We know that Robert E. Howard was a big fan of the movies. His letters to Tevis Clyde Smith and Harold Preece mention numerous films that Howard saw and many, such as The Mark of Zorro (1920) and Robin Hood (1922) with Douglas Fairbanks, no doubt had some influence on his yarns (a full list of films mentioned by Howard, along with an brief discussion on the subject by Rusty Burke is available on the REHupa website). One film, though, that Howard never explicitly mentions, but that scholars have often wondered if he saw, is King Kong (1933). King Kong was revolutionary film when it came out, with incredible stop-motion animation that would influence future filmmakers for decades. It was the Star Wars or Avatar of its day. And with its theme of savagery versus civilization and hints of a lost advanced culture on a Pacific island it had elements that surely would have appealed to Howard. But if he did see it, there is no mention of it in the existing corpus of his letters.

Howard biographer Mark Finn summed up the conundrum several years ago in a post on the official REH Forums:

This is one of those things that’s frustrating to REH scholars. King Kong came out in 1933. It got a wide distribution. IF Robert saw it, he never talked about it. There’s no evidence that he used it in his work (the “slipped back into savagery” line from Kong was well in place in Robert’s fiction already). But it’s a real shame that we can’t say for sure if he did or didn’t. Maybe there’s no mention of Kong because he saw the movie with Smith and Vinson and they talked for hours about it afterward. Maybe it never came to Brownwood. I haven’t gone through the Brownwood Bulletin (reading the Cross Plains Review was bad enough), so I can’t say what was showing, or where.

Barry Windsor-Smith's interpretation of the dragon from "Red Nails."

There are some tantalizing hints, however. Howard does mention being a fan of King Kong stars Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong, though of course he could have seen them in other films. More recently, Charles Hoffman, in his article “’The Shadow of the Beast’:A Closer Look,” published in the most recent issue of The Dark Man (vol. 5, no. 1), cites Howard’s appreciation of Wray and Armstrong, as well as his penchant for using large apes in his stories, as being possible evidence that he saw King Kong. Hoffman also notes that the stegosaurus that appears in the film might have been the inspiration for the description of the dragon in “Red Nails”:

Through the thicket was thrust a head of nightmare and lunacy. Grinning jaws bared rows of dripping yellow tusks; above the yawning mouth wrinkled a saurian-like snout. Huge eyes, like those of a python a thousand times magnified, stared unwinkingly at the petrified humans clinging to the rock above it. Blood smeared the scaly, flabby lips and dripped from the huge mouth.

The head, bigger than that of a crocodile, was further extended on a long scaled neck on which stood up rows of serrated spikes, and after it, crushing down the briars and saplings, waddled the body of a titan, a gigantic, barrel-bellied torso on absurdly short legs. The whitish belly almost raked the ground, while the serrated backbone rose higher than Conan could have reached on tiptoe. A long spikedtail, like that of a gargantuan scorpion, trailed out behind.

Did the log scene in King Kong influence a similar scene in a Breckinridge Elkins yarn?

Howard’s ‘dragon,’ with its barrel-shaped body, short legs, and spiked tail, does sound very much like a stegosaurus (albeit carnivorous rather than an herbivore) , and of course this interpretation was popularized by Roy Thomas and Barry Windsor-Smith in their now-classic adaptation of “Red Nails” for Marvel’s B&W comic magazine Savage Tales. Even if one accepts the accuracy of this interpretation, however, it is not conclusive evidence. It is true that the stegosaurus in King Kong was one of the most widely seen early depictions of that type of dinosaur in popular culture, but it was certainly not the only one.

I would suggest that there is a much more convincing piece of evidence that Howard saw King Kong, though it does not appear in his weird fiction or in an adventure tale as one might expect, but a somewhat more unlikely place: a humorous western. In one of the more memorable scenes in the film, the giant ape is pursued by Jack Driscoll, Carl Denham, and several crewmen across a large log bridge lying over a deep ravine. Kong turns on his pursuers as they attempt to cross, lifts the log, and, after shaking off several hapless sailors, hurls it into the ravine. All of the pursuers, with the exception of Driscoll and Denham, plunge to their death (the entire scene can be viewed here).

This “log bridge” scene is closely echoed by a similar episode in the Breckinridge Elkins yarn, “Cupid from Bear Creek.” According to Patrice Louinet, the story, originally entitled “The Peaceful Pilgrim,” was written around February 1935 — two years after King Kong was released — then subsequently re-written before being published in its final form in the August issue of Action Stories. In the yarn, Breckinridge is pursued across a log bridge by outlaws and he reacts in a very Kong-like fashion:

I bent my knees and got hold of the end of the tree and heaved up with it, and them outlaws hollered and fell along it like ten pins, and dropped their Winchesters and grabbed holt of the log. I given it a shake and shook some of ‘em off like persimmons off a limb after a frost, and then I swung the butt around clear of the rim and let go, and it went down end over end into the river a hundred and fifty feet below, with a dozen men still hanging onto it and yelling blue murder.

The similarity of this scene to its counterpart in King Kong, with Breckinridge playing the part of the giant ape (not much of a stretch), is so close that to my mind it cannot be a coincidence. I believe that, taken together with the other circumstantial evidence, this passage from “The Cupid of Bear Creek” makes it possible to say with reasonable certainly that not only did Howard see King Kong, but it also had a least a small influence on his work. As a fan of both Howard and the film, I have to confess that I find that an appealing thought.

[PLEASE NOTE - Not long after posting this piece, it was pointed out to me that Brian Leno had discussed this very topic two years in an article published in the print version of The Cimmerian (which Leo quotes below). I was unaware of Brian's work and I would like to give him due credit for being the first one to make the connection between King Kong and "The Cupid from Bear Creek." Brian posted a response to my piece at Two-Gun Raconteur in which he suggests that the fact that we came to this same conclusion independently helps strengthen the argument and I have to agree. In my opinion there is little room for doubt that Howard saw King Kong. -- Jeff]

LEO GIVES CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE: Great minds think alike, Jeff: Brian Leno made this exact correlation between Elkins and Kong in the print Cimmerian a few years back. In his essay “When Yaller Rock Came to Chawed Ear” which appeared in V5n5 for October 2008, Brian stated:

Such animalistic antics are common in these tales — in fact, A Gent from Bear Creek has Breckinridge Elkins called “my brawny but feeble-minded gorilla of the high ridges,” by one of the supporting cast of characters. And so he is. Elkins has strength beyond mortal men — strength beyond even a normal-sized ape. One is tempted to quote the memorable Jim Croce lyric from “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”: “Badder than old King Kong / And meaner than a junkyard dog.” Breck’s power is so hilariously great it oftentimes merits genuine comparison to “the eighth wonder of the world,” King Kong himself, which leads me to yet another possible influence for Howard’s comic westerns, this one the most unexpected yet. It was Morgan Holmes who said in The Cimmerian V2n6 that “A question I have had for a long time and one that I know other Howard enthusiasts have thought is: did Robert E. Howard see the original King Kong in 1933?” That question, I think, is answered by one of Howard’s Elkins tales, “The Peaceful Pilgrim,” which seems to slyly borrow a famous scene from what was, at that time, a recent state-of-the-art hit in movie theaters.

King Kong, according to the revised edition of George E. Turner’s Spawn of Skull Island (2002), was released on April 10, 1933. Howard’s “The Peaceful Pilgrim,” rejected in 1935, was later revamped and used in his collection A Gent from Bear Creek (1937) as “Cupid from Bear Creek,” making the timeline correct. The scene of King Kong carrying Fay Wray into the jungle is probably one of the most familiar in cinema, and few can forget the sequence immediately following, where Bruce Cabot and some sailors are trapped on a log-bridge which covers a vast abyss. Kong is determined to stop the pursuit and, leaving Ms. Wray in a tree, returns to the crossing. Once all the men are upon the log, the ape reaches down, wrests his end of the log into the air, and starts shaking it. Cabot scrambles for safety in a cave beneath the bridge, where he watches in horror as a few of the other men are knocked off the log and vanish into the canyon far below. Those who manage to keep a firm grip on the log are outmaneuvered, when with a great heave Kong tosses the entire works down into the chasm, the poor devils screaming all the way down to oblivion. It’s a memorable scene that audiences have marveled over ever since.

Apparently Howard found it hard to forget as well. In the first version of his Bear Creek story, Elkins is attempting to stop the pursuit of a gang of men on horseback from following him over a similar log-bridge. “But I got to the end of the bridge in about three jumps,” he writes, “…I bent my knees and got hold of the end of the tree and heaved up with it. It was such a big tree and had so many hosses and men on it even I couldn’t lift it very high, but that was enough. I braced my laigs and swung the end around clear of the rim and let go and it went end over end a hundred feet down into the canyon, taking all them outlaws and their hosses along with it, them a-yelling and squalling like the devil.”

The revised section from his A Gent from Bear Creek is even closer to the movie version. This time, the outlaws try to cross without their horses, and when Elkins shakes the log, they hurriedly drop their rifles and attempt to hold on. But, as in King Kong, some fall off just the same, and finally Breckinridge swings the end of it over the rim and then releases his hold, causing all to vanish into the depths which, in this telling, have now deepened to one-hundred-fifty feet. In the case of King Kong it was beauty that killed the beast, and while beauty never killed off Breckinridge Elkins it sure got him into some peculiar predicaments — and the literature left to us by Robert E. Howard is much richer because of it.

So full credit to Brian Leno for being the Amundsen planting his flag on this particular South Pole, leaving our blogging pal Jeff gasping out his life on the Howardian critical tundra, all his hopes for being first reduced to those of a doomed Scott!

Just one example of why anyone who professes a serious interest in REH needs to be the owners of a complete collection of The Cimmerian. They are floating around out there on eBay and other book sites, waiting to be scooped up by all the latecomers to the party. Right now I can see complete Deluxe sets, in slipcase (advertised by the seller as “absolutely beautifully produced material, fascinating and informative”), of both Volume 1 and Volume 2 on the Advanced Book Exchange for $150 (those are steals, in my opinion — for comparison, a single issue from this set is currently sitting on eBay for almost $50 all by itself). There’s also a number of issues from various Volumes available for $23 a pop (although you’ll have to ask whether they are truly Deluxes or Limiteds, as the advertisements seem to conflate the two, saying the issues come from a “deluxe edition of 150 numbered copies” — of course, the Deluxe edition was 75 copies, and the Limited was 150, so one part of the other of that blurb is misstated).

It will probably be awhile (if ever) before I deign to release some sort of Best of Cimmerian anthology in book form. But one thing I probably should do is get a full Cimmerian Index online, so new scholars can at least find out whether something was originally covered in the print mag, and then ask us old-timers for any necessary details.

JEFF RESPONDS: Well, apologies to Brian. I was not aware of his earlier essay on this topic as I do not have that issue of The Cimmerian. In my defense, I did briefly discuss my topic with a noted REH scholar who did not mention that the idea had been published earlier; nor did Hoffman mention it in his recent article that I referenced above. To be perfectly frank, the lack of availability of back issues of The Cimmerian is very frustrating to new scholars such as myself who were not able to get them all before the unsold stock was destroyed (though I know Leo had his reasons for doing so). For what it is worth I have been trying to acquire back issues when resources and availability have permitted and will continue to do so, but it will likely be a process that will take years rather than months. Leo, I do hope you will consider creating an index as you suggested as that would be a great help to us “latecomers.”