Wednesday, September 25, 2019

145 MILLION + 50 YEARS OLD

Since this year’s 50th anniversaries include the Moon Landing, Woodstock and The Brady Bunch, I suppose I shouldn’t expect much hoopla around a silly sci-fi fantasy film hitting the half-century mark. Nonetheless, this month also sees the 50th anniversary of the release of The Valley of Gwangi...



...that special effects spectacle in which cowboys find a hidden valley in Mexico full of leftover dinosaurs.

At the age of 6 or 7, I would surely have told you it was the finest movie ever made. I still love it; I watched it just a week or so ago on Turner Classic Movies, where it’s shown fairly often. My fondness for the film, in part, stems from the fascination I’ve always had for dinosaurs, and for movies of the “creature feature” variety. But in the case of Gwangi, I’m sure it’s also connected to the circumstances in which I saw the film, at a drive-in, with a bunch of relations stuffed into a car on a flawless early-fall Saturday evening in Pennsylvania. While we all gobbled popcorn, the little kids, especially me, sat thunderstruck by the tale, and my older sisters cracked wise about it, while nonetheless admiring Uruguayan actor Gustavo Rojo, one of the handsomer cast members. Even allowing for the refinements of nostalgia, it seems like one of those perfect childhood memories.

Based on an idea by Willis O’Brien, the animator of the original King Kong, Gwangi’s plot follows the Kong template: Sometime around the turn of the century, a group of cowboys from a Wild West show finds its way into a mysterious valley inhabited by surviving prehistoric beasts. They run afoul of a purplish allosaurus, the Valley’s apex predator, known as “Gwangi” to the local gypsies. The cowboys capture Gwangi and bring him to civilization as an attraction; he escapes, and heartache ensues.


The cinematic appeal in all this is that Gwangi and several other monsters are brought to life by the special effects master Ray Harryhausen, the greatest of the stop-motion animators, that Quixotic specialty class of film artists who tortuously shoot one frame at a time of articulated puppets, changing their position the slightest bit between frames to create a skittish, jerky and irresistible sense of motion. As an attempt at a realistic illusion of life, CGI has long since made stop-motion animation obsolete, but for some of us--I suppose it's a cinematic equivalent to being a "vinylhead" among record enthusiasts--stop-motion has a human charm and a low-tech vibrancy that even the finest CGI can’t claim.

The Valley of Gwangi is an example of this. Gwangi was a typical, irritable Harryhausen brute, loaded with loutish personality. At the end [spoiler alert!], the poor creature, dragged against his will to a civilization he wanted no part of, comes to a grim demise in a burning cathedral. The final scene pans across the faces of a crowd watching the church burn with Gwangi trapped inside, then comes to rest on the face of the little boy who went on the expedition, now with tears streaming down his cheeks. That kid stood in for at least one little kid out in the audience.

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