Mighty Joe Young (1949)

Mighty Joe Young owes a very large debt to King Kong, but perhaps that’s understandable since of the producers and writers of the film, Merian C. Cooper, was also responsible for the 1933 classic about a giant ape that wreaks havoc on New York City. The title gorilla of this later film, billed as Mr. Joseph Young in the credits, is not as large as his predecessor and he gets transported to Hollywood instead of New York, but the larger narrative strokes are somewhat similar. There’s a girl, of course. Jill Young (played by Terry Moore) has raised Joe since he was a baby gorilla; in fact, we get to see Jill as a little girl trade some of her “valuables” and her father’s flashlight to get the orphaned gorilla from two natives. Twelve years later, an Oklahoma cowboy named Gregg (Ben Johnson in his first featured role) comes to Africa to capture animals for Max O’Hara’s next nightclub act. They’ve managed to capture some lions when a now fully grown Joe wanders into their camp. The sequence where a group of cowboys try to capture him is quite thrilling, a merger of a western picture and a jungle film. Jill interrupts the attempted capture, but is persuaded by Max to come back to America with Joe and become a star. Apparently, even if you’re in Africa and isolated from the rest of the world, the lure of potential stardom is too great to turn down. Max’s nightclub called the Golden Safari is where Joe becomes a huge hit. The act is somewhat simple; he lifts a platform where Jill is playing “Beautiful Dreamer” (Joe’s favorite song) on a piano, he easily pulls ten strongmen (played by real-life strongmen) into a pool of water during a game of tug-of-war, and he is supposed to pick up giant coins while dressed as an organ grinder’s monkey. Both Joe and Jill and even Gregg eventually become disenchanted with Max’s demands. What is it about producers that they want to put whatever they have discovered on display for everyone to see despite the inherent dangers of doing so and then they make it worse by mistreating and exploiting the talent? Of course, it all goes horribly wrong. One night three drunks find Joe’s cage in the basement of the nightclub and give him too much to drink. He breaks out of the cage and begins to destroy the building. (Either that or he feels that the African jungle-inspired décor is far too over-the-top even for Hollywood). For good measure, he kills a few lions along the way as well. He obviously hates lions; he even tried to kill one of the caged ones that Gregg had captured back in Africa. The final third of the movie involves an extended escape sequence that features a particularly effective series of red-tinted scenes involving Joe rescuing orphans from a fire at a children’s home. It’s quite a sharp contrast to the rest of the black-and-white film. Most of Mighty Joe Young, aside from the moments involving his attempted capture in Africa and the attempted escape from captivity in America, is quite hokey. A totally unnecessary love story between Jill and Gregg develops, showing that filmmakers even in 1949 felt obligated to include such a ludicrous plot point in an action movie about a giant gorilla—another moment influenced of King Kong. And it probably should not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with film history that the depiction of the few blacks in the film is cringe-inducing. They are all “natives” or dressed like what Hollywood thinks natives dress like, which is to say like no African native has ever truly dressed. None of them speak English (if they speak at all), and they are prone to emotional outbursts. Blacks, however, are not the only group subjected to this kind of stereotyping. The Asian waiter in the “chop suey” restaurant where Jill and Gregg first profess their love for each other is also an embarrassing caricature. Aside from the naïve performances by Moore and Johnson early in their careers, Mighty Joe Young is perhaps most known today as one of the first films to feature stop motion animation work by special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen. Sadly, Joe isn’t really very convincing as a flesh-and-blood-and-fur gorilla to modern day audiences and, frankly, probably wasn’t realistic to the audiences of 1949 either. The film features a few moments of comedy, such as when Joe sticks out his tongue and makes faces at the police who are trying to kill him during the attempted escape. Mostly, though, it’s just an unremarkable film that pales in comparison to its progenitor.

Oscar Win: Best Special Effects