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3 | Monstrous Returns in the Postwar Context Mighty Joe Young and Godzilla I n one of the final scenes of A Summer Place (Delmer Daves, 1959), young lovers Molly (Sandra Dee) and Johnny (Troy Donahue) lie to their parents about going out to see King Kong, “one of those wonderful old horror numbers,” as Molly puts it. The proposed outing is a ruse, for the couple actually intends to venture out to an abandoned lookout near their parents’ beach house, in order to be alone. (In one of the film’s plot twists, Molly’s father [Richard Egan] and Johnny’s mother [Dorothy McGuire] were lovers in the distant past, but have divorced their spouses and married one another, creating an odd situation in which both parents and children are romantic couples.) The subsequent scene at the beach lookout is crucial. Having struggled to “be good” through much of the film, Molly and Johnny at last give in to temptation, and in the next scene we will learn that Molly has become pregnant. While at the beach lookout, still debating the terms of their love, the couple returns to a discussion of King Kong. Since Johnny has never seen the film, Molly supplies basic plot information, the better to sustain the lie to their parents. She explains, “It’s about this big ape or gorilla or something who carries this girl off in the palm of his hand—Fay Wray, I think.” As the lovers embrace, there is a tight close-up of Molly/Dee, who becomes increasingly emotional—a response motivated by Johnny’s nearness, but also by a recollection of King Kong’s last stand, in which, as she puts it, “thousands” of planes shoot at the ape, eventually killing him. Turning to kiss Johnny, she adds, “It’s kind of sad. If anybody asks, just tell ’em about the end. That’s the part| 121 122 | c h a p t e r 3 everybody remembers.” At the moment of the kiss, there is a cut to pounding surf, a recurrent image in this film of sexual desire unleashed.1 Although King Kong has been cited in a number of feature films, including Morgan! (Karel Reisz, 1966), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), and Amazon Women on the Moon (Joe Dante et al., 1987), this rather elaborate citation from A Summer Place offers a compact means for launching thischapter’scentraltopic:KingKong’s1950srevivals,aswellasreformulations of the story in the two most significant postwar spin-offs, Mighty Joe Young (Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1949) and Godzilla (Inoshiro Honda, 1954) (the latter having been inspired by King Kong’s popularity in Japan). First, the scene in A Summer Place makes reference to the historical fact of King Kong’s 1950s revivals, which were phenomenally successful, generating greater box office receipts than had been earned in the original 1933 release, and attracting renewed media attention for the film. King Kong thus became part of the general recycling of vintage Hollywood films that characterized the 1950s film industry, and that would constitute a facet of what we now regard as the beginning of the postmodernist moment. In this respect, King Kong was not a unique case, but for many media critics, it would become a virtual symbol of an aging Hollywood’s efforts to recycle its films, which would eventually fuel the critical movement toward cinephilia and cult filmgoing. An early portion of this chapter will provide an overview of the 1950s re-releases of King Kong, stressing ways in which formal features were discursively retrofitted to the shifting needs of emerging technologies and changing markets characteristic of Hollywood in this period. The Summer Place example also illustrates a second, perhaps more significant dimension of King Kong’s reception in the postwar context pertaining to questions of thematic and cultural value. In light of my argument, set forth in previous chapters, that King Kong’s cultural value in the 1930s issued largely from its distinct mobilization of discourses of exploration, primitivism, and race, the Summer Place example is quite striking for its insertion of the film into an intensely “white” family melodrama. The ostensible effect is that King Kong appears as a film of pure emotion and sentimental love, charged with the capacity to move a young Sandra Dee to tears. The manner in which American 1950s films often seem to foreground “clean” images of domestic life has received extensive critical attention, but as Michael Rogin, Alan...

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