Gorilla From Another Time

King Kong, Carefully paced, often gripping, this thriller-fantasy set the style for most of the giant monster movies to come. Special-effects designer Willis O'Brien's giant ape was the source of awe and terror--even the camera froze on him while he did his stuff. To movie-goers of 1933, O'Brien's small moth-eaten model--which had to be moved ever-so slightly and filmed for a fraction of a second at a time--was a revelation, the ultimate fantasy. If Kong appears jerky and slightly ridiculous to us, it must have seemed so to them--except they appreciated Kong's artificiality, they wanted to see the strings. A realistic 60-foot gorilla would have been a bit much for people who a mere 30 years before had dived out of their seats at the sight of a moving train on the screen, afraid it would run them over. Both the film-makers and the main characters were adventures--creating special effects on an unprecedented scale--and part of the film's charm lies in the breathless sense of discovery that infuses every shot, heightened with each passing reel. It's something Dino De Laurentiis' repulsive, self-conscious, exploitive remake never touches. And it's as good now, because today so much of it--Fay Wray's hysteria, the chases, Max Steiner's delightful but overdone score--seems tongue-in-cheek. And we got to suspend our disbelief. Really suspend it. Until we're yanked in. "'Twas Beauty killed the Beast," says Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) at the end of the movie, and the purity of this epitaph is convincing. King Kong is distillation of mythic adventures, and it helped Hollywood define the word, "Entertainment."

Picnic At Hanging Rock. Peter Weir's metaphysical mystery about the disappearance of several adolescent girls from a Victorian boarding school is often hilariously overdone, but the subject is eerie and the idea has potential. Weir is a wild Romantic, he gives every shot of nature stark religious overtones piled on to the point of silliness. The beginning is obvious but fun. There is no doubt as to what happens to the girls, but there follows more than an hour of ponderous, redundant "evidence," the result of an Agatha Christie-type structure which, Weir irritatingly enough, never fulfills. Weir may be an artist--he certainly makes films that proclaim their profundity--but he seems grounded in camp, and the movie stays shallow.

Klute. In 1971, Jane Fonda won an Oscar for this film She didn't work in Hollywood again until 1976. It's good to have you back, Jane, but Klute almost sustained us through those barren years. Somehow thrillers where the characters matter seem richer in atmosphere and tension--and Fonda's Bree Daniels, the call-girl who is the object of a shadowy killer, involves us so totally that the girl-in-the-abandoned-warehouse routine at the end doesn't even appear schematic (well, it does, but we're still scared to death). You gotta credit Alan J. Pakula though, who here, as in All the President's Men and the Parallax View, conveys the someone-is-always-watching-you motif with incomparable creepiness. Donald Sutherland is an intelligent, if pallid detective, but the protagonist is Jane all the way, the frustrated hooker trapped by the emotional and physical perils of her profession. Her best performance to date.

Norma Rae: When Sally Fields dropped from "The Flying Nun" into Burt Reynolds lap, a teen angel was despoiled, but no one took much notice. Martin Ritt, however, kept an eye on Fields, and plucked her from the backseat of Burt's van, where she last displayed her talents--prone--in Smokey and the Bandits. In Norma Rae, Ritt allows Fields aging starlet cuteness to work for her. A sassy, kick-around mill worker, Norma Rae is a woman cashing in on the vestiges of squirrel-mouthed, cheerleader prettiness. The story is hokey, but it plays. Widowed by a beer brawl and left with two children, one illegitimate, Norma Rae is trapped in a one-industry, two-bit, sexist little town. She marries a muscle-bound teddy-bear, but she only comes to value herself through a friendship with a New York Jew labor organizer. There's no sex, no racial problems, and pretty simple politics--it sounds like "Gidget goes to Harlan County"--but thanks to some good acting and direction, it is much more effective than feminist self-discovery movies in the vein of An Unmarried Woman or One Sins the Other Doesn't.

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Named Best Film of 1978 by the National Society of Film Critics, this film is a big hit with the Perrier Crowd, and it's packed the Welles since the opening. Reminiscent of Cousin, Cousine in its playful attitude toward sexual improprieties, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs fails to develop its characters much behond their pretty faces. Solange, the heroine, has three lovers: two are buffoons, her husband and a stranger he recruited to cheer her up, and one, a thirteen-year-old boy, is sensitive to her need for friendship. The plot is inconsistent, the jokes are obvious, and the direction is heavy-handed. You might find this film a clever and coy French farce--if you're drunk.