Von Stroheim's production went over schedule and over budget, and Powers sold the picture-and Wray's contract-to Paramount. Even in its truncated form, The Wedding March (finally released in 1928) was a masterful film that showcased Wray's virginal beauty. Paramount's The Street of Sin (1927) offered Wray an opportunity to work with German star Emil Jannings and Swedish director Mauritz Stiller. She appeared in The Legion of the Condemned (1927) with Gary Cooper for director William Wellman, and also costarred in Josef von Sternberg's first talkie, Thunderbolt (1929).
The Four Feathers (1929) was an odd hybrid production that combined semidocumentary footage directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack with studio footage helmed by German émigré Lothar Mendes, but it gave Wray her first opportunity to work with the team that would create King Kong When she joined the cast of Kong the protracted schedule allowed her to work on several other movies concurrently, especially thrillers and horror films, including a pair of Technicolor thrillers, Doctor X (1932) and The Mystery of the Wax Museum The Vampire Bat (both 1933), and particularly The Most Dangerous Game (1932), which was directed by Schoedsack (with actor Irving Pichel) and shot on the Kong jungle sets at night. Other films from this period include Dirigible, The Unholy Garden (both 1930), One Sunday Afternoon and The Bowery (both 1933).
By the time King Kong finally reached the screen in 1933, Wray was firmly established as the talkie's first "scream queen," a persona she did her best to dispel in subsequent assignments. She acted in prestige pictures such as Affairs of Cellini, Viva Villa!, The Richest Girl in the World and The Captain Hates the Sea (all 1934), but those films, as well as later programmers in which she toiled, did very little for her career. Divorced from screenwriter John Monk Saunders in 1939, Wray married screenwriter Robert Riskin in 1942 and retired from the screen. In the 1950s she returned to character parts in The Cobweb, Queen Bee (both 1955), Rock, Pretty Baby (1956), Tammy and the Bachelor (1957), and her last feature, Dragstrip Riot (1958). Her autobiography, "On the Other Hand" (1989) reveals that Wray had a life much more interesting than the characters she played.
Trivia
Saved RKO from bankruptcy with the movie King Kong. RKO went on to release their most successful film in 1941 "Citizen Kane".
Personal Quotes
"At the premiere of King Kong I wasn't too impressed. I thought there was too much screaming...I didn't realise then that King Kong and I were going to be together for the rest of our lives, and longer...".
"I have come to believe over the years that Kong is my friend" (2004)
"I have no advice for them". [In reference to the King Kong remake and speaking in 2004] (Personal note: This has got to be the most embarassing remake ever made, and that includes Lohan's 'Herbie The Love Bug')
"My scream was a product of pure imagination. I had to imagine what was happening to me, and I imagined that the nearest help was far away. When I first saw the picture I thought the screams were overdone. But they were an important part of the picture and I was delighted with how it all looked. My scenes with King were exactly the way I imagined them" (2004) [In reference to King Kong (1933)]
[In reference to King Kong (1933)] "He (Merion Cooper) called me into his office and showed me sketches of jungle scenes, and told me 'You're going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.' Naturally, I though Clark Gable, But then he showed me this sketch of a giant ape up the side of the Empire State Building, he said 'There's your leading man'" (2004)
"That film changed my life". [In reference to The Wedding March (1928) and speaking in early 2004]
"Von Stroheim never got treated correctly in Hollywood, but he made me feel very happy" (2004)
[On her favourite screen appearance in The Wedding March (1928)] "I still love that film, Eric Von Stroheim was a wonderful human being, and he took a chance on me. I was only 19 when I did the screen test, but he saw something in me. After 75 years, it's still one of the happiest experiences of my life. And it was a nice part, wasn't it?". (2004)
Later,
Kenaz
