http://www.amny.com/news/local/am-ki...,5516514.story
'King Kong' still roars over New York
A scene from the 1933 blockbuster film "King Kong." The Film Forum will be showing the classic flim at 1pm on Sunday March 2, 2008.
By David Freedlander
February 28, 2008
Seventy-five years ago this Sunday, New Yorkers for the first time saw what panic in the city looked like.
The occasion? A love-struck giant ape breaks free of his chains and climbs to the top of the Empire State Building, the city's newly built highest spire. As pandemonium ensues on the screen, audiences at Radio City Music Hall and the now-demolished RKO New Roxy howled with delight.
"Needless to say this picture was received by many a giggle to cover up the fright," said a review in the New York Times one day after "King Kong" debuted on March 2, 1933. "Constant exclamations issued from the Radio City Music Hall yesterday."
The film quickly became one of the first quintessentially New York movies. "It is such a New York movie because no matter who builds what elsewhere, there is nothing like the Empire State Building," said David Brin, author of "King Kong is Back: An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape."
"The Eiffel Tower is just as iconic, but the French would be too blase, and the Sears Tower just wouldn't give you that uniquely New York perspective of an Empire State and a city of immigrants. I mean talk about cognitive dissonance."
On Sunday, the Film Forum will host two showings of the film, and host a Fay Wray "scream-alike" contest in between. Wray played the object of Kong's affection, who enjoys an unscheduled trip with him up the Empire State Building.
Film critic Elliot Stein, 80, is one of the few New Yorkers who can claim to have been at Radio City to witness Kong's introduction to the world. Though he says it is now his favorite film, Stein remembers feeling fear after the premiere that the BMT subway line wouldn't be there to take him and his father back to Brooklyn.
"It's a film in a way about such cockeyed American optimism, with the Empire State Building this central symbol of doing something extraordinary at the start of the Depression."
Though the Empire State Building is the star of the show, the rest of the city plays a supporting role. It opens on the waterfront across the river, with the skyline gleaming in the background. After Kong is captured and brought to New York, he is displayed for the masses at a Madison Square Garden-style venue. But panic in the streets soon erupts when the great ape escapes, and the huge metropolitan police force tries in vain to capture him. Those scenes capture a piece of the American experience that is only true to Gotham in the 30s.
"In New York it was much easier to create a sense of panic, because it's so crowded, and because there is no other place to go," said Claude Samton, an architect and photographer who was 5 when the film came out.
"Growing up in New York you become conscious of buildings in a way that you don't elsewhere, and seeing them all film is the beginning of that love affair with the city."
The film has lived on in New Yorkers imaginations, helped by continual showings decades ago on WOR/Channel 9 as part of the "Million Dollar Movie," and with annual screenings on the former RKO station on Thanksgiving Day.
"This is not only how we got to see King Kong but how we got to become familiar with it in a modern way, where you watch it over and over and get to know it frame by frame,"said Bruce Goldstein, director of programming at Film Forum.
"For my generation, it's hard to look at tall buildings in the city now without imagining him up there," Goldstein said.
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