Rent King Kong (1933)

Monster Classic. - King Kong review by Steve

Merian C. Cooper started with an image of a giant ape on top of the Empire State Building, with fighter planes swirling overhead. Edgar Wallace wrote most of the rest of the plot, though it borrows from Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Willis O'Brien worked on modelling for that film in 1925, and returns to lead the incredible monster animation of Kong on Skull Island.

Robert Armstrong plays a megalomaniacal film producer who takes a crew into uncharted waters to research and exploit a legend about a land of giant creatures. He keeps his real mission a secret, especially from the starving ingenue (Fay Wray) he finds fainting in a queue for a soup kitchen in New York, who he proposes should star in his film.  

King Kong feels like an extreme experience, not just because of O'Brien's inspirational effects, but also the sheer amount of death. Its body count is off the chart. And because of the crazily entitled behaviour of the movie mogul who takes Kong back to wreck New York.

The use of sound is a landmark. Fay Wray's screaming is legendary. The cries of the beasts are fearsome. And Max Steiner's thrilling, groundbreaking score is all over the climax. King Kong is a triumph of technical achievement, but it is also a wonderful tale of exotic exploration, anthropological hokum, crazy entrepreneurship, two fisted action and, Fay Wray in her underwear.