Here’s an assignment for you: watch the 1976 remake of King Kong, starring Jeff Bridges and Jessica Lange, but study instead Rick Baker, the (now very famous) makeup artist inside the ape suit. Specifically, watch his eyes, and note how much the film’s emotional weight depends on those eyes: shot through with liquid sadness in loss, loaded with sharp anger in captivity, mild with pleasure in his scenes with Lange.
To create those expressive eyes, Baker wore scleral contacts that damaged his corneas. He struggled under the Kong masks to breathe. He could barely see over the parts of the mask that stuck out. To act, he had to coordinate his movements with costume operators who would move parts of his mechanical face mask into the appropriate expressions. Yet the performance he gave through all that pain—especially those eyes—so impressed director John Guillermin that, according to film historian Ray Morton, he decided not to film Kong at a higher frame rate; he wanted Baker filmed at normal speed to preserve every subtlety of his sensitive performance.
And it worked. Any kaiju fan knows a man in a suit either works or it really, really doesn’t, but in King Kong, Baker’s performance elevates the entire film. To my mind, the film succeeds better than any other Kong remake, simply because it understands one key idea: King Kong is a story about an ape. And this understanding is indicative of the film’s ability to capture what made the original great, while also updating the movie for a 1970s audience. Or maybe I should say, it’s indicative of how smart Dino de Laurentiis was, because the superproducer more or less strong-armed this massive production entirely on his own.
When De Laurentiis set out to remake the classic Kong, he wanted to update Willis O’Brien’s original stop-motion animation—legendary at the time, but perhaps less exciting after decades of pale and cheap imitations. De Laurentiis looked to the Japanese Toho Studios, home of Godzilla, and their long practice of using suit actors on miniature sets. He hired Baker—a very green makeup artist who loved gorillas—to build the suit. And when other grandiose plans for a gorilla fell through, Baker’s work so impressed director Guillermin that he was hired to wear the suit too, giving one of the greatest suit performances ever to appear onscreen. (Hyperbole mine, but accurate.)
It wasn’t just the use of a suit actor that distinguished the film from its lauded predecessor though. To its credit, the 1976 version departed in several refreshing ways from the original. Screenwriter Lorenzo Semple Jr. and De Laurentiis knew that their movie—the first direct remake of the by-now hugely beloved 1933 classic—would come under fierce scrutiny, so they decided to differentiate it as much as possible, setting it in the (then) contemporary 1970s. The film still centered around greed, but this time it was oil greed, not show business greed. (Though that note still sounds through the character of Dwan, the wannabe movie starlet and femme fatale.) The reliably grumpy Charles Grodin plays smarmy oil company executive Fred Wilson, who, much like his industry, spends most of the film trying to exploit everyone, at one point telling Jack Prescott (a young, starry Jeff Bridges), “Jack, I know how you feel, I feel the same. But this is a national energy crisis which demands that we all rise above our private selfish interests.” In another departure from the original, Semple’s screenplay was also quite funny at times. As Morton writes in his book, King Kong: The History of a Movie Icon, Semple wanted to inject a little “knowing sense of humor,” understanding that modern audiences might find aspects of the production more absurd than audiences in 1933. He intended the film to be taken seriously, though, and despite unfair charges of camp, it really does play (mostly) straight with its subjects.
In the original film, flamboyant filmmaker and showman Carl Denham convinces a crew, a ship, and a girl to take a dangerous voyage to a hidden island; he knows what they’ll find there, and he’s determined to make a motion picture about it. In the 1976 version, the villainous Wilson takes a massive tanker to a hidden island where he’s hoping to find the biggest oil reserve in history. Wilson doesn’t have to bring along the hero and the girl this time—they show up along the way: Jack is a stowaway, and Kong-bait Dwan (Jessica Lange) literally floats in as a sole shipwreck survivor, from one trauma frying pan into another trauma fire.
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Another assignment for you: watch one of the most recent Kong/Monsterverse films, and notice how little the story cares about Kong, really. He’s just a sort of screensaver for the human stories. Yes, you need humans, but to tell the story of Kong, you have to understand that humans matter because they matter to Kong. The director, writer, and producer all understood this in the 1976 film, and realized the best way to draw out the Beast’s full range of emotions was to update his Beauty. Film industry newcomer Jessica Lange was given a sexy naivete and a thoroughly modern attitude. That first blonde beauty, Fay Wray’s Ann Darrow, was a starving Depression era waif, going to an island to be in a movie. Lange’s Dwan is a damsel of her time, guided by astrology and auras. She’s also a much feistier captive than Wray, who mostly alternates between screaming and fainting. (When I was a kid, I remember watching the 1933 version for the first time and being surprised at how little Wray is actually given to do in the film.)
De Laurentiis and Semple wanted to develop a more reciprocal affection than in the original film. Dwan talks to Kong, reasons with him, fights back. She jokes with him. She flirts with him, lets him give her a blow dry after a bath in a waterfall, her evident arousal—and his—one of the few off-puttingly goofy notes in the film. Most of this is subtle and sympathetic, though. Dwan shows an empathy for Kong that the earlier Ann Darrow does not, which is only believable on screen because of Rick Baker’s doomed eyes and portrayal of frank curiosity, and Lange’s well-struck balance between smitten and selfish. She loves and pities Kong, and can’t help but use him in the end, because of her overwhelming desire to be famous. She also tries to save him, begging “Don’t put me down! Hold on to me or they’ll kill you!” when the helicopters are shooting at him, and yet still uses his death to finally achieve stardom—albeit at a terrible cost. Earlier on, she warns us this will happen. “How can I become a star because of someone that was stolen off that gorgeous island,” she asks, but with a strange resignation, as if she can already see the ending.
The last scene is surprisingly bleak for a spectacle film: Dwan is circled by cameras, separated from love interest Jack and alone in her stardom; the dead body of Kong, fallen this time from his (now uncanny) perch on the Twin Towers, lies next to her. Kong’s last wistful glance is wise and tragic as any human’s, his emotion made more devastating in its magnitude of scale.
“Beauty and the Beast is a grotesque farce!” exclaims Prescott, earlier in the film. But he’s wrong; it’s only in the 1976 film that we locate the true beauty and the beast story, love blooming in the wake of revulsion and horror. And yet I still don’t think the film gets enough credit for all the ways it breaks new ground, nor does Baker for his phenomenal performance in the ape suit.
De Laurentiis leaned into a marketing campaign that would have done Carl Denham proud, but no doubt tarnished the film’s reputation in the long run. The jewel in the crown of this marketing blitz was the technological miracle of the movie, especially the massive 40-foot mechanical King Kong, a prodigious folly no doubt inspired by the success of the mechanical shark in Spielberg’s blockbuster film Jaws the year before. But the truth was that the production was plagued by tech chaos. Fifty years ago, in an era before computer animation, the actors had difficulty acting in front of a screen. Lange in particular said she “spent a great deal of that schedule shooting by myself on a green screen and in a hydraulic giant gorilla hand. And [my co-star Charles] Grodin said to me, ‘This isn’t what movies are like.’”
In addition, the fabled mechanical Kong ended up a spectacular failure; at one point in a pivotal scene “a pipe inside the contraption broke, leaving a torrent of hydraulic fluid seeping down Kong’s leg in front of a startled crowd.” In the end, in a groundbreaking performance that should have been fêted, the guy in the suit—who also built the suit—acted almost the entirety of the ape scenes. Unfortunately, his work was buried in the hype surrounding a giant Kong that spends six seconds on screen and sports a silver crown, the gauchest accidental metaphor for the film’s lofty, unrealized ambitions.
The ’76 Kong was my Kong, growing up; I was born two years after, but it still loomed as large as the ape in the public imagination. I had my own encounter with a mechanical Kong, too—a 30-foot tall, 6 1/2-ton animatronic designed by Disney Imagineer Bob Gurr for a ride at Universal Studios that took you through New York City on an elevated train aimed straight at Kong’s noggin. The ride eventually burned down in a fire at Universal Studios, but I still think about that giant dumb head often, that gaping jaw and vacant expression. It’s still frightening, not because it’s Kong, but because it’s so unreal, so uncanny. Like being assaulted by a building, not a creature. And yet somehow, perhaps in spite of themselves, the director behind The Towering Inferno and the producer who just wanted a great big grand spectacle ended up making the most human of all the Kong films.