Hello!

All things fantastic film expert and generous blogger David J. Schow really hit something nice for the holiday week.

This video posted by Nigel Dreiner was taken at the 50th Anniversary Grauman’s Chinese Hollywood re-Premiere of the original, incomparable 1933  King Kong.

We don’t know how the event was arranged, but I long ago learned that a group of fans of Kong created a major attraction for the event. Some of them were well-known effects and stop-motion animation craftsmen, the disciples of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen that we wrote about in  a popular old DVD Savant post. Their work became a big display in the famed Chinese forecourt, where all the cement signatures and handprints are.

They constructed a duplicate of the giant Kong ‘bust’ like the one used for close-ups in the original movie. It looks great — the eyes, jaw and eyebrows move, just like the original prop.

The 24-minute video shows the expected drive-up of notables. A young Leonard Maltin hosts the event for ET. Just scanning through we see several faces we ought to be able to name, and note RKO optical guru Linwood Dunn, Darlene O’Brien, Robert Clampett, Sally Struthers. A big arrival is Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen, who thanks to Maltin’s prompt, offers a great audio bite about King Kong’s influence on his life and career. The IMDB offers a full list of celeb attendees at  this page.

Also Gary Owens, Leonard Nimoy, Brian Dennehy, and Jerry Mathers. Could that be Ken Osmond with Mathers?  Is that even possible?  Looks like him to me.

Fay Wray shows up at about 12 minutes as the guest of honor. She’s a charmer, a beautiful, classy, and very well-spoken lady. Ms. Wray also looks great posing ‘in the grip’ of the giant ape mockup … once a picture model, always a picture model.

At about 18 minutes comes some on-air E.T. coverage, showing the Kong bust under construction.

 

Full premiere coverage KING KONG 50th Anniversary. 

Also from April of 1983, here’s a New York Times article about an abortive, ‘deflating’ attempt to commemorate the Kong’s Golden Anniversary  at the Empire State Building.

 

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We wanted some Holiday themed items … all we can offer is a link to our  White Christmas review from a few weeks back. Meanwhile …

 

 

There’s nothing like a little lustmord for the Holidays … correspondent Gordon Thomas, responding to Criterion’s recent restored Blu-ray of G.W. Pabst’s  Pandora’s Box, has updated his Bright Lights Film Journal essay.

It’s a rewarding read that discusses the Franz Wedekind source plays, the changing attitudes about sexuality during the Wiemar Republic, and other pre-Pabst silent film adaptations (there were a handful), two of which starred Asta Nielsen.

With the benefit of Thomas’s research, we get an understandable explanation why Pandora’s Box received a tepid reception in Berlin of 1929 — German audiences had a fixed idea of who Lulu should be, and American Louise Books was not her.

 

Of Sexual Hate and Lonely Death 

I translate the caption above (with my amazing German 1 skillset) as:

“You are under the Mistletoe. Now you must let yourself be kissed.”That’s as close as we can get to an appropriate Yuletime Motto. A safe and happy holiday to us all.

Thanks for reading! — Glenn Erickson