| Though often seen as a
simple 50s B-movie, Godzilla is not
just a standard monster-on-the-loose film
like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
or Them. Like King Kong before
it, it's a true milestone: a film that would
lay the foundations for the tokusatsu (special
effects) industry in Japan and has continued
to inspire future generations to the present.
King Kong, however, was but a simple
adventure story; Godzilla chose to
take it in a deeper direction. The film’s
monster is not a giant ape taken out of his
home and made to suffer in captivity; it’s
an enraged, atomic explosion-created mutant
dinosaur out to repay a society that created
it for its pain. As a child, the original
Godzilla was never a favorite of mine.
I liked it, but I thought it was too grim
and serious for my taste and much preferred
the colorful hijinks of the 1960s films. At
an older age, however, the film resonates
far clearer and has its own unique quality
few of the later films possessed.
The Eiko-Maru, a Japanese fishing
vessel, is destroyed at sea by a mysterious
force. Later, a rescue ship, the Bingo-Maru,
is also obliterated. A group of reporters
are sent to the nearby Odo Island for an investigation.
On Odo Island, the villagers live in fear
of “Godzilla”, a giant monster
who lives in the sea. One night, something
comes ashore and causes massive destruction.
Not long after, the Japanese government orders
another investigation and sends a group of
scientists there headed by Dr. Kyohei Yamane
(Takashi
Shimura). He finds a lot of radioactivity
in a footprint left by the creature. Suddenly,
the creature comes ashore again and the villagers
race toward the hills to try to fight it off.
However, one look at the creature: a mutant
dinosaur hundreds of feet tall with a deafening
roar is enough to send everyone fleeing in
terror.
The Japanese military soon
tries to defeat the creature with depth charges,
but as soon as the Japanese public begins
to rejoice at the creature’s “death”,
the monster rises from the sea and briefly
attacks Tokyo before going back under the
sea. The Japanese government builds a gigantic
barrier of electric towers around Tokyo to
repel the creature, but when it resurfaces,
these have little effect and seek to only
enrage the monster. Godzilla then cuts a swath
of death and destruction through Tokyo as
it levels the city completely. The next morning,
Tokyo is in ruins and countless thousands
are dead or maimed. Yamane’s daughter,
Emiko (Momoko Koichi), remembers something
her ex-fiancée, the tormented Dr. Daisuke
Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), had shown her.
He has invented a compound that can remove
oxygen from water but kept it a secret because
of how terrible a weapon it could be in the
wrong hands. Emiko convinces her boyfriend,
patrolman Hideto Ogata (Akira Takarada), to
confront Serizawa about using his “Oxygen
Destroyer” weapon against Godzilla.
Serizawa reluctantly agrees, but can even
a force of that power destroy Godzilla?
There is no denying the cultural
impact Godzilla would have, as a genre
film, it would be as iconic to the Japanese
film industry as Jaws or Star Wars
would in Hollywood afterward. Before Godzilla,
the Japanese special effects industry didn’t
exist and Japan, as a culture, had no contemporary
“pop culture mythologies”. The
tale of Godzilla's production is story
of remarkable craftsmanship and luck. Who
made Godzilla what it was and still
is in the minds of both Japan and the world?
Was it Tomoyuki
Tanaka: who looked down at the ocean on
the plane ride home after unsuccessfully trying
to produce a film in Indonesia and got the
idea to make a monster film when he pondered
what forces of the unseen may exist beneath
the waves? Was it Ishiro
Honda: the humanistic filmmaker who served
in World War II in the Japanese army in China,
saw the horrors of war first hand there and
lent his own experience to give the film a
visceral feel? Was it Eiji
Tsuburaya: the special effects man who
is now as famous as Walt Disney to the Japanese
and was every bit as pioneering, always thinking
of more efficient and better ways to shoot
his footage? Or how about Haruo Nakajima,
who suffered the tortures of the damned inside
the hot and heavy Godzilla suit? Or could
it have been Akira
Ifukube, whose heavy, militaristic music
has an almost androgynous cultural marker:
it sounds just as Western as Eastern and lent
a very distinctive sound to the film? The
answer, of course, is all of the above.
Everyone who worked on Godzilla
gave it their all and their collaboration
led to one of the most iconic Japanese films
ever made. Honda’s direction, while
not as artsy, deliberate or controlled as
the likes of his friend Akira
Kurosawa, is clear, concise and full of
purpose and Masao Taimi’s cinematography
and lustrous use of monochrome gives the film
a grim edge, reminiscent of the newsreels
of World War II, that few of the sequels and
follow ups, often shot in vibrant Eastman
color, would share. The script is well written
and accomplishes its aim nicely. The characters,
if not particularly deep or well developed,
all serve the story, from Takashi
Shimura’s Dr. Yamane, who sees the
scientific purpose in a creature like Godzilla
to Akihiko Hirata’s tragic Dr. Serizawa,
a war-scarred man tormented by his invention
of the most horrible weapon of destruction
to date and crushed by his fiancée
Emiko’s rejection of him, both of which
lead to his eventual suicide. These characters,
who are portrayed earnestly by all involved,
are people who survived and weathered the
storm of World War II’s horrors only
to find themselves face to face with yet another
incarnation of this a decade later. Ifukube's
music is, as said before, very unique. Like
John Williams, his style is recognizable just
by hearing it. It sounds neither Asian nor
Western, but completely “Ifukube”
and his score, equal parts haunting and rousing,
helps lend the film its effective feel as
much as its look. Tsuburaya’s special
effects work is truly revolutionary and changed
Japanese filmmaking forever. While perhaps
clunky by today’s standards, it is no
less "real" than Willis O’Brien’s
work. Do Tsuburaya’s men in suit monsters
and miniatures really look “less realistic”
than the beautiful but jerky and obviously
“unreal” stop motion creatures
of Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen?
If anything, I’d say they look closer
to reality.
While critically acclaimed
Japanese films from the period like Seven
Samurai (1954) or Tokyo Story
are works of auteur filmmakers and Godzilla
is but a simple studio programmer, it’s
a far better film than most give it credit.
The film deals with Japan’s then recent
cultural wounds (the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki) and conveys its fears. The film
was made at a time that the Japanese as a
people had every reason to be afraid, a concept
that would be tackled by Kurosawa’s
I
Live in Fear (1955) a year later.
Not only was the country decimated by fire
bombings and two nuclear bombs but a decade
earlier, but the Japan was now surrounded
by communist enemies in Southeast Asia such
as China and North Korea. Japan had invaded
much of Asia in World War II only a decade
prior and the wounds of crimes committed against
Chinese, Philipino and Korean civilians by
the Japanese Imperial Army were still very
fresh and driving the hatred and anti-Japanese
sentiment in most of the area. By all accounts,
Japan was and to some degree still is sitting
near a political volcano. The idea that the
communism in China and nearby wars in Korea
and later Vietnam could infect Japan and cut
it down from its economic prosperity was very
deeply imbedded in the minds of the Japanese
people. The Japanese, though they may have
an aggressor during the war, had also seen
the full horror of it: the memories of hiding
in a bomb shelters during fire bomb raids
by American planes and seeing footage of the
nuclear devastation at Hiroshima was also
still fresh in the minds of all but the youngest
Japanese.
From the opening sequence,
in which a ship is obliterated by a mysterious,
almost supernatural force, Godzilla
makes its motives known. The scene recalls
a then recent incident involving a fishing
vessel called the Lucky Dragon No. 5. The
ship strayed too close to an American nuclear
test site, the crew members were sickened
and Japanese tuna was nationally recalled
after some of the contaminated product reached
the market. This caused a massive scandal
and Tanaka decided to use the incident as
a basis to give his upcoming monster film
more social relevance. The films that came
after Godzilla, with only a few exceptions,
frequently were aimed more and more toward
children when Tanaka began to realize that
children loved Toho’s monster menagerie.
They would depict the monster attacks as entertaining
and very seldom show the true devastation
that such an attack would bring. The original
Godzilla is the only Godzilla film
to go that route: showing mothers with children
begging for death, children hysterically crying
over their dead parents and hospitals filled
to the brim with the maimed and radiation
poisoned. In that essence, it is a fine anti-war
film and Ishiro
Honda truly brings a level of conscientiousness
to his film. This is not a warning just for
Japan; it’s not a nationalistic and
angry condemnation of America’s atomic
bombings of Japan, no. Godzilla is a message
and warning for all of mankind: stop foolishly
making war or face the consequences. Honda
only uses his home country of Japan as a relevant
example. His true message is much broader.
Indeed, in today’s world, with conflict
and human hatred still brewing the world over,
this message is still more relevant than ever.
Godzilla, in its true essence as a character,
is simply a personification of war itself.
When Godzilla came to Western
shores two years after its release in Japan,
US producer Joseph Levine, with the services
of B-movie director Terry Morse, shot new
sequences featuring actor Raymond Burr and
added them to the film while shortening the
Japanese sequences by about two reels. What
resulted was entitled Godzilla, King of
the Monsters and was a big hit in the
American drive-in circuit. The film features
Burr as an American reporter named Steve Martin
who stops off in Japan on his way to an assignment
in Egypt and accidentally ends up in the middle
of Godzilla’s attack on Tokyo. Naturally,
most of the film’s more overtly anti-war
and anti-nuclear sequences were cut. America,
only a decade prior, was interning Japanese
Americans and making documentaries like Know
Your Enemy: Japan in which the Japanese
were depicted as inhuman monstrosities. Burr
was thus a necessity so American audiences
could have someone to identify with. Godzilla,
King of the Monsters, if viewed separately
from the Japanese version, actually works
quite well. Yes, it’s taken down to
the level of a more typical 50s atomic horror
film like The Giant Behemoth or It
Came From Beneath the Sea, but it’s
still a very workable film, with a degree
of care utilized in the shooting of the American
sequences and editing of the film that has
been seldom seen on full scale “Americanizations”
since. However, to me it’s become much
harder to appreciate Godzilla, King of
the Monsters since I have seen the Japanese
Godzilla, since the latter is a much clearer
film in its aim.
When the box office receipts
were turned in, Toho knew they were onto something.
Almost at once, they rushed a sequel, Godzilla
Raids Again (1955), into production.
Eiji
Tsuburaya soon had his own permanent special
effects unit and he, Honda and Tanaka continued
to make these films together. After Godzilla,
the Japanese special effects film became an
industry and an institution. Dozens of films
would follow and a legend would begin!
|
(4.5/5)