Sixteen years after King Kong (1933) director Ernest B. Schoedsack, writer Ruth Rose, producer Merian C. Cooper and actor Robert Arstrong were working with a giant ape again in Mighty Joe Young, the “sequel” to Kong that the disappointing The Son of Kong (1933) failed to be. In truth there’s no connection between the two films at all but Joe is the spiritual son to the King that fans had wanted years before and hadn’t got.
In 1937, eight-year-old American girl in Africa Jill Young (Lora Lee Michel) trades her toys (and her father’s torch) for an orphaned baby gorilla brought to her father’s farm by two local men and names it Joe. Twelve years later, night club impresario Max O’Hara (Robert Armstrong) sets up a safari to Africa with his cowboy assistant Gregg (Ben Johnson) to look for animals for his new jungle-themed Hollywood nightclub, The Golden Safari. They meet “Joe Young”, now grown to be 12 feet tall, the lifelong companion of the now grown-up Jill (Terry Moore). O’Hara sees Joe as the answer to all his dreams and persuades the financially embarrassed Jill to return to Hollywood with him and allow Joe to be the main attraction in his new club. Inevitably it all goes horribly wrong as the tormented and humiliated Joe finally snaps, goes on on a destructive rampage and is threatened with being killed by the courts. The race is on to get Joe out of the country before the police turn up to carry out the order.
Despite some very dated and questionable attitudes towards its African characters and some distressing horse falls and lion mistreatment that simply wouldn’t be tolerated in any film made today, Mighty Joe Young still manages to be utterly charming. Joe, billed in the opening credits as “Mister Joseph Young as himself”, a sort on pint-sized Kong, is one of stop motion animation’s most endearing creations, risking life and limb to rescue children from a burning orphanage before waving the audience a cheery goodbye from the screen at the climax. Brilliantly animated by Ray Harryhausen, who as “first technician” performed the majority of the animation himself from “technical creator” Willis O’Brien’s original storyboards and designs, Joe has the widest range of facial expressions and readable body language of any stop-motion creature to that date and the stop motion was a quantum leap ahead of anything else seen thus far.
Harryhausen’s earliest efforts always had a problem maintaining scale and Mighty Joe Young is no exception, with Joe appearing to change height between various scenes. Harryhausen later claimed that producer Cooper had asked him to do this to make Joe look more menacing in certain shots. But the technical brilliance is unquestionable and Harryhausen’s work was rewarded with the the 1949 Academy Award for Special Effects, though it was only up against on other film, Stuart Heisler’s Western, Tulsa. The set pieces are remarkable, none more so than the initial attempt to capture Joe by a group of cowboys, a scene that O’Brien had long planned to be a part of his never-made dream project, Gwangi, which would have pitted cowboys against an Allosaurus they find in the Grand Canyon. Seven years after O’Brien’s death in 1962, Harryhausen finally helped to bring his old mentor’s dream to life in The Valley of Gwangi (1967), directed by Jim O’Connolly, which reprised the cowboys scene from Mighty Joe Young.
The brilliance of the effects tends to overshadow everything else in the film but one shouldn’t overlook Ernest B. Schoedsack’s briskly efficient direction, Roy Webb’s fantastically bombastic score and Rose’s often very funny script. The cast is a bit a mixed bag. Armstrong is once again a bit of an insensitive oaf, concerned more about the success of the new club than he is about Joe’s welfare, keeping him locked in a cage and refusing to see that his star is becoming depressed. He redeems himself at the end though and his exploitation of Joe and Jill becomes a commentary on the pernicious nature of celebrity decades before it became an issue. Johnson is a bit uncharismatic as the rope-slinging Gregg and frankly it’s hard to see what the immensely likable Jill, a nice turn from Morse, sees in him.
But no-one’s here to see the humans going through their paces. There’s the expected love story that no-one cares about but the real affair is between the audience and the endearing Joe. From his first appearance, having a temper tantrum and scaring the safari members through to his climactic acts of heroism as he dashes in an out of the burning orphanage to pluck young children from the flames, he’s more human than any of the human actors. It makes his appalling treatment by O’Hara all the more distressing. His debut at the club sees him lifting Jill aloft as she plays his favourite song, Beautiful Dreamer, on the piano, Joe bewildered and terrified by the noisy audience braying their approval. By the time he’s been reduced to wearing a silly hat and having huge plastic coins thrown at him, it’s no wonder he’s ready to rebel and smash the place up. The final straw is being burned by one of a trio of drunks who get him drunk on bottles of whiskey then get angry when he won’t behave as they want him to. His look of anguish is beautifully realised and if you’re not punching the air and cheering him on when he trashes the club in a terrified drunken rage there’s no hope for you!
The climax is genuinely exciting stuff as Jill, Gregg and a redeemed O’Hara spring Joe from his cage and make off into the night, switching trucks to fool the the pursuing police, stopping off only when they see the orphanage ablaze, a scene tinted orange to add to the tension. It’s a masterpiece of stop-motion animation, Joe really coming into his own as he scampers up trees, caries terrified children on his back and protects one of his new young wards from a falling tree. Mighty Joe Young may not carry the cultural weight of the original King Kong, still the finest giant monster on the loose film ever made despite many credible contenders to the titles, but it remains a hugely enjoyable monster film in its own right and the effects are still breathtaking.
The inevitable sequel, directed by Ron Underwood and starring Charlize Theron, Bill Paxton and a Joe created by a man in a Rick Baker gorilla suit (John Alexander) enhanced by full-sized prosthetics and digital effects by DreamQuest Images and Industrial Light & Magic, followed in 1998. And just as inevitably it wasn’t a patch on the original.
The EOFFTV Review 