King Kong, the granddaddy of all monster movies, will always remain the stuff that dreams are made of. On the nightmare/fairytale side, its sexual harmonics are still ominous, if obvious, from the first, outwardly tame moments of the film. Fay Wray as Ann Darrow, surely the most put-upon heroine in film, is captive from the start in the "hands" of movie-director/adventurer Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) and his crew. (Movie lore has it that Fay herself was told only, "You will have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.") The dark, clumsy rituals of the men on board Denham's ship differ only in degree from the forthright foreplay of the monster/god Kong, whose curious examination of this little blonde "other" could be seen in the original and was thereafter excised from many American prints. Over these fifty-five years, King Kong, when he hasn't been playing the psychological id-beast fool, has been attributed every human emotion from loneliness to love. But perhaps King Kong, "the eighth wonder of the world," is King Cinema itself: "A king and a god in the world he knew" brought out of the subconscious jungle as "a show to gratify your curiosity" (and, not incidentally, make millionaires out of gold diggers like Carl Denham). As Denham maintains from the start, "It's the public, bless 'em, that wants a pretty face to look at." And what will never cease to amaze and entertain about King Kong is its cinema, the sheer imagination of Willis O'Brien's technical special effects, which animate the jungle god and make him reality.