| RATING: | 100% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
BLONDES ARE SCARCE AROUND HERE
A brilliant and easily the best of all monster pictures ever made because, at heart, it is a great romantic love story. The beauty and the beast myth is cleverly re-imagined and presented larger-than-life in the modern world; the emotional impact of the movie stemming from the fact that it is a tragedy of unrequited and unrequitable love. Where the story differs from the original is in the way it, in common with a great many Hollywood films - up to and including the present day (2010) - presents a story of intercultural love in the guise of interspecies attraction.
The blonde White woman is presented as the epitome of human beauty and White virtue who needs protecting from being affectively raped by a large gorilla; representing White supremacist ideas of Black sexuality. Whites are shown as needing to protect themselves from the alleged taint that any such sexual unions imply by first attempting to tame the beast and, when this fails, to destroy him. Presenting an analogous Black as a potential rapist of White women (as literally shown in Birth of a Nation) is clearly readable as an analogy to White attitudes toward miscegenation - especially in the United States of the time when in some states it was a criminal offense and/or extra-judicially punishable by lynching. Yet, despite this, the lure of forbidden sexual-relations captivates the White mind; hence, the immense popularity among Whites of this amazing picture; representing, as it does, Whites' simultaneous fear of and desire for Blacks.
And yet the feared "Beast" - so-called - is humanized, as few movie monsters are (& as few Blacks still are in Hollywood where the ban on miscegenation still holds sway), so that he becomes a character in his own right and not a mere ragbag of clever special effects (as in Jurassic Park or Alien). We empathize with his love for the White woman. and his (thwarted) sexuality - although violent - is somehow endearing, chivalrous, the stuff of great tragedy and understandable in human terms. The SFX still look good today in an age of CGI.
An unusual Hollywood attempt at showing Blacks as human rather than as the ravening beasts of the White supremacist imagination - in this it resembles Shakespeare's play Othello. To have presented such a story in literal terms would have meant box-office failure with a White audience as well as censorship problems with White censors. Here the beast is the romantic hero whose violence is subdued by love and whose grand passion becomes as big as he is himself.
The entire cast is excellent particularly Fay WRAY as the "scarce blonde": The perfect cinema ingenue. Bruce CABOT is fine as the square-jawed, Flash Gordon-type out to protect his mate from any simian interest, whose love for WRAY is compared and contrasted dramatically with that of Kong. His character also has the same problem as Kong; coming to terms with his true feelings for WRAY despite his deep-seated misogyny. While Robert ARMSTRONG is perfect as the alter ego of the director (Merian Cooper): The daredevil film director out to obtain film footage that 'no white man has ever seen before'.
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