Kevin McMahon
I If you were a boy in the 1950s and grew up in a New Jersey suburb, your middle-class family owned a TV set-like a huge cabinet with a control panel inside, like a small, blurry B&W screen that had a huge cabinet with a control panel, you had to actually have to get up from the sofa to adjust; in other words, if you were me- you could use about six TV stations. One of them is Wor-enshel 9, whose trading stock is an old movie. At least the gem on the crown of my broadcast week is the “Million Dollar Movie” which airs twice a day, Monday to Saturday.
When I wasn’t kicking sticks at the nearby gang, shooting marble, jumping into leaf stakes, and building muddy forts in the woods (yes, we did these things), I was in the recliner in our study, glued to the TV. I watched everything, whatever they have, but my absolute favorite, this is a movie I will never and will never miss, it is “King Kong”. Max Steiner’s score begins with these three giant chords heralding into a wonderful adventure and strange kingdom. This is my first introduction to the real primitive magic of the movie. Even over the years, despite all the reboots, remakes, spin-offs and pop culture reboots, and depicting every questionable change in the giant monkey on the Empire State Building and embellished with blondes on his paws, the 1933 production continued to create its inevitable grip on imaging in its original form.
After a wonderfully clichéd fake Arabic proverb, after the title card about Beauty and the Beast, the card announces the theme of the movie on a misty night… Fade out: The Pier in Manhattan. A tugboat crosses the mid-screen, heralding a passage over the water to the mysteriously wrapped island. People have a quiet sense of expectation for what we don’t know yet.
Robert Armstrong’s latest quasi-literary jungle epic (Robert Armstrong) free start producer history coops Dispect waif fay waif fay wray seeks a last-minute start to increase “love interest.” He could look at her face nicely as she fainted from hunger, lit up by the glowing close-up of the original, sensual inner fragility of fragility – even a former youth former boy impatiently traveling through the settings and into the action, I know that Fay Wray is a real dish – Armstrong – Armstrong reacts: “Hey! Tax!”
The character is then developed through the voyage of the tramp steam engine with Bruce Cabot’s rough first companion and provides on-board romance for wray. Cabot here embodies the dualism of Hollywood Action Man, a hero of romanticism, transitioning from Graff’s dismissal to that woman to “a nuisance” obsessed with obsession: “Say…I think I love you.” Once the company reaches Skull Island and falls into the heart of dark secrets, the action will never be released. You all know this story, or you should. Giant gorilla meets the girl, Giant gorilla loses the girl, Giant gorilla gets the girl. Then, overcoming his (completely understandable) obsession with Wray, Kong meets his tragic ending: “‘Twas Beauty kills the beast.”
A few years after I first fell under the spell of the movie, I visited the Los Angeles House in J Ackerman in Los Angeles. Forri’s house was filled with souvenirs he collected throughout his life in his business.
One of the most precious items on display is one of the original gold metal models. About one foot a foot tall, rusted with rust and scattered with residue from rabbit fur, it is an impressive object-that is, until you recall its huge, repositioned frame in the film, the film’s clever crafts are made up of him skillfully forming the fantasy of the huge Gor Island magazine island and spanning his huge dance world and across his huge mountain island.
Indeed, this is something in the dream.
Kevin McMahon worked around town for years, a journalist, propagandist, screenwriter, development supervisor and script reader, then retired, and then worked as a senior story analyst at WB Pictures. He can be reached via kmcmahon50@gmail.com.
