17. The Legendary Missing Scene
The ordeal of the crew of the SS Venture - as they pursue Kong and the abducted Ann across the island - is one long dramatic onslaught. The most frantic episode climaxes in Kong shaking sailors from a log to their deaths in a ravine. But there were more infernal visions we never get to see, as giant spiders emerge from a cave to devour the wounded men. All that remains of this is a still published in the equally legendary Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine; its late editor, Forrest J. Ackerman, once told me his friend Ray Harryhausen (animator of Jason And The Argonauts, and many others) had a penpal who claimed to have seen the sequence at a cinema in the Philippines. It seems unlikely; Merian Cooper later told an interviewer he cut the scene because it slowed the film down, not as an act of censorship. But its mythically unseen nature fired off the imagination. When Peter Jackson remade King Kong, his favourite film, he showed the spiders sequence in full - making his own movie not so much a remake as an elongated love letter to the original version.