I cannot remember the last time I saw the original King Kong, which takes us all the way back to Merian C. Cooper's 1933 classic. It's part of that Criterion Channel collection which is paying homage to the first Criterion Collection films with commentary for which they've lost permission (to sell DVD copies, although they can still occasionally stream them on the Channel). Considering the state of America in 1933, in the depth of a Great Depression caused by unregulated corporate greed, it's not surprising that audiences loved seeing King Kong smash the shit out of New York. As I was watching I kept thinking about the final line: "It was beauty that killed the beast." A much truer line would have been, "It was capitalism than killed the beast." I also found myself wondering why Fay Wray is not universally recognized as the first Scream Queen.
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