A Possible 'King Kong' Predecessor?

[Brooksie]

I've recently been researching a forgotten Italian silent, L'onore di Morire (1915). It was an unexpected hit in the UK and Australia, where it appeared in mid 1916 as The Circus of Death, and a re-edited version was released to the US state's right market as The Masque of Life later that year, also to great success.

It was an unashamed thrill picture, and apparently somewhat grotesque - some reviews compared it to Edgar Allan Poe - but one sequence in particular gained enormous interest.

Through various plot convolutions, a trained chimpanzee makes off with a baby, carrying it first to the roof of a house, and then up an enormous smokestack - UK reports claimed it was 300 feet tall; it increased to 360 feet in American publicity. The fire brigade arrives, but their ladders are too short. A lady trapeze artist volunteers to climb up and save the kid. The action moves to the top of the smokestack, where the baby is sitting perilously close to the edge. The acrobat is attacked by the monkey, a fight ensues, and the unfortunate animal plummets to his death.

Newspapers published a few photographs, which I'm assuming is all that is left of this sequence:



Promotions focused strongly on the absolute veracity of the sequences - no safety nets, no special effects, filmed from a neighbouring smokestack using a telephoto lens. Doubtful as they were, the point was to emphasise a climax - in which a monkey takes a vulnerable human up an impossibly high structure and is attacked until he falls - as the biggest and scariest thrill sequence to date. It was well known enough for several different chimps to tour vaudeville in Australia and America, advertised as being the one from the movie.

My question is this: is it too rash to wonder whether Merian C. Cooper saw the film? I've read about many antecedents of King Kong, but I don't think I've ever heard The Masque of Life or any of its variations mentioned amongst them. Has anybody else? Or am I reading too much into it?

[Spiny Norman]

The King of the Kongo serial is also sometimes mentioned as a minor source of inspiration too.

Then again, whenever you look closer there is always a lesser known predecessor for almost anything!

[Wm. Charles Morrow]

Last summer, the final film shown at Slapsticon was a Clyde Cook two-reeler from 1926 called Scared Stiff, written by Stan Laurel and produced by Hal Roach. Cook plays a chauffeur who winds up in a haunted house. There’s a mad scientist (naturally), and, at the finale, a giant chimp who runs amok and terrorizes everyone. In several shots, the chimp clambers about in miniature sets representing the rooms of the house. He does not scale the outside of the building, but at one point appears to carry the leading lady (doubled by a doll) in his hand. Fay Wray appeared in several Roach comedies around this time but not, alas, in this one. Even so, it was a startling precursor to Kong.

Could Merian Cooper have seen this short comedy, or The Masque of Life, or even both? And if so, might he have stored away some ideas for eventual use? I don’t know, but it does seem that the monster ape concept was somehow lodged in the Zeitgeist of the era, just under the surface, waiting for the right auteur to come along and give it its proper form, make a masterpiece, and scare the bejeezus out of the public.

[Rick Lanham]

Those monkeys are always causing trouble!
Don't tell Peter Jackson about these films, he will re-create the lost ones.

[Henry Nicolella]

In LORRAINE OF THE LIONS (1925) Patsy Ruth Miller's beloved ape escapes from his cage and carries her to the roof of her mansion. A crowd mills below and the police eventually shoot the ape who then falls from the roof. Patsy is sad about it all but no one says "It was Beauty killed the Beast."
Henry Nicolella

[doctor-kiss]

I've recently been researching a forgotten Italian silent, L'onore di Morire (1915).

This is what every secondary source asserts as the original title of THE MASQUE OF LIFE / THE CIRCUS OF DEATH, but it turns out they're wrong. And the true identity of the movie is much more interesting, establishing it as a forgotten work in the output of Danish director Alfred Lind, who in his native country made such circus dramas as the 1911 version of THE FOUR DEVILS and the widely-available THE FLYING CIRCUS and THE BEAR TAMER (both 1912). Lind would continue making circus pictures right up to the end of the silent era, when he shot TRAGÖDIE IM ZIRKUS ROYAL (1928) in Germany.

In 1915, Lind was hired by Italian producer-distributor Armando Vay to shoot two features. The first, IL JOCKEY DELLA MORTE (The Jockey of Death) is extant and available to watch through the European Film Gateway: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=16663.

The many gothic excesses and stunts of IL JOCKEY DELLA MORTE may be the closest we can hope to come to getting a real sense of Lind's second feature for Vay, IL CIRCO DELLA MORTE --- the true identity of THE MASQUE OF LIFE / THE CIRCUS OF DEATH --- which was passed by the Italian censor on January 4th, 1916, and given its domestic release later that month. Its full, considerably more cumbersome title, was: IL CIRCO DELLA MORTE, OVVERO L'ULTIMA RAPPRESENTAZIONE DI GALA DEL CIRCO WOLFSON (with IMDb currently having separate entries for both halves of that title!).

THE JOCKEY OF DEATH and THE MASQUE OF LIFE were both picked up in the U.S. by Signet Films, who distributed them on a State Rights basis.

Placing this work within the context of a known circus picture director certainly makes a lot more sense than attributing it to either Edoardo Bencivenga, who was much more at home with costume dramas and melodramas, or to producer Ambrosio, who certainly went in for stunts and thrills, but never quite to the extent of THE MASQUE OF LIFE.

===

L'ONORE DI MORIRE, for the record, was really an Ambrosio costume war drama set during the reign of Louis XIV. It was released in the U.S. by Universal under the title THE HONOR TO DIE on January 6th, 1916, and is written up in considerable depth in Moving Picture World of December 25th, 1915. It was 1200 metres (3937ft) in length. Here are two 6.5" x 8.5" stills from that U.S. release from my collection, as well as a fold-out trade ad for the Spanish release of the movie in March 1915, in which both images can be seen:







By contrast, IL CIRCO DELLA MORTE was covered in much greater depth in the Italian trade press, and was much longer (2040 metres / 6693ft). Here's a taste of a four-page fold-out spread from La cinematografia italiana ed estera #3 of 1916:

[Daniel Eagan]

Here's news of a new King Kong starring Tom Hiddleston: http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/tom-hid ... 201306778/" target="_blank

[Brooksie]

Aha! Thank you for the clarification, doctor-kiss! This explains the many dead ends I reached in trying to seek the origins of this film.

Ironically, The Jockey of Death was mentioned many times in Australian publicity for The Circus of Death, having been shown in Australia the previous year. It was only when a third film, The Circus Dancer, was released in 1917, that advertisements explicitly linked the three films, giving credit not to the same director but to the producer, Armando Vay.

It's interesting to note that Australia must have received the original version of The Circus of Death rather than American version, which I understand was heavily revised. I also suspect that American publicists made up a good deal of the American publicity for the film. There were all sorts of outlandish stories about three people having died during the production, and the chimp having been given a doll to take up the chimney but stealing the real baby instead, and the director attempting suicide for placing the baby in danger. None of this had appeared in the Australian media, and I think they can safely be discounted.

'Gothic excess' sounds like a good description of the film. Apparently the final sequence was particularly ghastly, with a circus being destroyed by fire and animals running around with their coats on fire. Australian publicity claimed that the monkey was badly injured in the chimney stunt and had to be put down; by 1917 he had been magically revived, given the name of Jacko the Super Monkey, and was appearing in his own series of shorts. Who knows what the truth is?

[oldposterho]

by 1917 he had been magically revived, given the name of Jacko the Super Monkey, and was appearing in his own series of shorts. Who knows what the truth is?

Indeed. Shades of poor Joe Martin who, after being 'retired' was replaced by a chimpanzee, even though he was an orangutan. Who would notice, right?

That said, the whole ape-in-movies thing has a fascinating history of mixing and matching species footage in the early days, I suppose before nature shows made the differences obvious to even children people really didn't have a clue what these creatures looked like.

--Peter

[kaleidoscopeworld]

For those interested in The Jockey of Death and The Circus of Death, I've written about these films here: https://silentsplease.wordpress.com/201 ... lla-morte/" target="_blank
Illustrated by animated GIFs, for those curious but who don't have time to watch the whole film!

[Nosferatu]

I'd call The Lost World a predecessor. Also, check out this link that seems to be an inspiration to King Kong:

http://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitio ... our/7.html" target="_blank

[Brooksie]

There was a very strange, long standing panic around the idea of gorillas abducting nubile young women. There was a good article about it a few years back, when the stage production of King Kong was being trialled in Australia - http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/gor ... 2jqoe.html.

Interesting article, Kaleidoscopeworld! On the basis of what survives of The Jockey of Death, it looks like its sequel would have been a pretty intriguing picture. I had no more luck than you did in finding out anything about the central cast, but I do believe I've come across The Panther of Death, some of which appears to be extant in the collection of the Swedish Film Institute under the title of Panther - http://www.sfi.se/en-GB/Swedish-film-da ... &iv=PdfGen. It appears to have no connection to the earlier films beyond Italian origins and a circus theme, so I think you're correct in suggesting that it was a deliberate attempt to paint it as a sequel.

[kaleidoscopeworld]

Brooksie, that's fantastic! I've edited the post to put in that information. Thank you so much!

I was really hoping to find a newspaper profile or something of the cast. Maybe it's out there, somewhere ...

[Rollo Treadway]

A fascinating thread.

Two more predecessors, the first one at least is kind of obvious: The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915) by Willis O'Brien who went on to collaborate on The Lost World and King Kong.



Max Fleischer's documentary Evolution (1923) is fascinating in many respects. It includes a stop-motion dinosaur fight that prefigures similar sequences in The Lost World and King Kong, as well as the dinosaur fight in the "Rite of Spring" segment of Fantasia. Indeed there are enough similarities between the latter and Evolution that I doubt it's coincidental.

[Brooksie]

Believe it or not, someone's written a book about some of the phenomena we've been discussing - God or Gorilla? Images of Evolution in the Jazz Age, by Constance A. Clark.

You can read the introduction for yourself on Google Books. It takes in everything from the idea that the caveman was some sort of atavistic sexual hedonist and implication that jazz was somehow tied to man's primitive nature, to the Scopes trial on the existence of evolution in 1925, to the popularity of Tarzan and other 'noble savage' fictions in the early 20th century. As it notes, the theme was particularly popular in films, to the extent that it was ripe for parody in Chaplin's His Primitive Past as early as 1914.

[sadsack]

I've recently been researching a forgotten Italian silent, L'onore di Morire (1915).

This is what every secondary source asserts as the original title of THE MASQUE OF LIFE / THE CIRCUS OF DEATH, but it turns out they're wrong. And the true identity of the movie is much more interesting, establishing it as a forgotten work in the output of Danish director Alfred Lind, who in his native country made such circus dramas as the 1911 version of THE FOUR DEVILS and the widely-available THE FLYING CIRCUS and THE BEAR TAMER (both 1912). Lind would continue making circus pictures right up to the end of the silent era, when he shot TRAGÖDIE IM ZIRKUS ROYAL (1928) in Germany.

Is TRAGÖDIE IM ZIRKUS ROYAL (1928) available for home viewing?