On Friday, September 13, 2019 at 7:52:43 PM UTC-7, william ahearn wrote:

Hey,

Looking back at the movies of my youth, two films rocked my nascent sense of cinema. One was The Thief of Bagdad, helmed by a gang of directors and the other was King Kong directed by Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack. While The Thief of Bagdad

is rousing entertainment, King Kong is far more than that. No matter how many times Hollywood tries to remake this film, they never get close to how brilliant it is. Yeah, it's a monster adventure film on the surface – and a really good one at that –
and it's also a love story and also a story of a soul in a hostile world.

Somewhere among the dinosaurs and the biplanes is a heart. It's rare although one also finds a similar beat in Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein although it's gone in the endless reiterations. This is what the remakes of King Kong always miss. The

story isn't about the girl. It's about the ape.

One of my more memorable viewings of King Kong was at the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1960s when they screened a restored version that included the scenes of King Kong killing natives and New Yorkers. Every time Kong appeared on screen, the

audience – full of sophisticates, swells, and art lovers – cheered and hooted to such a point that MOMA stopped the film and someone lectured the audience about behavior in such a sacred place. MOMA – for a brief time – had the spirit of a
grindhouse.

There are few other films that would elicit that kind of response.

(2023 Youtube upload):

"King Kong (1933) Filming Locations - Then and NOW 4K"

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