10 Films to Watch if You Like: King Kong

Nowadays, if some needs a special effect, they tell a computer to create it. Nine decades ago, visual effects were more laborious and time consuming as the majority were handcrafted. Cinema Paradiso looks back at the making of the groundbreaking SFX that made King Kong (1933) a phenomenon that retains its power to shock and amaze.

Blockbuster cinema starts with King Kong (1933). Such was the ambition of co-directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack to create a credible alternative reality, in which giants apes and prehistoric creatures co-existed with humans, that they pushed the boundaries of screen technology to produce a picture the like of which had never been seen before.

Ninety years on, their achievement continues to enthrall and inspire because Kong is not just a movie character. He's also more than a technical marvel that changed how films were made and the subjects they could depict. The giant ape who was plucked from his island home and exploited in the big city is also a cultural icon and a symbol for the ages of 'unleashed savagery and nobility brought down by greed'.

It Wasn't the Airplanes

Having convinced Captain Englehorn (Frank Reicher) to let him charter SS Venture for his next film-making venture, Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) heads into New York to find a leading lady because agent Charles Weston (Sam Hardy) hasn't been able to persuade any reputed actress to take the role. Near the Woman's Home Mission, Denham spots

Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) stealing an apple and promises her the thrill of a lifetime if she signs on for his documentary.

First mate Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot) is unhappy about having a woman on board and Denham teases him about having a crush on Ann. She plays with a monkey between test shots, as Denham asks her to react to his description of an untold horror. Urging her to show fear, Ann lets out an blood-curdling scream and Driscoll wonders what they are going to encounter on Skull Island, a place 'way west of Sumatra' that is so remote it only features on the mysterious map in Denham's possession.

A small landing party sets out for the island, with the sound of drums and chanting growing louder as they approach a settlement that is surrounded by a gated high wall. A witch doctor (Steve Clemente) is preparing to sacrifice 'the bride of Kong' when the intruders are spotted and the chief (Noble Johnson) offers to swap six tribal maidens for 'the golden woman'. Denham refuses and the Americans return to the ship.

Under cover of darkness, Ann is abducted and tied to an altar on the other side of the giant gate. Kong rumbles through the jungle and she is terrified by the sight of the 30ft ape. Despite her screams, he is taken with Ann and gently frees her from her chains and lumbers off with her in his paw.

Leading the rescue attempt, Denham and Driscoll come across a Stegosaurus that has to be repelled with a gas bomb, as bullets simply bounce off its hide. Constructing a makeshift raft, they continue their pursuit, only for the craft to be smashed by a Brontosaurus that attacks some of the sailors.

Meanwhile, Kong has crossed a log bridge over a chasm and has placed Ann in the forked branch of a tree. He waits for Driscoll and his companions to arrive and pitches the log into the ravine. Fending off Kong with a knife, Driscoll sends a large lizard plunging into the abyss. But Kong is alerted by Ann's shrieks and fights off an Allosaurus that had been menacing her. Wounded in victory, he beats his chest and bellows before carefully collecting Ann and making for his lair atop Skull Mountain.

Sending Denham for reinforcements, Driscoll gives chase. But Ann again owes her safety to her captor, who overcomes an Elasmosaurus by dashing its head against a rock. Once in his cave, Kong examines the comatose Ann with tender curiosity, as he peels away some of her clothing and sniffs her perfume on his fingers. He is interrupted, however, by a flying Pteranodon and is so preoccupied with the tussle that he fails to notice Driscoll and Ann makes their escape down a vine.

In trying to pull them up the incline, Kong sends the pair splashing into the river. They are able to make their way back to the village, where Driscoll is dismayed when Denham insists on trying to incapacitate Kong and transport him back to New York so they can make their fortune by exhibiting him. The ape breaks down the gate and goes on the rampage, flinging huts around and killing one of the tribesmen with a single bite. But he is felled by a gas bomb and shackled to a raft for the long voyage home.

Crowds throng around the Broadway theatre where Denham is set to unveil 'Kong, Eighth Wonder of the World!' Now an item, Ann and Driscoll join the film-maker on stage and there are awestruck gasps as Kong is revealed. He is held by chrome steel chains, but takes fright at the flashbulbs of the eager photographers and reasons that he has to protect Ann.

As Kong gets loose, Driscoll sweeps Ann to a nearby hotel. But the ape sees them leave and bounds on to Broadway. He kills the hapless driver of a car and tosses a woman to her death after scaling the building and mistakenly plucking her from her bed. Spotting Ann, Kong snatches her and lurches off in search of sanctuary. Unnerved by a train on the elevated line above Third Street, he rips up the track and causes another service to crash.

Desperate to escape from the madding crowd, Kong climbs the Empire State Building. However, he is attacked by four naval bi-planes and is hit in the torso and throat. Placing Ann on a ledge, the creature strokes her with his finger before falling to the street. A police lieutenant joins Denham beside the corpse and expresses his relief that the planes had prevailed. But Denham contradicts him: 'Oh, no. It wasn't the airplanes. It was Beauty killed the Beast.'

Creation in a Lost World

Merian Caldwell Cooper claimed that he got the idea for King Kong while shooting location footage in Africa for his 1929 adaptation of A.E.W. Mason's tale of derring-do, The Four Feathers, which would also later be filmed by Zoltan Korda (1939) , Don Sharp (1977) , and Shekhar Kapur (2005) , all of which are available from Cinema Paradiso. In addition to developing a keen interest in gorillas, Cooper also became intrigued by the Komodo dragons he had read about in a book by naturalist William Douglas Burden. He had proposed a story about a colossal ape dwelling in a prehistoric jungle to his bosses at Paramount, but they felt that using trick photography to enlarge real apes would prove too time consuming and costly.

Cooper was not the first to broach such subject matter, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912) and Edgar Rice Burroughs's The Land That Time Forgot (1918) had been bestsellers, while cinema had ventured on to the wild side in Edward Warren's Beasts in the Jungle (1913) and Scott Sidney's Tarzan of the Apes (1918), which had been respectively co-written by women, Alice Guy and Lois Weber. Each has work in the BFI's marvellous collection, Early Women Filmmakers 1911-1940 (2019), while Guy's Making of an American Citizen (1912) and Weber's Suspense (1913) can also be found on Retour de Flamme, Volume 6 (2007). The French pioneer's remarkable career in silent film is also explored in Pamela B. Green's Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), although Weber is certainly worthy of a documentary of her own, as is Hollywood's first regular woman director, Dorothy Arzner.

While making the documentary, Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness (1927), Cooper and co-director Ernest Beaumont Schoedsack had also encountered monkeys, while the latter had made a pair of orangutans the stars of Rango (1931), which should be on disc and shouldn't be confused with Gore Verbinski's chameleon animation, Rango (2011). Cult items like Lloyd Bacon's Stark Mad (1929) and William S. Campbell's cod documentary, Ingagi (1930), also exploited the vogue for the exotic, with the latter including a hoax sequence of a woman being sacrificed to a gorilla. Yet, in spite of it making $4 million in the early days of the Great Depression, Cooper couldn't convince a studio to back his own creature feature.

He kept refining the narrative outline, however, adding the Empire State finale some time in 1930. During this period, David O. Selznick became head of production at RKO and heard through his agent brother, Myron, that Cooper was trying to persuade MGM to part with the rights to the Tarzan stories. Selznick wasn't convinced this was a good idea, but he hired Cooper to work as an associate producer in December 1931. As the studio was struggling to cope with the Depression, Cooper was asked to close down a stop-motion project entitled Creation, which was being made by the studio's chief technician Willis O'Brien, who had created the landmark special effects for Harry O. Hoyt's The Lost World (1925) - which would also be remade by Irwin Allen (1960) , Timothy Bond (1992) , and Stuart Orme (2001) .

O'Brien and his crew had been hard at work for over a year and Cooper realised he could use some of their stop-motion footage in his 'Giant Terror Gorilla' picture, while recycling their rubber-and-dural dinosaurs. In December 1931, he set O'Brien to work on a test reel and he spent three months conducting paleontological and geographical research, while scientific artists Mario Larrinaga and Byron Crabbe produced over 600 drawings to ensure that the settings and the creatures were authentic. They even consulted Eadweard Muybridge's photographic studies of animals in motion that had played such a key role in the prehistory of the moving image (and it's a great shame that nobody has thought to release Kyle Rideout's 2015 biopic, Eadweard, as Muybridge is a fascinating figure who hailed from Kingston Upon Thames).

As she had appeared in The Four Feather, Cooper hired Fay Wray to provide the live-action contrast with the models. On being told that she was to shoot a test with 'the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood', Wray presumed she would be working with Cary Grant. But she had to endure 22 hours of being perched in a tree in order to react to the stop-motion fight being projected on to a large screen beside her. Marcel Delgado was recruited to make the 'almost human' ape figure and, after two unsuccessful attempts, he came up with the 18-inch Kong who would be seen in the top secret footage hurling terrified sailors off the log bridge and fighting the Allosaurus (which is often mistaken for a Tyrannosaurus Rex) in front of the petrified Ann Darrow. Long before film-makers could call on Andy Serkis for a session of motion-capture work, Cooper and Schoedsack had to put their past experience as wrestlers to good use in order to provide the animators with some acceptable fight choreography.

While these sequences were being photographed, Selznick invited renowned English thriller writer, Edgar Wallace, to draft a screenplay from Cooper's treatments. As he worked quickly, Wallace produced a script within the first five days of 1932, which included a subplot about some escaped prisoners. But it's not known how much of it survived into the final screenplay, as Wallace died of pneumonia on 10 February and Cooper always downplayed his contribution, while being glad to have his famous name among the credits.

Some sources claim that Dudley Nichols (who had just embarked upon a successful collaboration with John Ford) worked on what was then called The Beast, before James Ashmore Creelman wrote two drafts prior to falling out with Cooper. Cannily, Selznick brought in Schoedsack's writer wife Ruth Rose in July 1932, and she based Denham and Driscoll on the co-directors, while also reworking the scenes before and after the Venture reaches Skull Island.

While she was still working, Cooper and Schoedsack assembled their cast. Jean Harlow and Dorothy Jordan were considered for the role of Ann, but the latter preferred to marry Cooper than work for him. Wray was set to reunite with Robert Armstrong and Joel McCrea, with whom she was shooting Schoedsack and Irving Pichel's The Most Dangerous Game (1932). But while Armstrong readily signed up as Denham, McCrea's agent asked for too much money and the part of Driscoll passed to Bruce Cabot, who had been spotted managing the Embassy Roof Club by Mexican actress Dolores Del Rio, whom Cooper had just cast opposite the new RKO dance team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Thornton Freeland's Flying Down to Rio (1933).

There were also several familiar faces in the supporting cast. Among them were former Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe, who would be played by Burt Lancaster in a 1951 biopic; Gone With the Wind Oscar winner Hattie McDaniel's sister, Etta; Carmen Jones star Dorothy Dandridge's mother and sister, Ruby and Vivian; W.C. Fields's future partner Carlotta Monti, who would feature in Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935) and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941); onetime silent siren Dorothy Gulliver; and Madame Sul-te-wan, who had been the first African American woman to be offered a film contract back in the 1910s. The woman flung from the hotel window was played under the pseudonym Sandra Shaw by socialite Veronica Balfe, who would shortly marry Gary Cooper. Always fancying themselves as daredevils, Cooper and Schoedsack also took cameos as a pilot and his gunner in the high-flying denouement.

Knowing that the effects were going to take time, Cooper and Schoedsack decided to get a head start and use the jungle sets for RKO's The Most Dangerous Game in order to shoot after hours. Once production began in earnest with a budget of $500,000, Cooper concentrated on the ship, jungle, and Broadway scenes, while Schoedsack supervised the opening New York and village sequences. As a rule, the live action was staged in three-week segments that gave the animators time to tailor their work. The sacrifice scene, however, was filmed in a single night, even though it required three camera crews, 65 electricians, hundreds of extras, and a small battalion of costume and make-up assistants.

The pair also put supervising art director, Van Nest Polglase, to work on the sets. Skull Island's jungle was modelled on Gustave Doré's etchings for an 1885 edition of John Bunyan's Paradise Lost, while the village gate and wall were respectively salvaged from D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) and

Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927). The village itself came from Irving Pichel's 1935 adaptation of H. Rider Haggard's She, while the huts were recycled from King Vidor's Bird of Paradise (1932), which had starred Joel McCrea and Dolores Del Rio. Six years later, the sets would all go up in flames as Selznick organised a spectacular conflagration for the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind.

An FX Extravaganza

Despite claims that Charles Gemora and Ken Roady donned ape suits in certain scenes, Kong is entirely a product of cutting-edge animation. The stop-motion effects may look primitive to eyes accustomed to digital wizardry. But audiences in 1933 witnessed a technological revolution, as Willis O'Brien and his team made innovative use of models, matte paintings, and photographic and post-production printing processes to make fantasy a filmic reality and change the nature of cinema forever.

Things could have been different, as both O'Brien and technician Buzz Gibson were struck down with pneumonia and blood poisoning in March 1932. Unlike Edgar Wallace, they recovered in time to make the test reels that convinced the RKO front office to take a risk with a feature whose success depended entirely on untried techniques.

Key to everything were Marcel Delgado's 18-inch models of Kong. Previously, miniatures had been made of jointed wood. But Delgado opted for an articulated steel skeleton with latex rubber muscles that expanded or contracted to make the ape move smoothly. The frame was stuffed with cotton and covered with liquid latex to which was added a layer of bear fur. Two Kongs were built, along with a king-sized arm and hand for close-ups of Ann in his grasp. Four men were required to move the eyes and jaws inside the giant head, while another was needed to wrap the long fingers around Fay Wray, who was raised above the studio floor by levers and filmed by an elevated camera to convey her sense of peril.

As the models had to be photographed one frame at a time, 24 exposures were required for each second of screen time. The minute adjustments were meticulously monitored using a specially devised surface gauge, while assistants ensured the backdrops and the intensity of the lighting remained consistent between shots. So painstaking was the work that major fight sequences, such as Kong's encounters with the Allosaurus and the Pteranodon took seven weeks to complete.

Trick effects even had to be used for some of the scenes with the human cast. When the Venture's crew first land on the island, the scenery was matte painted on glass which was composited with images of flying birds and back-projected on to a screen behind the actors. Several layers of painted glass suggested the density of the jungle, although miniatures were also used to show the layout of the village.

Several techniques were used to bring human and animated figures into the same shot. Some of the effects were achieved by masking half of the frame and reversing the process during a second pass of the celluloid to conjoin the two elements. However, Cooper was so determined to make the moving interaction seem lifelike that he had to use two different techniques to create what are called 'travelling mattes'.

Invented by cinematographer Carroll H. Dunning, the Dunning Process produced composite shots from two strips of film and was used for both the scene in which villagers flee in the foreground while Kong appears at the distant wall and the Empire State sequence. The brainchild of director of photography Frank D. Williams, the Williams Process was employed on the scenes in which Kong pushes open the gate and shakes the sailors off the log bridge.

The Williams technique required an optical printer that synchronised a camera and a projector to composite single images from several film strips. O'Brien worked with Linwood Dunn to create unprecedentedly sophisticated moving images that combined foreground, background, live-action, and stop-motion elements. As RKO only had one such machine, access was limited and other ways had to be found of bringing the human and model casts together.

One method was having the actors perform in front of screens on which the stop-motion action was rear projected. In order to make the images sharper, Sidney Saunders and Fred Jackman created a translucent cellulose-acetate screen that made it easier to light scenes such as the crew's battle with the Stegosaurus and Ann watching Kong's fight with the Allosaurus. Saunders and Jackman were rewarded for their ingenuity with a Special Achievement Oscar.

This was the only award linked to the film, although O'Brien and his team should surely have been recognised for concocting a method of rear-projecting footage into miniature sets, which were fitted with a fan to prevent the screen from overheating. This technique was employed in the scenes in which Kong places Ann in the tree and in which he tries to snatch Driscoll from his cave. Even more remarkable was the struggle with the Elasmosaurus (or Tanystropheus), which, according to the American Film Institute, 'was accomplished through the use of a miniature set, stop-motion animation for Kong, background matte paintings, real water, foreground rocks with bubbling mud, smoke, and two miniature rear screen projections of Driscoll and Ann.'

For the scene in which Kong removes Ann's clothing, O'Brien projected live-action footage (with wires being used to raise the garments) one frame at a time on a screen behind the simian model. The effect is surprisingly convincing, but Cooper and O'Brien were too preoccupied to patent the process and cost themselves a small fortune.

In order to show the planes swooping from Kong's vantage point, a 24ft wooden ramp was constructed so that miniature aircraft of differing sizes could be moved on piano wires to give an impression of distance away from ape atop the Empire State, which required a life-size model of the pinnacle to be built in the studio.

Work on the sound effects and score started on 29 December 1932. Audio engineer Murray Spivack created Kong's breathing by lowering the tone of a library recording of a tiger and playing it backwards. He also reversed tapes of caged lions and tigers roaring, which were slowed down and lowered by an octave to produce Kong's bellow. His footsteps were achieved by Spivack stomping across a box of gravel with foam-encased plungers on his feet.

Sound specialist Walter G. Elliott consented to being vigorously pounded with a drumstick for the sound of Kong beating his chest, after experiments with drums and floorboards had proved unsatisfactory. The showdown between the ape and the Allosaurus was accompanied by a combination of Spivack's screeches, a puma's scowl, and the whoosh of a compressed air engine. A megaphone was used for the affectionate grunts emitted by Kong when doting upon Ann, whose shrieks, whimpers, and sobs were recorded in a single session. This 'Aria of Agonies' earned Wray the nickname of 'The Scream Queen'.

Initially, the score was going to be pieced together from existing compositions. But Cooper was so insistent about having original music that he offered to pay Max Steiner out of his own pocket. Drawing on the operatic convention of employing character themes, the Austrian needed eight weeks to write what was not only the first full-length score in the sound era, but also the first thematic one. It was also the first to be recorded by a 46-piece orchestra, while the film itself broke new ground in being recorded on three separate sound tracks for its dialogue, sound effects, and music.

The score cost $50,000, but Spivack ensured that the sounds effects matched its tone to make it much more than mere background music. Composers across Hollywood copied Steiner's method, while extracts can be heard in Schoedsack's The Last Days of Pompeii, Rouben Mamoulian's Becky Sharp (both 1935), George B. Seitz's The Last of the Mohicans (1936), George Nicholls, Jr.'s The Soldier and the Lady (1937), Edward Dmytryk's Back to Bataan (1945), and Raoul Walsh's White Heat (1949).

During the shoot, the picture had been known as The Beast, Kong, and The Eighth Wonder. Wray recalls Cooper coming up with the name for his tragic hero after seeing Delgado's model for the first time, while naturalist Douglas Burden (whose wife, Babs, was the model for Ann Darrow) wrote about the director's fixation with the phrase 'King of Komodo'. An RKO memo, however, suggests that the title King Kong was agreed upon to differentiate it from William J. Cowen's MGM release, Kongo (1932), which had starred Walter Huston and Lupe Velez in a remake of Tod Browning's Lon Chaney vehicle, West of Zanzibar (1928).

Selznick had also been concerned that people would think the film was about a Chinese warlord. His faith in the project never wavered, however, as he even siphoned funding from other pictures to keep the production going. Ultimately, the negative cost came to $672,254.75, which was $270,000 over budget. Cooper later claimed the front office had inflated this figure by $200,000. But no one would dispute the magnitude of the box-office showing.

A Nine-Decade Legacy

As it was released in 1933, King Kong fell into the so-called 'Pre-Code' period between the introduction of the Hollyood Production Code in 1930 and its stricter enforcement after June 1934. Consequently, some of its more violent sequences were passed uncut, although a preview in San Bernardino prompted Cooper to remove the footage of the sailors being devoured by giant crab spiders after Kong had tipped them off the log bridge because he didn't feel that the audience reaction justified the slowing down of the action at such a crucial juncture. The footage was lost, although the models resurfaced in O'Brien's creature feature, The Black Scorpion (1957). Moreover, Peter Jackson, who claims that his entire career has been inspired by King Kong, joined with the Weta Workshop to recreate the attack using period technology for the 2005 DVD extra, The Lost Spider Pit Sequence.

In fact, RKO and Cooper concurred that the 14-reel preview print was too long and, amongst the scenes to be cut (and seemingly lost) was a confrontation with a Triceratops, Ann and Driscoll's escape down river, and a sequence in which Kong crashes down Skull Mountain to the village. When the film was re-presented to the Code Office for reissues in 1938, 1942, 1946, and 1952, a number of other scenes fell victim to conservative censors. Indeed, 29 changes were demanded in 1938. The shots of the Brontosaurus chomping on sailors in the swamp were cut, as was the sequence in which Kong kills villagers on the scaffold and tramples several others. The biting of a man in New York also disappeared, along with the image of the ape hurling the sleeping woman to the street on realising she was not Ann. Also excised was the jungle disrobing incident, but that didn't stop the 1952 revival from taking $2,500,000 in a double bill with Jacques Tourneur's The Leopard Man (1943) that Cinema Paradiso users can recreate for themselves with just a couple of clicks.

Four years later, the edited edition premiered on television in the New York area on 5 March 1956. Eighty per cent of households with a set tuned in and audiences were equally impressive when the film was subsequently sold to small-screen outlets around the world. In 1969, an uncut 16mm print was found in Philadelphia and this 100-minute version was released by Janus Films the following year. Meanwhile, Howard Schuman wrote an experimental play entitled Censored Scenes From King Kong that was due to air on the BBC before power cuts decimated the schedule in 1974.

Shortly afterwards, Universal Studios attempted a restoration using prints dating from 1937 and 1942. In April 1983, the Empire State Building marked the film's 50th anniversary by having vintage bi-planes fly around an 84ft inflatable Kong affixed to the top. But there was greater excitement later in the decade, when a 1933 release print came to light in London and Criterion supplemented their 1984 laser disc release with the first ever audio commentary, which was provided by restoration expert Ron Haver. Dismay greeted the colorised video marketed in 1989 by Turner Home Entertainment, however, although they partially atoned with a 60th anniversary special that included the 25-minute documentary, It Was Beauty Killed the Beast. Better still, the packaging boasted an interactive Kong, who roared when his chest was pressed.

Around the turn of the century, Warners conducted a six-year search for lost footage prior to the release of a two-disc digital edition in 2005, which included a four-minute overture, archival snippets featuring Cooper and Wray, and a commentary by SFX legends Ray Harryhausen and Ken Ralston, who each claim the picture as a principal inspiration for their own work. Sadly, this isn't available to rent, but Cinema Paradiso users do have access to Universal's 96-minute digital remaster, which was commended for the clarity of the image.

Making history as the first film to be released at New York's Roxy Theatre and Radio City Music Hall on the same day (2 March 1933), King Kong broke records by selling 50,000 tickets. Those attending the Los Angeles premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre were greeted by a giant ape head in the lobby. But the opening rather fizzled out, as bank holidays had been declared to celebrate President Roosevelt's inauguration and the venue had to offer cut-price tickets in order to fill the auditorium.

Sid Grauman still opined: 'Never saw greater enthusiasm at any premiere in my past experience of presenting premieres as that of King Kong...I believe it to be the greatest picture I have ever seen.' Bolstered by largely enthusiastic reviews, the film became the first to take $100,000 in its opening week and went on to gross $1,761,000, helping to save RKO Pictures from bankruptcy in the process, along with Fred and Ginger's dance musicals. By 1952, the North American gross had risen to $3.9 million.

Despite Adolf Hitler being transfixed by the film, it was banned by the Nazis for being 'an attack against the nerves of the German people' and 'a violation of German race feeling'. There were also misgivings among African American commentators tired of seeing apes being used symbolically to reinforce racist stereotypes. Several scholars have since identified the film as a cautionary tale about inter-racial romance. But Schoedsack and Cooper vehemently denied that it had any sinister undertones, with the latter discussing the meaning in a posthumously published interview, which explained that he had been leaving his office in Manhattan, when 'he heard the sound of an airplane motor. He reflexively looked up as the sun glinted off the wings of a plane flying extremely close to the tallest building in the city...he realised if he placed the giant gorilla on top of the tallest building in the world and had him shot down by the most modern of weapons, the armed airplane, he would have a story of the primitive doomed by modern civilisation.'

In recent times, an eco thread has been attributed to the story, as the intrusion of white men disrupted Skull Island's natural equilibrium, as Kong had presumably co-existed peaceably with the dinosaurs for years before they became mortal enemies over Ann. Others have claimed the picture as a Depression parable in the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash and this anti-capitalist sentiment has continued in critiques denouncing white entitlement. Perhaps the US establishment had an inkling of these sentiments, as it took until 1991 for the picture to be deemed sufficiently 'culturally, historically and aesthetically significant' by the Library of Congress to be preserved in the United States National Film Registry.

RKO sought to cash in on the success of its monster movie by getting Schoedsack to direct The Son of Kong (1933), which was scripted by Ruby Rose and saw Armstrong reprise the role of Carl Denham. Schoedsack, Cooper, and O'Brien reunited on Mighty Joe Young (1949), another giant ape yarn, which was remade with Bill Paxton and Charlize Theron by Ron Underwood in 1998. The influence of O'Brien can also be seen in Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion work in Eugène Lourié's The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and in the 3-D photography for Jack Arnold's Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954).

The latter was released in the same year as Inishiro Honda's Godzilla (1954), which producer Tomoyuki Tanaka freely admitted took its cues from the 1933 epic. 'I felt like doing something big,' he told one interviewer. 'That was my motivation. I thought of different ideas. I like monster movies, and I was influenced by King Kong.' Indeed, the giant ape found his way into the kaiju genre when RKO licenced him to Studio Toho for Honda's King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) and King Kong Escapes (1967).

In 1976, Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis collaborated with British director John Guillermin on King Kong, which starred Charles Grodin as oil executive Fred S. Wilson, Jeff Bridges as paleontologist Jack Prescott, and Jessica Lange as Dwan. Making her debut after Barbra Streisand and Meryl Streep had been considered, Lange is taken to the top of the World Trade Centre by an ape co-created by three-time Oscar-winning effects specialist Carlo Rimbaldi and seven-time victorious make-up artist, Rick Baker. When their efforts were nominated for the Academy Award, however, stop-motion animator Jim Danforth returned his nomination certificates in protest because the 40ft hydraulic creature had misfired so frequently that several scenes made do with a man in a monkey suit.

Despite the critics being unimpressed, the picture made a $56 million profit on its $24 million investment and De Laurentiis and Guillermin cast Linda Hamilton as Dr Amy Franklin, who keeps the ailing ape alive with an artificial heart in King Kong Lives (1986). A dozen years later, Dudley Moore bowed out of movies by voicing both Denham and Kong in Art Scott's animated musical, The Mighty Kong (1998), which contained songs written by the Sherman brothers, who were played by Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak in John Lee Hancock's Saving Mr Banks (2013).

New Zealander Peter Jackson's King Kong (2005) was more faithful to the original in casting Jack Black as Denham, Adrien Brody as Driscoll, and Naomi Watts as Ann. Having travelled to Rwanda to study gorillas, Andy Serkis assisted with the motion capture to guide the digital animators creating the 24ft simian, but Fay Wray died at the age of 96 in August 2004 before she could cameo to deliver the closing Beauty/Beast line. Like its predecessor, this version broke records with the $207 million budget being the highest for any film in Hollywood history. It's now the 54th most expensive and its makers would only have $53 million left from their $500 million gross if they had also bankrolled the new chart-topper, J.J. Abrams's Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).

This was made two years before Jordan Vogt-Roberts's reboot, Kong: Skull Island (2017), which was the second installment in Legendary Pictures's MonsterVerse franchise, after Yoshimitsu Banno's Godzilla (2014). The pair came together again in Adam Wingard's Godzilla vs Kong (2021). Now towering in at 100ft, Kong came alive through a mix of motion-capture for his facial expressions and computer animation for a body that contained 19 million digital hairs.

In addition to the remakes and spin-offs, there have also been numerous homages and knowing references, as well as a dollar-spinning franchise. Among the curios lurking in the Cinema Paradiso vaults are William Nigh's The Ape (1940) and William Beaudine's The Ape Man (1943), which respectively starred Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the title roles. Lugosi and Beaudine also teamed on Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952), which is sadly as unavailable as Curt Siodmak's equally splendidly titled, Bride of the Gorilla (1951). Other notable films with simious connections are John Lemont's Konga (1961), Marco Ferreri's The Ape Woman (1964), Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Roberto Mauri's Kong Island (both 1968), Paul Leder's A*P*E (1976), Frank Marshall's Congo (1995), Jamal Debbouze's Animal Kingdom: Let's Go Ape (2015), Daniel Lusko's Ape vs Monster (2021), and Marc Gottlieb's Ape vs Mecha Ape (2023).

Adapted from a novel by Pierre Boule, Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes (1968) was followed by four sequels: Ted Post's Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) Don Taylor's Escape From the Planet of the Apes (1971), and J. Lee Thompson's Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) and Battle For the Planet of the Apes (1973). Tim Burton rebooted things with Planet of the Apes (2001), since when the series has continued with Rupert Wyatt's Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), and Matt Reeves's Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) and War For the Planet of the Apes (2017). Wes Ball is in situ to helm the forthcoming Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, which should reach cinemas in 2024.

In one of his hilarious monologues, Bob Newhart set the trend for lampooning the Empire State finale when he played a nightwatchman taking his first shift at the landmark. Since then, Homer Simpson has appeared as a giant ape pursuing Marge in the 1992 'Tree house of Horror III' episode of The Simpsons (1989-), while a robotic Miley Cyrus abducted Stewie Griffin in the 2009 'Hannah Banana' episode of Family Guy (1999-). And don't forget the scene in Futurama: The Beast With a Billion Backs (2008), in which an ancient Kong is briefly seen clutching Ann Darrow's skeleton.

Finally, Cinema Paradiso users can get clicking and play 'Spot the Kong' in films as different as Karel Reisz's Morgan: A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966), George Dunning's Yellow Submarine (1968), Robert Stevenson's Herbie Rides Again (1974), Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Joe Dante's Amazon Women on the Moon (1987), Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993) and Jurassic Park: The Lost World (1997), Tom Shadyac's The Nutty Professor (1996), Lasse Hallström's The Cider House Rules (1999), Antoine Fuqua's Training Day (2001), Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (2007), and Chris McKay's The Lego Batman: The Movi (2017). If you spot any we've missed, do let us know...