Gorilla of Your Dreams

A Brief History of Simian Cinema

By Rick Klaw

Peter Jackson's King Kong will be the seventh big screen interpretation of this legendary giant ape's story. The original King Kong (1933), the first giant gorilla movie, revolutionized film making, is one of the greatest giant creature movies ever made and inspired numerous rip-offs, imitators and parodies, including The Mighty Kong, a 1998 animated musical direct-to-video release starring Dudley Moore.

Developed from an idea by crime writer Edgar Wallace and producer Merian C. Cooper, King Kong is essentially a re-telling of "Beauty & the Beast." The groundbreaking special effects developed by Willis O'Brien remained the industry standard until the 1980s with the emergence of computer-generated effects. O'Brien perfected the art of stop-motion animation that was popularized in the 1950s by his famed disciple Ray Harryhausen. The technique uses a model that is filmed after each minute movement. The shots, shown in rapid succession, give the illusion of action. Recent examples include Tim Burton's Corpse Bride and Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of Were-Rabbit.

Thanks to O'Brien's camera work, a good script and a stirring Max Steiner soundtrack, King Kong established the ape as a major movie player. The 1950s re-release inspired another popular monster, Godzilla, and launched that decade's giant monster movie craze.

Later in 1933, O'Brien, Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack (the original's co-director) teamed up once again on the tepid but humorous sequel Son of Kong. As critically disappointing as that movie was, their third foray into a giant ape film more than made up for it. Mighty Joe Young (1949) is the classic story of friendship and devotion between a young woman and her giant gorilla companion. While Kong was a tragic monster, Joe Young is a lovable and playful character who is exploited. By the film's end, Joe becomes a hero. For his efforts, O'Brien won an Oscar for visual effects. Sadly, Mighty Joe Young was a financial disaster and its failure essentially ended O'Brien's career.

Disney Studios and director Ron Underwood successfully remade Mighty Joe Young (1998) with Charlize Theron as the big ape's friend. Unlike Dino De Laurentiis's atrocious 1976 remake of King Kong, Underwood and screenwriters Mark Rosenthal and Lawrence Konner successfully modernized the story for contemporary audiences. The exceptional Joe Young visuals were created by Oscar-winning special-effects artist Rick Baker, who had been at least partially responsible for the awful effects in the 1976 King Kong.

There have been other King Kong movies, including two Japanese features (King Kong vs. Godzilla [Kingukongu tai Gojira, 1962] and King Kong Escapes [Kingukongu no gyakushu, 1967]) and a worthless sequel to the 1976 remake, King Kong Lives (1986). None of these films approach the caliber or the visual impact of the original classic.

Fittingly enough, Willis O'Brien animated the first gorilla movie with his stop-motion short The Dinosaur and The Missing Link (1917) for the Edison Studios. The 1918 silent picture Tarzan of the Apes was the first film version of Edgar Rice Burrough's classic ape man tale and the first feature length project to feature apes. Starring Elmo Lincoln as the adult Tarzan and Enid Markey as Jane, it was the second biggest grossing film of 1918, behind Mickey, which bore the unfortunate tagline "The Picture You Will Never Forget." Tarzan of the Apes spawned numerous imitators, including The King of the Kongo (1929), Darkest Africa (1936), the Bomba serials (beginning in 1950) and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (two television series [1955, 2000] and a feature film [1984]). Over the next eight and half decades, Tarzan remained one of the most popular and active characters, with numerous movies and television projects.

The first use of an ape suit was in the 1918 Tarzan of the Apes. This revolutionary concept was used in almost every ape film that followed, the O'Brien films being notable exceptions. In 1920's Go and Get It, wrestler Bo Montana became the first person credited for portraying an ape. By the end of the decade, men in gorilla suits were commonplace.

George Barrows, Emil Van Horne, Charlie Gemora (the first to create his own gorilla suit), Ray "Crash" Corrigan (out of the suit, he simultaneously maintained a thriving acting career playing cowboys in the serials) and Bob Burns were some of the most famous of the small fraternity of "gorilla men." These actors wore suits of their own designs and enjoyed long, successful careers playing apes in films like Tarzan the Tiger (1929), Murders In the Rue Morgue (1932, starring the famed Bela Lugosi), Queen of the Jungle (1935), The Ape (1940 with the legendary Boris Karloff) and many others.

In the Forties and Fifties, apes abounded in Three Stooges shorts, feature films, "I Love Lucy" episodes and much more. Simians usually portrayed buffoons, often as stand-ins for oafish humans. The fact that apes are so human-like but not human was often used to humorous and/or frightening advantage.

The gorilla men were seen as an inexpensive alternative to the superior but costly and time-consuming techniques developed by O'Brien. To this day, the majority of movies and television with ape appearances use a man in a suit. Similar to the technique employed to create Gollum in The Lord of the Rings films, Peter Jackson's King Kong is essentially a man in a suit: Andy Serkis acted the role and the special effects technicians digitally morphed an ape figure around his body.

King Kong was not the only big ape movie of the Thirties. The controversial Ingagi (1931) promoted itself as a documentary of African life. At the L.A. premiere, several actors recognized one of the scantily-clad gorilla-kidnapped natives as a frequent movie extra. It turned out the director had used African footage from a 1917 documentary interspersed with grainy, poorly-lit scenes of beautiful women and Charlie Gemora in his gorilla suit. It didn't stop the film from becoming the third largest moneymaker of the year. Ingagi spawned several imitators including Son of Ingagi (1940), which had no connection with its predecessor and whose main importance is that it was the first horror film with an all African-American cast.

The use of actors in ape suits achieved critical mass with Planet of the Apes (1968). This movie spawned four sequels, a television series, an animated series, a 2001 remake and a handful of "Simpsons" parodies. A dystopian reflection of American society in the 1960s, the real strength of Apes is the brilliant Michael Wilson and Rod Serling script, which was loosely based on Pierre Boulle's Swiftian satire, La Planète des singes (Monkey Planet). The most original shock-ending of all time cemented the movie's place in film history.

Throughout the Eighties and Nineties, Hollywood continued to churn out ape films, including Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984); Gorillas in the Mist (1988); Congo (1995); Ed (1996); Buddy (1997); Tarzan and the Lost City (1998); and Disney's animated Tarzan (1999). While a number of these films were dreadful, the popularity of simian features appears unabated. Peter Jackson's King Kong is destined to be the first significant ape film of the new millennium, but the question is, will his Kong achieve the quality and visual impact of the original classic? History is not on his side.