HERE COMES KING KONG

From thy full-moon wedding with the creature who touches heaven, lady, God preserve thee.

According to the marvelously clever, yet touching script for the new $24 million film version of King Kong, this starkly poetic, spookily enigmatic warning was found—drawn in blood, naturally—on the thwart of an empty lifeboat discovered adrift in the South Pacific in 1749. Next to it, natch, there was a "likeness of some huge slouchy humanoid thing."

Chills. Shuddery anticipation, as Jeff Bridges, playing the Princeton paleontologist who is but the first of millions who will soon believe that Kong lives, speaks this line in the wardroom of an oil-company ship. The vessel is exploring the ocean's remoter reaches in search of a petroleum strike that the expedition's comically cynical leader (Charles Grodin) is convinced will turn the energy crisis around.

Like the first King Kong, produced 43 years ago, the new version plunges one quickly into the heart of that special critical darkness indigenous to the movies. On the face of it, nothing could be more preposterous than this story of the love affair between the oddest couple in popular culture: a blonde whose beauty is matched only by her dimness of mind (at least in the original) and an ape who is 40 ft. tall, fierce of mien and manner, yet at heart just a big adolescent, bumbling spectacularly through the throes of his first—often literally crushing—crush. At best it is low camp, at worst a lunacy that should have sent people howling into the night long before Kong hauled himself to the top of the Empire State Building for the climactic battle with the biplanes that is one of the great iconic sequences of movie history.

Yet somehow it worked, back in the early days of talking pictures, and damned if it does not look like it is going to work again, in a supposedly more sophisticated age. The ultimate triumph of special effects over common sense? A weird sexual charge, heavy in portent, reassuringly innocent in presentation? A comic strip rendering of a myth dredged up out of the collective unconscious and splashed so boldly on the screen that the audience is awed into acceptance by its sheer audacity? Or is it, finally, just an act of primal showmanship, a Barnum-like invitation to admit to ourselves that we are all members of the great fraternity of suckerhood and simply revel in the release of cultural inhibitions that admission sometimes encourages?

Big unanswerable questions those. It is perhaps ungrateful even to ask them, so excellently is the first hour and a half of the film playing to carefully selected audiences. The tiny groups huddled in a cavernous screening room on the MGM back lot feel the beginnings of that rarest of reactions—the warm glow that comes over people in the presence of a confidently conceived, exuberantly executed work of popular movie art.