Cardboard Science: Mr. Joseph Young as himself

MIGHTY JOE YOUNG

1949

Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack

Written by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, Willis O'Brien, and Ruth Rose

Spoilers: moderate

I don't know if it's really appropriate to slot Mighty Joe Young into the Cardboard Science series, dedicated principally to the cinematic science fiction of the 1950s, and not because it came out in 1949, but because I don't know if it's supposed to be science fiction: it's about an ape of the genus Gorilla, and he's enormous, at least four times bigger than the biggest G. beringei—his dimensions won't be entirely consistent, thanks to the stop-motion animated handicraft that begat him, but he's always huge—and while the movie does depend on people finding him impressive, not a solitary line suggests that anyone thinks of him as anything but a gorilla, not even necessarily an atypical specimen, and you could get the impression that this colossus is just what the word "gorilla" conjured in the minds of directors Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack, screenwriter Ruth Rose, and animation supervisor Willis O'Brien.  King Kong—for of course you recognize those names as the creators of King Kong, so they're the experts on giant apes—well, that was a movie monster.  The titular Joseph "Joe" Young?  Just a Goddamn gorilla, much as any you might find in the Ugandan uplands.

Presumably that's where this pair (Joel Fluellen and Milton Shockley, possibly) had been, for when little Jill Young (Lora Lee Michel) meets them coming down her road here in British Tanganyika, she discovers that in their basket is such a gorilla in its infancy, which for the next few minutes shall be played by an actual baby gorilla (which might've saved animation resources, but I'd call it a mistake).  Lonely, motherless Jill wants this gorilla as a playmate and pet, and, with her father (Regis Young), needless to say, not on hand to supervise her, she makes a trade.  When her dad does come home, he gently explains that they can't keep this gorilla, but he evidently never followed up, because they did.

Twelve years later arrives showman Max O'Hara (Robert Armstrong, so the appropriate supposition is "Carl Denham faked his death, assumed a new identity, and wound up the same just goofier") on a trip to what he keeps calling "Darkest Africa," because that's the kind of florid personality he is.  Max has brought a whole safari crew with him, notably Gregg Johnson (Ben Johnson), the unemployed cowboy stuntshow performer who'd talked his way into helping Max capture some wildlife for Max's new jungle-themed nightclub.  So far, they've rounded up a collection of lions, but when one excessively large gorilla wanders into their camp and starts playing with the kitty in the box, Max insists they add him to their kidnapped menagerie.  This goes how you'd figure—the gorilla almost obliterates them—except his hand is stayed by none other than Jill (now Terry Moore), because this behemoth is just her little Joe Young (himself!), though she's still rather livid to find intruders on her property attempting to steal her pet.  Max sends Gregg to apologize, and, having made peace with Jill and, thereby, Joe, he inveigles the now wholly-parentless plantation owner into a contract, convincing girl and gorilla to come to Hollywood with him.  But fame and fortune isn't everything it's cracked up to be, and Jill—and Gregg, who's soft on the kid, and even Max—realize that a cage beneath a nightclub is no place for a gorilla.  Unfortunately, what it took to convince Max was a rampage, and while that rampage was not entirely of Joe's making, Joe has nonetheless been marked for death, unless our heroes can get him out of his new, much sturdier cell and back to Africa.

Now, is that a movie by the creators of King Kong, or what?  Even awkwardly so: primarily, of course, Joe Young is a vessel for the magic of the legendary Willis O'Brien, and, ordinarily, there wouldn't be any problem with a special effects artist revisiting a concept sixteen years down the line; but while Joe Young makes it perfectly easy to forget this for 93 minutes, after Son of Kong (also released in 1933), O'Brien's career hadn't meaningfully existed for all those intervening sixteen years—not until Cooper tapped him to do another giant gorilla.  It arguably doesn't exist much afterwards, either.  As far as the Sound Era goes, O'Brien never got to be much besides the guy who did Kong, the sequel to Kong, and the overt knock-off of Kong.  Now, there must be something special in there to get to "legendary" from just three extremely similar films, plus 1925's (pretty-darned-similar) The Lost World, but "overt knock-off" is how one surmises Cooper and his producing partner (no less an unexpected figure for a giant monkey movie than John Ford) pitched it to RKO, which had been the studio behind Kong.  Cooper, probably inspired by the true story of Toto the Gorilla, originated the idea in 1945 (though his co-directorial credit seems honorary), and even with Cooper reciting "King Kong" over and over, it was never inevitable.  Cooper had Schoedsack and O'Brien start developing the visual and narrative concepts even before RKO greenlit it in 1946, and that light flashed yellow (and threatened to flash red) many, many times throughout the long road to release, for while live-action photography was completed in late 1947, that's only when animation started in earnest, lasting fourteen months.  Cooper kept telling RKO that it'd be finished when it was finished, reassuring them that, hey, no matter how expensive it got, they had another Kong here.  It ultimately cost $1.8 million, and, in fairness, that's not some truly outrageous sum for 1949, though it's hardly cheap.

RKO wasn't wrong to worry, since it grossed just slightly more than that, a flop that echoed across three decades.  It depends on your perspective, naturally, but I've buried the lede quite a bit here: of course it's entirely feasible to come to Joe Young today as, principally, a fan of O'Brien and Kong; but I suspect most arrive from the opposite chronological direction, tracing backwards to the beginning from the fourteen feature films made by O'Brien's heir, the even-more-legendary Ray Harryhausen.  So what was merely playing an old hit for O'Brien becomes, for Harryhausen, a thunderous, career-defining debut.

That debut can even swallow up some other important developments: it was the last time that O'Brien worked with Marcel Delgado, the Mexican refugee and aspiring sculptor O'Brien had once cajoled into his employ, who subsequently developed the armature-based models so vital to Kong's animation (and who I understand completed the late O'Brien's work, sans credit, on his friend's final piece of animation for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World); meanwhile, as the process dragged on, O'Brien gave an enthusiastic young grip named Pete Peterson his first animation job, and while a screen credit half the size of Harryhausen's even overestimates Peterson's comparative prominence in their field, the movies that "O'Brien" made in the late 50s, rescuing his career twilight from complete unproduced-project-after-unproduced-project obscurity, are essetially Peterson's work.  But Harryhausen, starting as barely more than a gofer here, wound up responsible for the lion's share of its animation—and, indeed, all its lions.

Joe Young, therefore, makes fifteen "Harryhausen movies."  (The traditional number is sixteen, though I disagree that his reunion with O'Brien, a budget-strapped dinosaur sequence for Irwin Allen's The Animal World, counts.)  It's surely unnecessary to offer Harryhausen's biography, so suffice it to say that his association with O'Brien went back, first as a fanboy, then as a friend, but, having at least equaled his mentor by the time O'Brien delegated the task of executing Joe Young, I've never heard anybody contradict Harryhausen's assertion of something akin to co-ownership of it.  (Although I'll make this observation: Harryhausen would preen about how he'd preened Joe, employing methods that would obviate the juttering, "randomly windswept" complexion Kong had had thanks to the handling of the furred model by the animators and no facility to maintain that kind of infinitesimal continuity.  Those methods, incidentally, involved rubberizing his maquette's fur by setting skin beetle larvae on pieces of pelt, the dermis of which they preferentially ate, leaving only the hairs to be set in new synthetic integument, and I assume you're pleased to have been pulled behind that particular curtain.  But there's a fuckton of ruffled fur in Joe Young, which is to say, on other models, moved by other artists.)  But, to close this circle, the commercial disappointment redounded throughout Harryhausen's future: he would speak, with regret, of how it foreclosed the budgets he'd have preferred for his fantasies—and the fact is that Joe Young, made in 1949, boasted the highest nominal budget of any Harryhausen movie until 1977, and wouldn't be surpassed in real dollars until Clash of the Titans, his final film, in 1981.

Let's say this: the budget shows!  It looks luxuriant, and not at all solely thanks to effects wizardry.  Schoedsack was virtually blind, but I don't believe you'd know from this, which is an awfully kinetic thing, sometimes sufficiently flamboyant that editor Ted Cheesman wasn't even left with great choices about where to go once some of its more impressively-mobile shots end, which can be annoying when it's an axial cut jumping back six feet after the camera's made its determined invasion of Max's office.  Still, it's such a collection of good instincts for what would look cool that I wouldn't trade it just for cleaner transitions.  Meanwhile, it can be overstated how much of a retread of King Kong this is, rather than a hugely productive remix of it.  There are obvious reasons to make that claim—Joe Young is Kong With a Happy Ending, and the cutest epilogue—but the fundamental, structural one is that it's just so much more interested in the show surrounding its Seventh and a Half Wonder of the World than Kong was with the Eighth.  You'll recall that Denham just kind of chained up his beast, then charged people who owned evening wear to gawk at it.

This brings in our great art director, James Basevi, translating and supplementing O'Brien.  The first act has already given us some splendid storybook Africa by way of nearly every shot involving some kind of glass painting (half the reason RKO, wisely, nixed Technicolor), and it's a vague and fanciful idea of the Great Lakes (and even more like oversized coastal limestone towers, but the view from Jill's alleged "farmhouse" into a jagged canyon is awfully thrilling).  But my single favorite image, or pair of images, doesn't even have Joe in it, for it's our dizzying introduction to Max's ridiculous, gaudy, orientalist (meridionalist?), crazily-Africa'd-up nightclub that looks like a Donkey Kong Country level (the orchestra occupies a "treehouse," accessible by a rope bridge), boosted by a bit of compositing that gives it an aura of unreality, but not that much compositing, because it really is an enormous, exhaustively-thought-through space, presently demonstrated by the throngs of extras and a fairly-racist floorshow.  A pair of crane shots connected via whip pan works to expand that space horizontally, and rear projections in the back even extend it deep down the z-axis, by way of some plate-glass "lion cages" that—you guess correctly—shall figure prominently when Joe smashes this club to pieces, whereupon all the care taken to establish it as a place that can be devastated in detail really pays off.  (When you learn that several stuntmen got injured on a movie about a puppet, you'll say, "unfortunately, that checks out."  I'm not entirely happy with its treatment of its real lions, either—at least one lion stunt seems genuinely risky, inasmuch as lions are heavy and oughtn't be dropped, whereas the technically-bravura introduction to Joe, involving a front-projected composite of a lion getting tipped over inside its cage, at least seems mean.  Also, they mauled a guy.)

Anyway, it's a huge difference from its predecessor: Joe headlines for seventeen weeks, not just one abortive night, and we get a long stretch devoted to his novelties, kicking off with my favorite animated images in the movie, after Max teases the crowd just long enough to get the right reaction of awe when he reveals what it is lifting Jill's piano platform up into the darkness, with Joe seeming to be as mystified as his audience (I'm confident this is Peterson or Delgado, if for no better reason than Harryhausen never eagerly claimed credit).  But what a show Joe makes, absent-mindedly besting ten of the world's strongest men in a tug-of-war, then finishing their kayfabe by tossing the last of the dudes into the dining room; or take Joe's humiliation, where he seems to dimly realize that dressing Jill up as his organ-grinder and him as her monkey is demeaning (the expression Harryhausen gives Joe as he throws his hat to the floor in loathing is one of his best emotional beats).

Now, the effects aren't flawless.  There are background composite elements that won't stay put.  The cel animation for the "organ-grinder monkey's" "coins" isn't remotely up to the task.  I have rarely seen an object take a more unnatural trajectory than the banana that Moore tosses to Joe across a rear projection screen, which moves like a missile, and it's still better than Schrodinger's gorilla, where the banana is both caught and not caught, flying behind him instead.  Peterson managed a giant gorilla shadow on a background that's representing the night sky.  Harryhausen's solution to the limitations of the maquette's facial expressivity, which he found insufficient for Joe's depression and drunkenness, was to, apparently on his own authority, radically redesign the character, adding thick plasticine lips that don't look like a gorilla's, look bad in their own right, don't help him be more expressive, and perhaps have other negative ramifications.  And there's stuff to dislike about Joe's design already, namely the googly eyes that make him more cartoonish than was strictly required.

But for whatever reason, because O'Brien wanted it that way or simply because the money and time were available, the ambition is way out there, more ambitious than anything Harryhausen would do for years.  For instance, while camera movement (much creakier camera movement) within the animation had been a non-negligible aspect of Harryhausen's Puppetoons shorts for George Pal, his immediately-subsequent animation on The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms features so little moving camera that I think it's literally just the one shot (and not one attempting to impress you); Joe Young, however, is doing "lateral dollies" and even a "crane-in," the latter of which Harryhausen concedes he had to be crazy (or heavily indulged) to have even attempted.  More persistently, the story demands that the visual interaction between man and monster is virtually constant (not to mention man, monster, and cat, as the club freakout involves some complicated matching).  The proportion of those ambitions that gets satisfied is startlingly high; the initial encounter between Joe and Gregg's cowboys might be a little less sophisticated than the analogous (essentially self-homaging) allosaur-roping scene in The Valley of Gwangi twenty years later—the allosaur moves around much more, so at no point there do you say "aha, he's roping a post in the ground"—but the conception is at least as grandiose, including a full third plane of action with cowboys actually encircling Joe (and if they're stop-motion cowboys, well, they burst in and out of the frame quickly enough you scarcely notice).

It's wondrous, and the animators get a strong performance out of their pantomime gorilla, so in a movie that's not really "about" performances, it's fair to accord the puppet the title of the best—I was shocked to discover how choked up I was getting at Joe's reluctant heroism in the finale—though I don't wish to malign our humans: Armstrong, who surely ought to have known his role by now, is enormous fun, and Moore's adolescent naivete—Jill's hardly more worldly than her gorilla—makes for rock-solid-if-one-dimensional emotional appeal (and considering she was frequently so close to the projection screen she couldn't actually see anything, she's effectively acting against nothing and, unlike some actors given the same task today, is still convincingly pulling off her relationship with that white-gray smudge).  Even Johnson, who's objectively terrible—coming off so inexperienced at delivering his slow-talking cowpoke's dialogue (this was the ex-stuntman's first big role) that those deliveries almost feel like they're coming from outside of the story's universe—is so bad that he swings back to good, almost like a narrator, or exceptionally tall shoulder angel, working surprisingly well on behalf of a film that, yes, needs to be an exciting matinee, but, in its heart, desires most to be a conservativish fable about leaving nature to nature and there being no place like home.  Rose's script manages that nice, simple arc with aplomb, though the third act does threaten to rattle apart, starting off well with a deliriously-paced gorilla heist—its zaniness potentially even benefiting from that disintegrating feeling, even if, all things being equal, I'd have preferred Max's moral epiphany to have actually happened inside the movie—but the obligation to square this story with an action climax was a conundrum that neither Rose nor O'Brien could solve.  It probably doesn't help the sensation that the film's swerved into chaos just to justify its ending, when that swerve, taking the form of a burning orphanage, also slams itself into your eyes, here in 1949, with completely-unheralded red tinting.  But the weaknesses are easy to forgive (it's still an awesome finale), and they get us where we need to go.  I'm not overlooking them, but I can't pretend they bother me that much.

Score: 9/10

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• Seriously, what is Joe?

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• When her new friends express admiration at young Jill's ability to run a farm by herself, she demurs that's it's actually pretty easy, and yeah, I'll bet.
• They're not terribly nice to the horses, either.

Sensawunda:

• Just look at any of, like, five dozen effects shots here.