Films: 1950s
(1956) Godzilla: King of Monsters
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Godzilla: King of Monsters
Director: Ishiro Honda, Terry Morse
Release: 1956
In the 1954 original, "Gojira," there were direct references to the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the version released to general United States audiences two years later, retitled "Godzilla: King of Monsters," those references were removed. References to American testing of nuclear weapons the ocean near Japan were softened, as well.
Having endured revision, "Godzilla" remains a political film. Long tracking shots of burned and bloodied Japanese victims in rows of emergency shelter aftermath, repeated images of Tokyo engulfed in fire, and the hiss of geiger counters held up to children tell the tale within the tale.
Ishiro Honda directed this film in the early 1950s, and it may be considered the first major reaction from Japanese cinema to the atomic conculsion of World War II.
Close friends with landmark Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, Honda created "Godzilla" from the frustration following the rejection by studio Toho, Ltd. of his more directly political film about Japanese sailors being poisoned by atom testing.
The resulting horror movie was nominated for a Japanese Academy Award for Best Picture. It won for best visual effects. Within 24 months, Embassy Pictures put its modified version on United States screens.
In the westernized release, with new footage by director Terry Morse, the film opens on devastation. Reporter Steve Martin (played for most of the film with pipe-chomping, eyebrow arching aplomb by Raymond Burr) is near death in the rubble of his office, and soon slowly recovering in a medical ward. In solemn voice-overs he narrates the aftermath. The narrative shifts to several days before.
When he arrives in Tokyo, looking up scientist Daisuki Serizawa, Martin finds that Serizawa has vanished on pressing business. Meanwhile ships in the Sea of Japan are sinking without survivors, the common last message containing descriptions of the ocean catching fire.
Martin and crew fly to the island of Oto, where they interview natives harboring shipwreck casualties and who worship to protect themselves from the sea monster they call Godzilla. A typhoon descends and something gigantic and destructive cuts a path through the village in the blinding rain and wind.
Escaping narrowly, Martin and Dr. Kyohei Yamane (a solid and sad performance by Takashi Shimura, of "Ikiru" fame) return to Oto to investigate. They encounter more than anticipated, coming face to face with the enormous prehistoric Godzilla in broad daylight.
The military attempts to secure Japan from Godzilla by depth charging the area of the ocean in which the monster lives, but to no avail. Godzilla surfaces in Tokyo Bay and two nights of violence ensue. Only Serizawa, who returns with a terrible new weapon, can stop Godzilla. The price of victory, however, is no small one.
Again, as a parable of Japanese atomic trauma, "Godzilla" is impressive, even when sanitized. Honda's work is ambitious, and photographed with an eye for artful mise-en-scene. He locates his camera above village roads and allows his actors to rush along them in flight, creating multiple lines of motion across the shot. His lens studies the ocean, impenetrable and vast. What could it contain?
When Honda films Godzilla, he does so wisely. The suit and special effects required to create the 400-foot dinosaur so drained the Toho studios of available talent during production that special effect director Eiji Tsuburaya had to draft his son as camera asisstant.
The intensity of the project paid off. Godzilla doesn't always look authentic, but it does look artful. Honda is careful to primarily film the beast in portions, or from afar. When Godzilla is framed against the boiling fire of the Tokyo skyline, or grappling with 300-foot electrical towers, it looks impressive and Honda finds numerous occasions to capture the creature in iconic positions. The final battle for Tokyo is beautiful filmmaking.
But "Godzilla" suffers from another kind of artifice. The Morse-Burr scenes are close enough in lighting and costume to pass for integrated narrative, but the stand-in actors (all face Burr and never the camera), as well as the inserted shots of "Gojira" cast dubbed with the new English lines, stand out.
The Embassy changes allow a certain Western commentary to pervade the film, and by similar recutting and dubbing, Morse works in a love triangle between Serizawa, his fiancee Emiko Yamane (Momoko Kochi) and an honorable soldier, Hideto Ogata (Akira Takarada).
But the seams show, and the plot is clunky. Characters double back and in one occassion speak lines that preclude knowledge of yet-to-happen events.
In comparison with the phenomenon of the late 1990s in the United States, when Japanese horror began to appear in wholly remade Western versions helmed by Japanese directors, "Godzilla" is a remarkable first note in a long-running harmonic relationship between East and West genre cinema. It is a feat, a spectacle film of the same ilk as "King Kong," but its melodrama is based in geopolitics rather than sexual mystery.
"Godzilla" is a fierce commentary film, and seen from the vantage of 60 years later, it is tremendously subversive, a landmark to the human ability to tell multiple stories through manipulation of context.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
