrous eroticism and the poetic character of Kong's on-screen presence - not to mention his uncanny ability to seemingly change size [10].
VII.
By the 1960s and '70s, King Kong's public image had shifted from a terrifying monster to a campy cult figure used almost exclusively for comic relief. Satirised, spoofed, and parodied from pillar to post, he even made a cameo appearance in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine (1968).
If that isn't depressing enough, it was during this time that academics also began to take an interest in Kong - subjecting him to endless critical analysis. One Kongophile, Mitchell Prettyplace, even produced a definitive 18-volume study that was referenced by Thomas Pynchon in his 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow.
Thankfully, in 1978 McLaren and Westwood gave King Kong back something of his old outrageousness by restoring his phallic glory [11].
His heart's still pumping, his blood's still running
King Kong, the king is here! [12]
Notes
[1] See the post 'Go Ape Crazy' (28 Sept 2026).
[2] See the post 'Reflections on King Kong Theory' (29 Sept 2026).
[3] A real trooper, not only did Wray spend an uncomfortably extended period of time sitting in a tree while filming King Kong, but she provided all of her character's screams in a single recording session - resulting in her being unable to speak for several days afterwards.
[4] The political (and sexual) politics of King Kong have undergone extensive analysis, so I'll only touch briefly on these aspects here. However, readers who wish to know more are encouraged to see the essay by Stefanie Affeldt titled 'Exterminating the Brute: Sexism and Racism in King Kong', in Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class, and Race, ed. Wulf D. Hund, Charles W. Mills, and Silvia Sebastiani (Lit Verlag, 2015), pp. 139-169.
[5] Directed by William S. Campbell, Ingagi (1930) was a highly successful exploitation film masquerading as a documentary about gorilla-worshipping women in the Belgian Congo. It established the highly lucrative Hollywood formula of putting pretty girls in peril alongside gorillas. RKO likely greenlit King Kong to capitalize on the film's massive box-office success.
[6] Roger Ebert hits the nail on the head when he writes that "in the very artificiality of some of the special effects, there is a creepiness that isn't there in today's slick, flawless, computer-aided images" and that these ensure King Kong has something ageless and primeval about it. See the four-star review of King Kong (3 Feb 2002) on rogerebert.com
[7] Interestingly, one scholar argues that when Kong partially undresses Ann, touching her body and sniffing her clothes, it initiates her into the natural world and should not be seen as a sexual act. See Cynthia Marie Erb, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2009), p. 112.
[8] Although it is a widely reported claim that Hitler was spellbound by King Kong, historians debate whether this is more popular myth than verifiable fact.
For while several contemporary accounts from people within his inner circle confirm the Führer was a Hollywood film fan who enjoyed watching movies nearly every night - and while the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff published a very positive review of King Kong (in predictably racialised terms), the historian Bill Niven points out that there is no official record definitively proving Hitler ever saw it. See his book, Hitler and Film: The Führer's Hidden Passion (Yale University Press, 2018).
[9] This needs to be qualified somewhat: Kong's transformation from a famous movie monster into a true cultural phenomenon accelerated after the film's 1952 theatrical re-release. Following its final cinema outing in 1956, RKO sold the television rights, introducing Kong to a massive new generation of small-screen viewers.
[10] Ferry published the review under his real name, Jean Lévy, in Minotaure No. 5 (May 1934). An English translation can be found in The Shadow and Its Shadow, ed. and trans by Paul Hammond (City Lights Books, 2000), pp. 161-165.
[11] Again, see the post 'Go Ape Crazy' (28 Sept 2026).
[12] Lyrics by Malcolm McLaren for the Bow Wow Wow track 'King Kong', on the album See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! (RCA Records, 1981).
Bonus: click here to watch the original trailer to King Kong (1933) on YouTube.
