One of the great pleasures of revisiting the really old
classics is to see how concise Hollywood storytelling used to be. Watching the
original King Kong from 1933,
directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack and written by James
Creelaman and Ruth Rose, I was amazed by how much adventure is packed into such
a tight timeframe. It’s a little more than half the running time of Peter
Jackson’s bloated remake from 2005, but their stories are virtually identical
and most of the set pieces have the same basis.
