Charlotte Allen Approves

In the L.A. Times, Andrew Erish tells the story of Ingagi, the 1930 exploitation movie that posed as "an authentic incontestable celluloid document showing the sacrifice of a living woman to mammoth gorillas!" The bestiality-obsessed pseudo-documentary, which arguably influenced the original King Kong, was one of the most popular pictures of the Depression. After it was exposed as a hoax, it spawned investigations by the Hays Office and the Federal Trade Commission.

Vaguely related reading: Joe Bob Briggs wrote about the exploitation circuit in this classic Reason piece. And my appreciation of Kong star Fay Wray is here.

Comments

[MP]

Boondocks also hit on the beastiality angle.

[Ian]

I have no greater desire in this life than to see 'Prohibition Monkey'.

[Stevo Darkly]

An extended shot of a tribe dancing is accompanied by: "The African native is very emotional. He dances, and how he dances. Such a dance must be seen to be fully appreciated?. Like something out of an opium smoker's dream."

Those damn jazzmen! That's what this is really about, isn't it?

[Jeff P.]

Earthmen are not proud of their ancestors, and never invite them round for dinner.

[Jeff P.]

Many pictures of giants and girls:
http://www.giantsandgirls.com

[SM]

Dude, that site is NOT WORK SAFE ... Whew !

[Jeff P.]

Sorry. All this talk of monkey-fucking had me a bit jaded...

[Ethan]

Anybody else think that scene in (the most recent) King Kong where the brontosaurusses are tumbling all over each other but somehow leaving all the main characters unscathed was completely ridiculous? I mean, the thunder lizards were acting like they'd never been chased before.

Yeah, Jack Black is gonna be able to avoid stomping bronto-feet whilst carrying a camera.

[Gimme Back My Dog]

The movie seemed totally realistic up to that point.

[Douglas Fletcher]

Probably not the first to wonder about this, but does anyone know if Fay Wray was related to Link Wray?

[mitch]

I really liked the Peter Jackson "King Kong," so I am going to mount my cinematic Rocinante and defend Kong against all comers!

The saurapods don't step on many of the characters and smaller dinos because animals simply don't like stepping on other animals, due to an instinctive fear of tripping or getting an injured foot. Horses, for example, will refuse to trample people, and even take pains to not step on people who are laying down. (Or so my military history books tell me.)

On a more philosophical level, the stampede is an allegory of the randomness of life. Some people get killed, some don't, based on impersonal, seemingly random factors. Think about auto and rail accidents, cancer, etc. Anyone of us can suddenly be killed at any moment, through no fault of our own, or survive some danger, not because of any inherent goods qualities we possess, but simply due to random chance.

[Eric the .5b]

Is it just me, or does every movie with orcs, aliens, giant apes, or any other kind of imaginary intelligent creature get called "racist" by somebody?

[Eric the .5b]

(My last comment in reference to the Boondocks cartoon.)

[mitch]

All these movies do get called racist, but I think it is understandable, if not neccesarily justified. One of the many themes addressed by "King Kong" is the relationship between modern middle-class capitalist society, represented by New York and the white explorers/film crew, and the primitive "other," represented by Kong and the bloodthirsty natives of Skull Island. (The black officer of the ship and the young sailor he takes under his wing, interestingly, represent people who are suspended between the modern bourgeois society and that of the "other," people whose origin is among the primitive "other" but who strive to become members of the modern capitalist society. As a result, these two characters have the virtues of both societies, and are the most admirable characters in the film.)

Anyway, "King Kong" does use whites and non-whites to represent two different societies, so is vulnerable to charges of racism. These charges, I think, are weak, because the film tries to portray both the "good" and "bad" of both societies. Kong, for example, has many good qualities, and the viewer is obviously expected to feel that his death is a tragedy, even if it is inevitable and/or neccesary. The natives, who are devoted to human sacrifice, after all, don't seem to have any positive attributes, but in some ways they serve to point out the not quite so obvious "barbarism" of the Western world. The natives put people to death, and sacrifice them to Kong, but the film crew and the ship's crew are willing to risk people's lives to fulfill their selfish ambitions. The similarity between the people of Skull Island and the people of the island of Manhattan is made explicit when the very ceremony of human sacrifice the natives enact is re-enacted by Denham on Broadway.

[Ethan]

The movie seemed totally realistic up to that point.

I assume you are being sarcastic here, but I don't see the point. I am not making the demand that movies be realistic. Obviously fiction is going to take liberties. If you want a world in which magical things happen, then that's great. But what happens should make sense in the world you have created. But in the world created in King Kong, there was no indication that Jack Black and the boys had superhuman abilities, yet they needed them to escape this particular fix. They were basically in the tumble-dry cycle with a bunch of dinosaurs, and emerged unscathed.

And it didn't look real anyway. The scene at the end, though, was pretty amazing, I must admit. But the beginning was tongue-dustingly tedious--why did they wait what seemed like 4 hours before Monkeytime?

[SR]

"Probably not the first to wonder about this, but does anyone know if Fay Wray was related to Link Wray?"

Not impossible, but unlikely. Fay Wray was born on a ranch in rural Alberta in 1907 to a family that later moved to Arizona. Link Wray was born in Dunn, NC in 1929 and was described as being of Shawnee Indian descent. The Shawnee are native to the North Carolina region, so that suggests Link's family were locals. Equally, Fay Wray's family were Mormons, suggesting that they did not come from North Carolina (at least recently), since the Mormon colonies in Alberta were largely founded by migrants from Utah. Thus, I would guess a family connection is very remote or non-existent.

[mitch]

The beginning of "King Kong" is quite long, maybe too long. However, many interesting points are made. For example, we see both Carl Denham and Ann Darrow stealing, one to satisfy his ambitions, the other out of hunger. This shows one of the themes of the film; that within each of us, even in our modern, middle-class society, lives a primitive, barbaric nature that is a threat to the very stable modern society we enjoy. (Kong, among other things, represents this inner barbarian, a part of human psychology that must be supressed or destroyed if we are to enjoy the wealth and stability of a modern, bourgeois society.) In the New York and "at sea" scenes we are also introduced to all the characters. For their deaths on Skull Island to have an emotional impact, we need to get to know all these people. In particular, we need to meet the black officer and the young sailor, who are important symbols of the relationship between primitive societies and modern societies, and how men endeavour to rise from one to the other and combine the virtues of each.

[wellfellow]

I think that the black officer and the young sailor were in love, personally.

[Anon]

Joe Bob also once mentioned (search of ingagi) "Son of Ingagi" in one of his Monstervision segments. I hope Erish covers that one when Jackson's remake of _King Kong Lives_ comes out...

Anon

[shecky]

So... Where can I find a copy of Ingagi for my own...?

[Deus ex Machina]

The modern viewer watching King Kong might be put off by the holes in the plot and the gaps in the special effects; or, worse, he might accept them, condescendingly, as problems that are only obvious to us sophisticated cineastes of today. In fact, many moviegoers noticed them in the '30s as well.

While I know the Jackson remake purposely kept the plot holes in place (the biggest one being how did the ship's crew manage to get him off the island), there was one that I couldn't get out of my mind: Dennam's Broadway show featuring Kong starts presumably in the evening-say around 9 PM. Kong then escapes and after thrashing around Times Square, locates the Naomi Watts character and serenades her in the park before being interrupted by an artillery charge. He then climbs the Empire State Building just as dawn is breaking and meets his maker. So trying to apply the timeline, apparently Kong rampage and date with Watts takes up about 10 hours or so. Gives new meaning to the phrase Rock solid, all night long.

[Ed]

However solemn and earnest, reviews of monkey monster movies still make me giggle. ...one of the themes of the film; that within each of us, even in our modern, middle-class society, lives a primitive, barbaric nature that is a threat to the very stable modern society we enjoy. Tee hee hee! Stop, you're killing me!