(9 of 10)
Perhaps the most successful of Dino's last-minute improvisations was the casting of Jessica Lange in the old Fay Wray role. Streisand almost signed on, then backed away. Cher would have been acceptable, but was visibly pregnant when production started. Then began a search for an unknown, which followed another mythical pattern: the fashion model flown out from Manhattan for a test; a first meeting with an unimpressed producer; the discovery by the director that she had one of those faces the camera loves; the producer's quick reversal of opinion; a hasty contract signing by a girl from Cloquet, Minn., who has now made good.
Lange benefits from some of Semple's best lines. Unlike Fay Wray in the original, who was mostly called upon to scream and faint, Lange plays a sexually hip chick, a movie starlet who literally drifts into the picture as a castaway from a wrecked yacht on which she was cruising with a movie producer who had promised her a part. Once she gets over the shock of Kong's first spectacular pickup, she treats him like all the apelike movie moguls she has had to fend off. She tries helplessness ("I can't stand heights"), anger ("You goddam chauvinist pig ape"), some impromptu analysis after striking out at her captor ("It's a sign of insecurity, like when you knock over trees"), even guileful seduction ("I'm a Libra, what are you?"). Eventually she and Kong actually begin to build a ... well, a relationship, something that was never made explicit between Wray and her big boy.
Kong, too, has greater charm than he did 43 years ago. He no longer gnaws distractedly on human beings as he did when he got anxious in the original. One of his best moments occurs when Lange, trying to escape him, falls in a mud puddle. Tenderly he picks her up and trots her off to a waterfall for a shower, dunks her in the pool below for a rinse and then, still cupping her in his paws, blows her dry with several mighty breaths.
Lange does a sort of muted Marilyn Monroe imitation in these scenes, but there is an underlying quickness and humor in her characterization. Considering that she played most of her big scenes with a thing, not an actor, and that sometimes she worked to no more than a mark on the wall where the ape would be in the finished picture, her accomplishment is considerable. "We've signed her for 700 years," says Paramount's Diller, exaggerating slightly. Lange, who for some time had led a wandering sort of existence as an art student, dancer and model, has invested some of her Kong salary in a home on Lake Nebagamon, Wis., where her parents now live. Just as Dwan stands on the brink of stardom at the end of Kong, so does Lange.
But then, so does the whole crazy venture. Perhaps the craziest thing about it is that it finally works not merely because De Laurentiis spent money on it like a man possessed but because he had, besides unlimited nerve, an unsuspected cultural impulse driving him.