King Kong

King Kong on the Empire State Building

'King Kong' is a classic adventure/monster film made in 1933, co-directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong and Bruce Cabot. The movie has become one of the most famous of Hollywood pictures and the gorilla itself and his last stand on top of the Empire State Building has become one of cinema's most enduring and iconic images.

The movie occupies a unique niche, being in parts an adventure story, a tragic love story about a hopeless passion, and part horror movie. In 1991, it was deemed "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" by the Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. In 2007 it was ranked at number 41 on its list of the 100 greatest movies of all time by the American Film Institute.

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The basic plot is a timeless one and it is carefully created and brilliantly structured in the movie. The special effects used - stop-motion animation and rear projection - were state-of-the-art and contribute hugely to the success of the film. The basic themes of the movie can be said to be doomed passion, and the clash between the modern world and that of the primitive forces of nature, and are eloquently summed up in the final scenes with Kong and Wray on top of the Empire State Building.

The final scene is deservedly iconic and is unforgettable - by now we are firmly on Kong's side. When he plunges, mortally wounded, to the street, Denham delivers his famous epitaph: "It wasn't the airplanes, it was beauty killed the beast."

When Fay Wray died in August 2004, the lights of the Empire State Building were dimmed for 15 minutes in her memory.