Celluloid Heroes

Who do you think is going to get the worst of this, Maxie or Africa?

It took them sixteen years, but they finally made a real sequel to the original King Kong. Okay, Mighty Joe Young is not technically a sequel to the 1933 classic, but they definitely share the same DNA. Like Kong, Joe Young was produced by Merian C. Cooper and directed by Ernest B. Shoedsack from a screenplay by Ruth Rose. Stop motion animation pioneer Willis H. O’Brien is still around, supervising his young protégé, Ray Harryhausen. From the cast, Robert Armstrong is back as nightclub owner Max O’Hara, who has a lot more ideas than sense. While he’s not playing Carl Denham, it’s easy to imagine O’Hara as Denham still living under an assumed name to evade the lawsuits stemming from the problems he had with the last big ape he ran into.

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Tell me, Harold, how many of these, eh, suicides have you
performed?

Harold and Maude is one of those “little classics” that’s a shared secret among the few who saw it on their first run, sort of the Lost in Translation of its generation. Like the 2003 film, there are going to be those who love it and those who just don’t understand the appeal. I’m sure if I had been my current age in 1971, I would have been charmed out of my socks by this idiosyncratic May-December romance.

As it is, separated by thirty-five years, the cultural rust has accumulated on this movie, which is almost completely a creation of its times. Among those perhaps ten to fifteen years my junior, it would probably be a rare person who could connect to this film. That doesn’t make it bad, just dated.

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