...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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