Capital Celluloid 2014 - Day 107: Thu Apr 17

King Kong (Cooper/Schoedack, 1933): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm


This films is part of the Passport to Cinema season at the BFI Southbank and can also be seen on the 17th and 18th April. Tonight's screening is introduced by Nathalie Morris.

Time Out review:
'If this glorious pile of horror-fantasy hokum has lost none of its power to move, excite and sadden, it is in no small measure due to the remarkable technical achievements of Willis O'Brien's animation work, and the superbly matched score of Max Steiner. The masterstroke was, of course, to delay the great ape's entrance by a shipboard sequence of such humorous banality and risible dialogue that Kong can emerge unchallenged as the most fully realised character in the film. Thankfully Wray is not required to act, merely to scream; but what a perfect victim she makes. The throbbing heart of the film lies in the creation of the semi-human simian himself, an immortal tribute to the Hollywood dream factory's ability to fashion a symbol that can express all the contradictory erotic, ecstatic, destructive, pathetic and cathartic buried impulses of 'civilised' man.'
Wally Hammond


Here (and above) King Kong climbs the Empire State Building.

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