FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

What nationality is Queen Kong?

This is a thorny one and the answer depends entirely on how one wishes to define a film’s nationality: by financing, production, location or whatever. Most sources list Queen Kong as Anglo-Italian, but this is very debatable. The original announcement at the Cannes Film Festival trumpeted the film as a Franco-Italian co-production between André Genoves’ company La Boetie (Paris) and Virgilio De Blasi’s company Canaria (Rome). It was to be shot in the UK but that did not affect the film’s nationality. (Star Wars was shot entirely in the UK the same year, but that’s hardly a British movie!)

In order to make the film, Frank Agrama set up an independent British company - Dexter Films (London) - and this, together with the use of a British cast and crew, qualified Queen Kong for Eady money, a government funding scheme which was discontinued shortly afterwards (the Eady Levy was a tax on cinema tickets which was ploughed back into the British film industry). There was no commercial British funding of the film, nor did Agrama put any of his own money into it.

While the film was in post-production, in August 1976, Genoves announced that he could not in fact afford his half of the production costs. Dexter Films had "cash-flow problems" so co-producer Keith Cavele, according to a contemporary report in Screen International, told the Frenchman that if he didn’t stump up the money by 20th August, he would "take advantage of an alternative source".

Ah, but here’s where it gets really complicated. The original set-up had Agrama as producer, De Blasi as executive producer, Keith Cavele as co-producer and Genoves with a ‘presents...’ credit. The finished film retains Agrama’s credit and Genoves’ credit but omits De Blasi entirely and promotes Cavele to executive producer. This does not square with the above information since it suggests that it was De Blasi, rather than Genoves, who reneged on his financial commitments.

Extensive publicity material which was prepared for a German release (although the film appears to have had only one trade screening in that country) calls Queen Kong “Eine produktion der Cine Art Pictures, München und Dexter Films, London.” It is therefore reasonable to assume that the “alternative source” mentioned by Cavele was Cine Art (which some people have assumed to be an Italian company but which was, as can be seen, actually based in Munich). However, there is no mention of Cine Art anywhere in the credits of the film as released. Italian publicity material meanwhile just calls the film “A Dexter Films Production, London” - but Italian films of this period are notorious for disguising any domestic involvement.

What this all amounts to is this:

• If the on-screen credits are correct, Queen Kong is a Franco-British co-production between La Boetie and Dexter Films.
• If the credits on the German posters are correct, it is an Anglo-German co-production between Dexter Films and Cine Art.
• If the credits on the Italian posters are correct (which they probably aren’t), the film is a purely British production from Dexter Films.
• And if the trade paper reports were correct, then the film is an Anglo-Italo-German co-production between Dexter Films, Canaria and Cine Art.

But one thing that the film cannot be, by any permutation of the established and claimed production credits, is Anglo-Italian...

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