Page 65 – LIFE

King Kong: When the Awesome One Showed His Might

January 14, 2020March 10, 2017 by

When King Kong was introduced the world in 1933, TIME described the creature as a “gigantic whatnot resembling an ape, 50 feet tall, equipped with large teeth and a thunderous snarl.” (His fur, the story noted, was made of 30 bearskins.) The whole concept of the film could have produced something entirely ridiculous, the magazine observed back then as well as in future stories about the franchise, but somehow it worked thanks to some Hollywood alchemy that filmmakers are hoping to recapture once again.

That means there have been plenty of chances for audiences to be reintroduced to Kong.

Case in point: In 1952, LIFE dispatched Alfred Eisenstaedt to photograph a screening of that original 1933 film, images from which can be seen here. The story did not run in the magazine at the time—in fact, no record could be found of why the magazine sent the photographer to that particular event or what editors intended to do with the images. It seems likely, however, that what Eisenstaedt was capturing was a screening from the theatrical reissue of the film that year, which was a prime example of the character’s proven staying power in action.

It was, as TIME described, a hit:

Hollywood, frantically casting about for a movie formula which will bring customers back into the theaters, last week agreed that one studio at least had struck pay dirt. After thriftily digging into its storehouse of possible reissues, RKO dusted off the 19-year-old King Kong, the adventures of a snarling, 50-ft. prehistoric monster who saved RKO from bankruptcy in the thirties and seems destined to gross at least $2,500,000 for his masters in 1952.

As most of Hollywood’s producers watched with envious amazement, crowds in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati and Indianapolis flocked to see Kong brought back alive from a Pacific island to Manhattan, where he climbs the Empire State Building clutching the beauteous and screaming Fay Wray (now fortyish and retired). There, raging defiantly at his puny pursuers, the monster finally gets shot down by a squadron of ancient biplanes.

That 1952 take was significant (about $22.9 million in 2017 dollars), so it was perhaps no wonder that when the concept got yet another go in 1976, the images Eisenstaedt created in 1952, of a 1933 movie, were used to illustrate TIME’s cover story about the movie.

“[The original] achieved the legendary status of classic kitsch, the charm of which remained undimmed by innumerable el cheapo rip-offs and overexposure on TV. The great monkey has become a pop culture staple in everything from cartoons to ad campaigns,” the story observed.

As that place in pop culture endures, LIFE presents this look back at the staying power of the King Kong iteration that remains the monster’s milestone achievement.

Photo from a 1952 screening of the 1933 film King Kong

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.

Photo from a 1952 screening of the 1933 film King Kong.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock.

Remembering Harry Belafonte

April 25, 2023March 7, 2017 by

Harry Belafonte, entertainer and activist, died on April 25, 2023 of congestive heart failure at age 96.

He appeared many times in the pages of LIFE magazine, both as a performer and as a champion of civil rights. Pictures show him in a variety of settings that give testament to the breadth of his life. He was photographed on stage at the Coconut Grove nightclub, making his acting debut in the film Bright Road, and attending the 1963 March on Washington with Sidney Poitier. And the list goes on of moments in which he shared his joy and his wisdom with American audiences.

LIFE’s feature story on Belafontee from May 1957 gives a sense of how big he was as an entertainer. That story talked about how he had pulled ahead of Elvis Presley in record sales, and the first movie of his three-picture deal with Fox, Island in the Sun, was going to come out the following month. Belftonte achieved his massive success by introducing audiences to calypso music, which he did despite encountering resistance in the music business:

When I started singing the kind of folk music I do now I was told it was too special to get across. But I’d given up the idea of reaching a lot of people. I was trying to express my strong social feelings in terms of folk music, the way people of all nations have historically done. Part of my heritage is West Indian so my interest in their music—calypso—was natural.

That music propelled an amazing journey. Please enjoy this photographic tribute to Harry Belafonte.

Harry Belafonte laughed during Bop City nightclub’s opening night, 1949.

Martha Holmes/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte in his film debut as a principal in Bright Road, 1952.

John Swope The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte singing at a recording session, 1957.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte performed at the Coconut Grove nightclub, 1957.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte and wife Julie at Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte singing, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Singer Harry Belafonte singing in his apartment, 1958.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte playing guitar, 1958.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte playing with son David as wife Julie watches.

Martha Holmes The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Singer Harry Belafonte at a night club in 1960.

Joseph Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte and actor Sidney Poitier and folk singer Odetta at a civil rights rally at the Statue of Liberty in 1960.

Al Fenn The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte sightseeing in Israel, 1960.

David Rubinger The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

Anthony Quinn with singers Ethel Merman and Harry Belafonte at President-elect John F. Kennedy’s inaugural ball, 1961.

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Burt Lancaster, Harry Belafonte and Charlton Heston at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. for a civil rights march, 1963.

Eliot Elisofon The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte with Julie Andrews at a party following the Broadway premiere of ‘Sound of Music’. 1965.

Bob Gomel The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

When A Young Gloria Steinem Played the Pop-Culture Pundit

January 14, 2022March 1, 2017 by

Today, Gloria Steinem is a feminist icon whose imprimatur can bestow the highest level of progressive cred.

So it’s worth remembering that Steinem’s own history in the public eye began with her career as a journalist which included the early moment when she showed, for the 1965 LIFE magazine story for which these photos were taken, that she could bestow her seal of approval on all kinds of things.

The lengthy article, which ran in the Aug. 20 issue that year, was a primer on Pop Culture—capital P, capital C. Steinem’s definition of the term fastened it to “anything currently in fashion, all or most of whose ingredients are familiar to the public-at-large.” In other words, you might not know how to do the latest dance, but if it’s pop you’ll still be able to recognize the refraction of the zeitgeist.

“A thing is either widely recognizable or it isn’t,” she wrote, “and whether it is good or bad needn’t be held against it.”

At the time, Steinem was only a few years into her career as a big-name writer, having gotten a jump start in 1963 with a story for Show magazine in which she went undercover as a Playboy bunny. (She would later say that she regretted the assignment at the time, as it led editors away from thinking of her as a serious writer.) Prior to that, after graduating from Smith in 1956, she had gone to India for two years and worked in Massachusetts for “a group encouraging American students to attend Communist youth festivals abroad” which was later revealed to be connected to the CIA. And yet, though she had only burst on the magazine scene not long before, by the time this article ran in LIFE her byline had appeared in a wide range of outlets and, as TIME noted that same summer, Steinem, then 30, was the most successful example of an experiment by Glamour magazine in which the journalists also served as models.

She did the same here, posing as figures in the board game of pop culture though, as she noted, pop was no game.

It was serious business, and with typical incisiveness she explained how what might seem to be frivolous stuff was really a sign of major generational shifts taking place in the United States. For example, whereas American culture had once trickled down from on high, it had become the case during the period of postwar prosperity that many of the most obvious markers of that culture (clothing or golf, for example) could be afforded by wide swathes of the population. When money ceased to be a prerequisite for mainstream cool, it was possible for cool to come up from the bottom instead. “The proliferation of money and the collapse of the old caste system automatically downgraded those who had little but cash and ancestors to offer,” as Steinem put it.

Better sources of cool included African-American culture, camp culture, teenage culture and British culture.

What exactly that translated to, however, was more complicated. The full list is worth reading, but even just the highlights are pricelessly spot-on. The Twist was out; the Frug was on the way out; the Jerk was on the way in but only because the Twist had cleared a path for new dances to come and go quickly. “Jive” had stopped referring to jazz; it now meant “phony.” The Rolling Stones were in; the Beatles were already on the way to becoming Classic Pop rather than of-the-moment. The New Yorker and Disneyland had both been pop from the beginning and always would be. Meanwhile, football was so out it was back in.

Few could say what would be next, but Steinem expressed a fear that will likely resonate with 2017’s pop connoisseurs too: Was the cycle of in-ness and out-ness speeding up so much that it was becoming impossible to keep up? Her best tip for the overwhelmed was just to find a “tolerant teenager” to act as a source.

“In your new state of irreproachable In-ness, anything you do is In,” she concluded. “Which leaves you with just one rule to remember: to be Pop Culture, it’s got to be Fun.”

As for Steinem herself, by 1971, she had helped launch Ms. magazine and was one of feminism’s most recognizable faces. She may have had her finger on the pop pulse, but her In-ness proved to be anything but passing.

From “The Ins and Outs of Pop Culture,” an article by Gloria Steinem in the Aug. 20, 1965 issue of LIFE magazine. This image did not appear in the story.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From “The Ins and Outs of Pop Culture” an article by Gloria Steinem. This image did not appear in the story.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Contact sheet from “The Ins and Outs of Pop Culture” an article by Gloria Steinem in the Aug. 20, 1965 issue of LIFE magazine.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection

Her pop culture suggestions included “boning up on World War II memorabilia.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Steinem suggested for people who want to be In “…learning to look at and/or wearing Op Art (Dramamine helps).”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Of going to pro football games, Steinem wrote, “try thinking of them as improvisational theater.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Contact sheet from “The Ins and Outs of Pop Culture.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection

She described skateboarding as “dangerous enough for James Bond.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The end goal of the course, she wrote, was “arriving at a state so In that you can relax and forget about whether you’re in or out.”

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Elizabeth Taylor: A Life-Changing Portrait

December 15, 2019February 27, 2017 by

Philippe Halsman, the prolific 20th-century portrait photographer, was assigned by LIFE Magazine to photograph Elizabeth Taylor for a profile story. Halsman had previously captured figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Alfred Hitchcock and Winston Churchill.

In October 1948, Taylor, who was only 16, arrived in a low-cut dress at Halsman’s New York City portrait studio, which still exists and is home to the Halsman Archive. “In my studio Elizabeth was quiet and shy. She struck me as an average teen-ager, except that she was incredibly beautiful,” Halsman reflected in his book Halsman: Sight and Insight.

Halsman had his one-of-a-kind hand-built 4×5 view camera ready to go with both black-and-white and color film.

“On a purely technical level, he pointed out that two sides of my face photographed differently,” Taylor would later recall. “One side looked younger; the other more mature. In posing for Halsman, I became instantly aware of my body.”

Taylor had worn her own dazzling earrings, but she didn’t wear a necklace. During the sitting, Halsman borrowed his wife Yvonne Halsman’s blue triangle pendant necklace and placed it around Elizabeth’s neck. This subtle decision added a level of impact to the portrait. The necklace was later passed down to Halsman’s daughter Irene.

In Taylor’s 1988 autobiography, Elizabeth Takes Off: On Weight Gain, Weight Loss, Self-Image, and Self-Esteem, she described the effect the portrait session had on her self-image: “[Halsman] was the first person to make me look at myself as a woman… After my session with Halsman, I was much more determined to control my screen image. I wanted to look older so I insisted on cutting my hair. In 1949 I went from portraying Amy in Little Women, another child-woman to playing a full-fledged romantic lead in The Conspirator. At barely seventeen, I grew up for all America to see.“

Halsman ran into Taylor a few weeks later in Hollywood and when approached by him, she couldn’t remember where they had met.

“She could have not hurt me more,” he would later reflect. “Her words showed again how important a photograph can be and how unimportant the photographer who made it.”

Color portrait of Elizabeth Taylor, Oct. 1948.

Philippe Halsman Halsman Archive

A black-and-white outtake from Halsman’s shoot with Elizabeth Taylor, Oct. 1948.

Philippe Halsman Halsman Archive

Halsman’s portrait of Taylor as it originally appeared in color the Feb. 21, 1949 issue of LIFE.

MLK and the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom

December 16, 2019February 23, 2017 by

On May 17, 1957, on the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s epoch-making decision in the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case, thousands of people traveled to Washington, D.C. not for a visit, but for a pilgrimage. The reason for the gathering, in short, was that the milestone court decision had not yet translated to real integration.

“The camera of Paul Schutzer caught these faces in a crowd of 15,000 people who assembled in Washington from 30 different states on a mass ‘prayer pilgrimage for freedom,'” LIFE Magazine noted in its June 3, 1957, issue. “The pilgrimage, on the third anniversary of the Supreme Court’s segregation decision, was planned to urge the President, Congress and both political parties to make the court’s decision a reality.” (The actual number of participants may have been significantly higher.) Here LIFE revisits Schutzer’s striking images, many of which were not published at the time.

The most important of the day’s speeches, the brief write-up continued, was by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who asked those in attendance to work unrelentingly but for the goal of voting rights and true equality. In an oration that would come to be known as the “Give Us the Ballot” speech, he affirmed the ways in which voting rights were essential to the goal of integration and freedom, and how important he believed it was to face without bitterness the work to be done:

We must never struggle with falsehood, hate, or malice. We must never become bitter. I know how we feel sometime. There is the danger that those of us who have been forced so long to stand amid the tragic midnight of oppression—those of us who have been trampled over, those of us who have been kicked about—there is the danger that we will become bitter. But if we will become bitter and indulge in hate campaigns, the new order which is emerging will be nothing but a duplication of the old order… We must meet hate with love.

The portraits captured by Schutzer that day were more than an attendance list, the magazine pointed out: they were a visual reflection of the spirit of King’s plea “in the expressions of the pilgrims listening, with prayerful intensity, to the exhortations.”

Rallying point for Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial during the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, D.C. in 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Gospel singer Mahalia Jackson performed “Keep-A-Trustin.”

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Two women among the estimated 15,000 people at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A woman listened intently as speakers voiced hope and warning.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

U.S. Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of New York addressed the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

After sitting through the meeting in quiet dignity, this man broke into a pleased smile.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A women listed to the closing speech of Martin Luther King Jr.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Fierce concentration showed on the face of Judge Edward R. Dudley of New York during a speech.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Harry Belafonte and his wife Julie at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

With quiet force, Martin Luther King called for action to implement the court’s decision.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, women waved their arms in approval, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actor Sidney Poitier during the prayer pilgrimage, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Civil Rights heroine Rosa Parks at the Prayer Pilgrimage, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A participant addressed the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A child at the Lincoln Memorial during the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom in Washington, D.C. in 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A women’s chorus performed in front of Lincoln Memorial.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Martin Luther King at the prayer pilgrimage, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rev. I. G. Glover from Brooklyn brooded during one of rally’s speeches.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Faces in the crowd at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C., 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier: Actor and Activist

January 7, 2022February 17, 2017 by

In 1959, when LIFE magazine profiled the star of a new production of A Raisin in the Sun, Sidney Poitier, he was 32 and as the magazine then put it, “already accepted almost without question as the best Negro actor in the history of the American theater.” In the months leading up to that assessment, Poitier had played Porgy in Porgy and Bess and become the first black actor nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, for his work in The Defiant Ones. (He lost that time around but would win a few years later for Lilies of the Field.)

“Whenever Poitier walks on stage, excitement walks on with him,” wrote entertainment editor Tom Prideaux. “He seems to be taking it easy most of the time but with the hidden tension of a coiled spring. In appearance he veers between man and boy. His open grin and handsomely boyish head set off a powerful body. He can be as appealing as a child or show a shattering range of deep adult emotion. Today, acting and Poitier seem made for each other.”

Poitier died on January 6, 2022 at the age of 94. Here, LIFE presents some of the magazine’s most striking images of the star, who appeared in its pages in a 1950 story about the film No Way Out, went on to be featured on the cover in 1966 and became a mainstay of the magazine’s coverage of Hollywood as well as the civil rights movement. As these pictures make clear, Poitier’s career has been one of breadth as well as depth.

“It has been a long journey,” as Poitier said when he accepted his Oscar in 1964, “to this moment.”

Sidney Poitier in a scene from the film “Cry The Beloved Country”, 1952.

Yale Joel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier at the prayer pilgrimage in Washington D.C., 1957.

Paul Schutzer The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier with his wife at home, 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in the play “A Raisin in the Sun”, with Ruby Dee, 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in “A Raisin in the Sun,” 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The “Raisin in the Sun” party at Sardis with Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier, 1959.

Gordon Parks The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in a scene from “Porgy and Bess,” 1959.

Gjon Mili The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Folk singer Odetta at a civil rights rally at the Statue of Liberty with Sidney Poitier, 1960.

Al Fenn The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier spoke at a pre-Inaugural gala for President John F. Kennedy, 1961.

Leonard McCombe The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier in a TV program, “Strolling Twenties,” a story about Harlem of that era, 1965.

Henry Groskinsky The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sidney Poitier during the filming of “The Lost Man,” 1968.

Charles Bonnay The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

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