Some Thoughts About Godzilla (1954)

In truth, there isn’t all that much one can still add to everything that has been written about the movie that started it all, Ishiro Honda’s incredible original Gojira, a film that has been something of a given for me all of my life, at first in the curious German cut (that is based on the US cut, but mutilated further), then in the much superior Japanese original.

My umpteenth rewatch, however, did bring up a handful of observations: first, how much of a horror movie this initial Godzilla movie is at its beginning, with much of the monster action taking place in gloomily lit nights scenes, and a structure that slowly reveals the giant lizard that’s going to threaten Japan. Much of the film’s visual language must of course have resonated quite heavily with a populace that has lived through the war years and their particularly brutal end, and at first, these shots as well seem to be in the service of simply making the horror more horrific.

But the more emotional gravitas the film gains – and this film is all about gravitas, and sadness, and things and people destroyed in the end even when the world is saved – the less Honda uses his shots of destruction that way, and instead utilizes them to argue his emotional, humane and political points. In the end, Honda’s always the humanist, the pacifist who enjoys shots of destructive technology with the best of them but is also genuinely saddened at their use, and only the guy trying to creep us out on the way to get there.

Speaking of the political, it’s interesting to watch a couple of scenes here after Shin Godzilla and after Godzilla Minus One, how important Godzilla’s moments of the squabbling, ineffectual, officials will become to these films in the century after it was made.

In general, one of Honda’s particular strengths here isn’t just that he creates surprisingly complex characters particularly in Drs Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) and Yamane (Takashi Shimura), but that he understands how to create side characters who feel memorable and alive enough to stand up to the giant lizard with the atomic breath – which most kaiju and giant monster movies simply don’t manage.

It is also fascinating to keep in mind how much this one is a movie all about the filmmakers figuring out how to do what they are trying to achieve while doing it, and how little this looks like a movie made by people who weren’t quite sure how to do it until they did it. In fact, Godzilla feels like a fully thought through and composed masterpiece from shot one to its finish, where one has to look very hard for the traces of the scrappiness of some of the production.

Terror of Mechagodzilla (1975)

Original title: Mekagojira no Gyakushū (メカゴジラの逆襲)

A short time after the end of Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, a submarine working with Interpol is searching the ocean floor for the remains of Mechagodzilla, when it is destroyed by a titanic amphibian kaiju the film is going to insist is a dinosaur, soon to be dubbed Titanosaurus.

It turns out the aliens from the last movie haven’t given up and are trying to smash Japan (the rest of the world to follow later) to build a beautiful, orderly New Tokyo for them to dwell in from the rubble. They are planning to use said Titanosaurus as well as a rebuilt Mechagodzilla for the smashing, and as their tools to destroy mankind’s most competent protector – as it happens also the one with the best theme song – Godzilla. To be able to control Titanosaurus, the aliens – apparently coming from somewhere romantically dubbed Blackhole Planet 3 which does explain their wish to move pretty well – have managed to win over tragically mad scientist Dr Mafune (Akihiko Hirata), who comes in a package deal with his somewhat mysterious daughter Katsura (Tomoko Ai).

Mafune has his reasons for hating humanity. Once a pioneer in underwater agriculture, he then turned to experiments concerned with trying to control animals as if they were robots. When he discovered the peaceful Titanosaurus swimming around in its natural habitat, he decided to make mind-controlling it his next big project. This led to his rejection by the rest of the scientific community, half of which seems to have poopooed the idea of the existence of Titanosaurus despite living on the same planet as Godzilla and company, the other half of which simply wasn’t keen on animal mind control. Afterwards, a mental breakdown and years of poverty that killed his dutiful wife.

Helping out on Godzilla’s side of the equation are the usual assortment of people in lab coats and suits, as well as marine biologist Akira Ichinose (Katsuhiko Sasaki) and his old school buddy turned Interpol agent Jiro Murakoshi (Katsumasa Uchida). Also, the potential power of love and long buried humanity.

Terror of Mechagodzilla, set as a direct sequel to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla was the very last hurray of the Showa era Godzilla films, holding the sad record of having been the commercially least successful entry in the series at the time it came out. Nowadays, the steady stream of home video versions has of course turned it into a commercially rather successful kind of commercial flop, all without the magic of Hollywood accounting. This film is also the return of the great Ishiro Honda to the Godzilla franchise, and big screen movie direction, as well as his final feature film as a director before he did some intermittent work for and with Akira Kurosawa in the final decades of his life.

It is also a much better film than its clearly low budget and the trajectory of the Godzilla movies suggest. While I’ll always defend the Jun Fukudas of this world for being purveyors of fun nonsense at the worst of times, the comparison of this direct sequel by Honda to a Fukuda movie does not exactly make Fukuda look good. Honda had the same diminished production values to work against yet the resulting film is simply better in every possible aspect, from the character work right through to the realization of the monster fights.

Rather more pertinent, Honda is much better at keeping an audience interested between the rare monster fights (Godzilla himself makes his first non-flashback appearance when the film is already half over). Or really, in this case, Honda simply avoids the feeling of the alien invasion plot, the mad science business and the desperately sad background of some of the villains being any kind of filler between the fights by making the often much-loathed bits of a kaiju concerning humans, as always was his wont, important parts of the actual point of the film. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a somewhat silly pulp alien invasion plot with bad guys so sadistic, they cut the vocal chords of their prisoners just in case they might escape their clutches, a cyborg woman, and some of the silliest helmets any alien invader ever wore, but Honda uses of all of this to treat many of his regular humanist concerns, showing much more interest in motivations and self-justifications of characters than you’d usually get in this sort of film, and doing it so well, a viewer might find oneself actually caring.

Of course, this is also thanks to Yukiko Takayama’s (yes, it’s that pleasant and alas rare occurrence of a woman writing a kaiju) script, that hides some complexity and a lot of intelligence between fun monster fights and Interpol versus alien invaders, clearly sharing in Honda’s understanding of how to join pulp fun and serious themes without losing the fun.

Another element that makes Fukuda look bad in comparison is Honda’s direction of the monster fights. They are few, and they are certainly cheaper than anything made at the height of the series but Honda uses all the tricks - the slow motion, the camera angles from below, editing to the rhythm of Ifukube’s (who wasn’t involved in the Fukuda film either) music, and so on – he has learned over a long career of having men in monster suits smash Tokyo to give the fights weight and drama. In Terror’s particular case, there’s also the excellent intercutting between the climax of the human drama and the monster fights to mention, which is perfectly timed, providing a series of emotional jolts that don’t distract from the city smashing business but enhances it.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is how a master takes a bow.

Rodan (1956)

After a relatively minor break-in of water in a coal mine in the Japanese Kyushu province, one of the miners is found dead, killed in a hardly explicable way and bearing the strangest wounds. Still, the only suspect for the death is another miner called Goro who disappeared during the break-in and has had quite a history of violent altercations with the dead man.

Neither Goro's sister Kiyo (Yumi Shirakawa), nor her boyfriend, the young mining engineer Shigeru (Kenji Sahara) believe the miner to be capable of killing someone, though.

They are soon proven right, when more people are killed, all bearing the same, inexplicable pattern of wounds. What really killed these people is a giant creature that looks rather like a cross between a caterpillar and a crab. Since this is Toho's Japan, there is little skepticism towards the existence of giant monsters and so an early involvement of the JASDF and the biologist Professor Kashiwagi (Akihiko Hirata) in the plot.

Shigeru, who turns out to be quite a heroic young man, is buried alive during the JASDF's fight against the murderous creature which itself doesn't seem to survive the clash with its human food source.

Shigeru is thought dead, but a small earthquake frees the lucky engineer. He must have seen something terrible while he was trapped in the mines, and now suffers from amnesia. When he finally starts to remember what it is that he has seen, he relates a frightening tale of a mine full of the creeping caterpillar things and something worse - a gigantic egg from which a winged reptile hatches, a thing itself so big that it eats the caterpillars the army had such difficulty fighting like small snacks.

One can't help but think that the things Shigeru has witnessed have a connection with the gigantic unidentified object that has been witnessed flying over parts of Asia with a speed no plane could reach and eating planes for breakfast.

Based on Shigeru's description and an out of focus photograph, Kashiwagi develops the theory that a combination of chance and radiation has caused the development of a biological mutant and the meaner and bigger brother of the Pteranodon, the Radon, has returned out of the past.

Rodan is the the third (or first, or fourth, depending on the way you count them) of Toho's kaiju eiga and the first to be made in colour. Directed by the great Ishiro Honda, it is a strikingly beautiful film that would probably be worth watching for some of the colour compositions alone.

To the kaiju fans delight, Rodan (which should be called Radon, but had to be renamed to avoid trouble with a toy making corporation), is also quite a brilliant piece of writing. Sure, you'll have to ignore the weak explanation for the existence of the film's giant monsters, but if you are unable to do that, no giant monster film will ever find your approval. What the script by Takeshi Kimura and Takeo Murata does oh so right is the use of escalation. From one murder to an unseen monster to the caterpillars to the army fighting the caterpillars to Rodan to something I am not going to spoil, the film never stops making everything bigger and every stake a little higher, putting the kind of stuff people like Jerry Bruckheimer do today to shame. I was surprised how thrilling in the way modern blockbusters often try to be a fifty years old film I must have seen a dozen times as a child still can be (at least in its Japanese cut - the eight to ten minutes cut from the American version can't mean anything good).

The film also has the fortune to have come quite early in Toho's kaiju sequence, affording it an obviously high budget and a certain sense of unpredictability of the proceedings.

Rodan has a feeling of freshness about it. Nobody behind the camera had already made a dozen films of the same type, and everybody was at the top of his game, making something new and exciting here. Honda's direction is as meticulous as always with tighter pacing than in many of his later films. Honda also shows a subtle sense for smaller gestures made by the actors, something that you can in fact always find in his films, if you are willing to look for it.

The actors don't have all that much to do, of course, but everyone on screen is more than able to make her or his character credible.

That Tsuburaya's special effects are splendid and Ifukube's music excellent barely needs to be mentioned.

The only thing I find myself able to criticize about Rodan is the film's lack of depth when compared to the original Gojira, but complaining about this seems to me rather like someone complaining that the diamond he got as a present just isn't big enough.

 

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