Ninety years later, we still love 'King Kong.' Maybe this is why

It's the most ridiculous story ever told. A 50-foot-tall ape, in love with a five-foot blonde.

But don't worry. It'll be believable. After all, the ape will be played by an 18-inch-tall doll.

What — seriously — could have been the elevator pitch for the original "King Kong," which this month celebrates its 90th birthday? Was there ever a more unlikely idea? And was there ever a movie more immediately successful, more beloved, more of a national myth?

It opened nationally on April 7, 1933 — a magical day for Americans, the day that FDR signed the Cullen-Harrison Act that re-legalized beer drinking. The beginning of the end of Prohibition.

The movie itself was like a case of delirium tremens. Violence, destruction, racial and sexual nightmares, all rolled up into 100 minutes of berserk, hallucinatory entertainment. Earlier, on March 2, it had opened in New York, simultaneously at the RKO Roxy (3,000 seats) and Radio City Music Hall (5,960 seats). It was the only movie ever to do so.

'King Kong' is a survivor

But the original "King Kong" has survived The RKO Roxy (it was demolished in 1955, and is not to be confused with the larger Roxy Theater on West 50th Street). It has survived two remakes — so far — and countless imitations and parodies. It has survived endless analysis of its racial, sexual and colonial implications. It has survived several revolutions in F/X technology, including CGI and motion capture, that have rendered its stop-motion ape doll crude and quaint.

"King Kong" lives. The 102-story fall from the top of the Empire State Building supposedly killed him — but not really. He'll never die.

"He's part of our lives," said film buff Nelson Page, executive director of Fort Lee's Barrymore Film Center. "Unlike most of its contemporaries, this is a film that has literally withstood the test of time. All these years later, you will never be bored by 'King Kong.' "

'King Kong' is timeless

Why this appeal? Lots of reasons.

There's the sheer amount of action the film crams into under two hours. Witch doctors, dinosaurs, airplanes, sea voyages, uncharted islands, the destruction of Manhattan, and Fay Wray — screaming, screaming. There is the scale of the whole thing: a 50-foot ape, crashing through New York's skyscrapers, and finally ending atop the biggest one of them all.

"You have the greatest beast on the greatest building," Page said. "It was poetry on film."

There is the powerful suggestiveness of the story: a great dark being, brought to America in chains, who escapes to wreak havoc. What could that be about?

There is the ingenuity of F/X man Willis O'Brien — whose novel "stop-motion animation" technique turned a two-foot mannequin into a living, towering monster.

There's the memorable music. "Kong" was the first sound film to have complete musical underscoring (by Max Steiner), a thing that Hollywood executives had resisted for years. "They were nervous," Page said. "They thought the audience would wonder where the music was coming from." After "Kong," it became obligatory.

Above all, perhaps, there is the outsize personality of Merian C. Cooper — the daredevil filmmaker who was the prime mover of "King Kong."

"Cooper was bigger than life, just like King Kong was bigger than life," said Dennis Doros, co-founder of Milestone Films, an independent film distribution company in Harrington Park. Two early Cooper documentaries, "Grass" and "Chang," are in their catalog.

Cooper, like the Robert Armstrong character in "King Kong," was famous for filming in distant jungles and remote deserts. His own adventures, and those of his colleague Ernest B. Schoedsack, were part of the mystique of the films. "They were children of the Theodore Roosevelt era," Doros said. "They had to test themselves against the wilderness. But Cooper and Schoedsack took it to extremes that few others would have done."

"King Kong" was the capstone of their careers. With the help of screenwriter Ruth Rose (Mrs. Schoedsack), they created the jungle movie to end all jungle movies. With the gorilla to end all gorillas.

"Cooper was the king of entertainment, and this was really based on his life and career," Doros said.

'King Kong' is a TV treat

In the 1930s, "King Kong" was a sensation. In the 1950s, he became a houseguest. Starting in 1957, WOR-TV 9 in New York began showing the film as part of its "Million Dollar Movie" series. And showing it. And showing it.

"They would run the thing two times a week," Page said. "You would watch the film over and over. These people became family. I was fascinated. I kept begging my parents to take me to Boulevard East in West New York, to see the Empire State Building. Just to see if we could see King Kong climbing it. It was amazing. It opened up a whole new world for me."

He has his own theory about why "King Kong" is unique. Not something big, but something small. It's Kong's close-ups.

"You got to see his expressions," Page said. "His pain, his terror, his love."

There had been monster movies before. There had been movies about apes abducting beautiful girls. Indeed, it was almost a genre. "The Gorilla," "Murders in the Rue Morgue," "Ingagi," capitalized on the public fascination with Darwin's Theory of Evolution, as well as the fears of miscegenation that are, shamefully, part of America's racial baggage.

But none of those films had thought to give the ape a personality, make him a character. "King Kong" did.

"That's something you don't see in those earlier films," Page said. "And not really much afterwards. They personalized Kong, in a way that I don't think you ever saw, before or after."

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: 'King Kong' the movie turns 90. Here is why we still love it