Rodan

Rodan (1956)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

This is a milestone: Toho's first daikaiju movie in glorious colour! It’s not the first to be filmed in the “Tohoscope” widescreen format – that’ll be The Three Treasures (1959) or, if that’s not monstery enough for you, Mothra (1961).

Rodan opens with a couple of mining company employees talking about global warming and polar ice melting (in 1956!), just before one of the mine shafts in the vicinity of Mt Aso is reported as flooded. Not all the miners make it out safely – a couple of bodies are recovered, but they didn’t drown. The deaths are initially blamed on a miner who was earlier seen fighting with one of the victims and has disappeared, which leads to some juicy human drama between the surviving family and colleagues. The coroner is at a loss over the victims’ wounds, which seem to have been inflicted by a large, sharp blade of some kind. The descriptions of the bodies, and what we see of them, are surprisingly gruesome. More deaths, of miners and of the investigating police officers, follow. We, the viewers, know that they’ve been attacked by an unseen creature that makes bleeping, chittering sounds.

Shigeru, a young mine engineer, is engaged to Kiyo, the sister of the suspected murderer. He goes round to her house to comfort her after she’s verbally assaulted by the wives of the dead miners. Suddenly an enormous insectoid creature bursts into the house and forces them to flee. The police and miners chase the creature back to the mineshaft, where they sustain further casualties and find the missing miner’s body. It’s now clear to all that the creatures – the mineshaft is crawling with them – were responsible for the deaths. Shigeru is trapped by a cave-in and the others run for the surface, fearing an earthquake.

The next day, the paleontologist Dr Kashiwagi is called in. (Why they’ve chosen to consult a paleontologist, I don’t know, but as it turns out it’s a lucky call.) He identifies the creature as a kind of prehistoric giant dragonfly nymph which he calls Meganulon. (Insects of the genus Meganeura lived during the Carboniferous Period, roughly 300 million years ago – Dr Kashiwagi erroneously suggests they were around 20 million years ago.) The Meganulons are a bit larger than human size, with long, segmented bodies and tails, large mandibles and claws. Although Dr Kashiwagi believes them to be larvae, they also have the compound eyes and six legs of adult insects. They're not vulnerable to gunfire, but a train of full coal wagons runs one over quite effectively.

At this point there’s another earthquake, and an amnesiac Shigeru is found wandering above ground. Meanwhile, something bursts out of the ground at Mt Aso, tussling with JASDF planes and causing UFO sightings over Beijing, Manila and Tokyo. It would be easy to suppose that this is an adult Meganulon, but in fact we never see one of those. Photographic and witness evidence eventually convinces Dr Kashiwagi that it’s some kind of prehistoric flying reptile. He names the new creature Radon, although in English this becomes Rodan.

Rodan is a large, leathery, winged creature resembling a pterosaur. (Allegedly a pteranodon, hence the name (pte)RA(no)DON, but Rodan shows the characteristics of a pterodactyl. Pteranodons had large crests on their heads while pterodactyls had skulls with no crests. The newly hatched Rodan shows a flat head with the stubs of two horns, and in adulthood these become two long swept-back horns that might conceivably be mistaken for a crest. Pterodactyls had teeth in their beak and pteranodons didn't – Rodan has teeth.)

We see a mating pair of Rodans in this film. They mature rapidly. Shigeru's amnesia has been triggered by the shock of seeing one hatch – we're not explicitly told how long his amnesia lasts, but it feels like no more than a few days, and by that time the fully grown Rodans are terrorising the JASDF. They eat Meganulons, cows and people. They can fly 1.5 times the speed of a JASDF fighter, fast enough to produce a sonic boom. Even when flying at slower speeds, their wake is powerful enough to bend and destroy a metal bridge over a river. They can also cause destructive winds by flapping their wings. Like the Meganulons, they're impervious to conventional weapons.

The JSDF develops a plan to defeat the Rodans by proxy, by shelling Mt Aso to provoke a volcanic eruption and destroy the creatures’ nest with lava. The mining town is evacuated and the plan enacted when the adult Rodans are present. It turns out that they’re not impervious to lava. Presumably the subterranean Meganulons are also destroyed, if they haven’t all been eaten by the Rodans, but we’re not explicitly told their fate.

Let’s get the mundane stuff out of the way first. Nice to see Hirata Akihiko, who played the doomed Dr Serizawa in Godzilla (1954), playing another scientist as Dr Kashiwagi. This time, he isn’t wearing an eyepatch. The youthful hero Shigeru is played by Sahara Kenji, another one to watch out for.

The second half of the film, featuring the kaiju who’s actually named in the title, is fine, but I prefer the first half. The first scene of a Meganulon attack is extremely effective. The creatures remain unseen, we just hear their bleeps/chitters and see members of the search party pulled under the water in the flooded mine. Their noises owe something, I think, to the giant ants in Them! (1954), although the Meganulon costumes worn by stunt actors look a lot better than the puppet ants in the American movie. The sudden appearance of one at Kiyo's house, even though it immediately shows us the full costume, is no less effective thanks to its shock value. The mountainside confrontation that follows is also well staged.

This film feels like two ideas welded together: the creeping horror at the Mt Aso mine and the slambang military campaign against the two Rodans. The first gives way abruptly to the second and is soon forgotten, barring Shigeru's discovery of the Rodan egg hatching among the Meganulons, which we see in a luridly coloured flashback. Yet it doesn't seem there's enough meat in the Rodan story, so it has to be padded out with lengthy scenes of explosions. The JSDF bombardment of the Rodans' nesting site at Mt Aso goes on for what feels like forever, including the same shot of a missile being launched over and over again. Then there's another abrupt shift at the end into pathos as everyone stands around silently mourning the deaths of the Rodans, which appear to dive resignedly into the lava after their nest is destroyed. This is quite a disjointed movie.

The style overall is somewhat in line with America’s creature features. The monsters are explicitly prehistoric animals (or at least, based on them), members of a species and not named individuals. In later daikaiju eiga, Rodan will be the proper name of an entity who appears in crossovers with Godzilla. Those lone monsters are more prone to being reinterpreted as something supernatural, perhaps kami or embodiments of some incomprehensible force. Here, the Rodans are just big pest animals, and the military succeed in corralling them and blowing them up. Perhaps Rodan owes more to Them! than might first appear.

There's some talk among fans that Rodan's impact on Tokyo is meant to call to mind the aerial assaults and fire-bombing of the Second World War. (At one point, Dr Kashiwagi also suggests the Rodans and Meganulons might have been revived by nuclear testing, but that comes out of nowhere and really feels like the writers just threw it in to cover all the bases. As noted in the plot summary, the Japanese name of the creature, Radon, derives from the word “pteranodon” and has nothing to do with the radioactive element.) In the context of the film, it's only one brief scene and, as far as the effects of Rodan's sonic boom flying and wing flapping are concerned, it looks more like a hurricane or a tsunami. Between this, the opening conversation about climate change, the flooding and earthquakes at the mine and the JSDF's bombardment of Mt Aso causing a small volcanic eruption, it looks like this film might be more about natural disasters and the dangers of life as a miner than about warfare or nuclear tests.

Godzilla Raids Again

Godzilla Raids Again (1955)
Toho Studios
Directors: Oda Motoyoshi, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Not also discussed: Gigantis, the Fire Monster (1959). Again, we’ll come back to that another time.

The film opens with a Godzilla roar over the title, so there can be no doubt of what/who it's about. We then pass from the credits into a lovely peaceful scene of Tsukioka's seaplane scouting for fish off the coast of Osaka. Tsukioka is a spotter working for a tuna fishery and canning factory. He rescues his colleague Kobayashi, whose engine has stopped and has made an emergency landing at Iwato Island. While waiting on the island, the two witness a fight between Anguirus and Godzilla, which ends when the two monsters topple into the ocean. The two later identify Anguirus from a textbook about dinosaurs at a meeting at the Osaka police HQ. Also present at the meeting are the zoologist who owns the textbook and special guest Dr Yamane from Tokyo.

Anguirus is explicitly identified as an Ankylosaurus. The zoologist who helps the film's heroes to identify the creature claims up front that Anguirus is an alternative scientific name for the prehistoric beast. (Some English-language dubs, reference texts and such call him "Angilas", which is a little nearer to the dinosaur name. “Anguirus” is the name Toho currently use in their English-language marketing.) According to the textbook he's territorial, has fast reactions and should be between 150 and 200 feet in length. He supposedly lived 70 to 150 million years ago, and the zoologist claims Godzilla originates from that time period too. Anguirus is a lot spinier than his Cretaceous era counterpart is believed to have been – reconstructions of Ankylosaurus look something like an armadillo, whereas Anguirus has huge armoured quills sticking out all over his back and a fan of horns on his head.

Yamane tells those assembled that there’s no way to defeat Godzilla, then shows them some silent footage of Godzilla's rampage through Tokyo. (It’s not entirely clear why he does this – does he just really want to put the shits up them?) He talks about the use and loss of the Oxygen Destroyer, which isn’t available as an option to defeat this Godzilla since its creator destroyed all his notes and took his own life. Since the original Godzilla was successfully killed with the Oxygen Destroyer, this must be a second Godzilla. The possibility that larger numbers of Godzillas may have been created/awoken by the Pacific nuclear tests is not dwelt on, and to date we've never seen two adult Godzillas in the same film. Subsequent Shōwa era Godzilla movies will treat Godzilla as if he’s the same one seen here.

Yamane hypothesises that Godzilla could be lured away from populated areas with flares, because he's attracted by bright lights, perhaps because they remind him of the nuclear tests. (Which sounds bizarre, but what would I know, I’m not a fictional scientist.) The flare plan works when Godzilla is about to make landfall at Osaka Bay halfway through the film. Unfortunately, an attempted prison break during the blackout ends with an explosion at a refinery, and the blast and light brings Godzilla right back in, along with Anguirus. Anguirus puts up a good fight, but Godzilla kills him by biting out the back of his neck and setting him on fire with his radioactive breath.

Godzilla looks broadly similar to his 1954 relative, but he needs to visit the giant dentist - his teeth are far too big for his mouth and jut out all over the place. He has larger, more angular ears, giving his head a wider, flatter appearance than before. His radioactive breath still manifests as a sort of mist; here it causes fighter planes to explode on contact, but it also seems to act like a kind of napalm when Godzilla exhales over Anguirus' corpse.

With Osaka's dockside area in ruins, the staff of the fishing company are transferred to the Hokkaido branch. Godzilla turns up there too, sinking one of the fishing company's ships. (This isn’t played as another echo of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident, just another affront by Godzilla. He’s going to sink an awful lot of ships in the decades after this, and they can’t all be topical references.) It's now we learn Tsukioka and Kobayashi are veterans of the same flying corps as some of their old school friends, who've arrived with a detachment of the Japan Self-Defence Forces (both ground troops and members of the new air force, the JASDF) to contain Godzilla. The commander of the aerial squadron is their old friend Tajima, who is surprisingly willing to let his demobbed pal Tsukioka fly shotgun in his jet, and later even fly a jet on his own.

The two spotter pilots find Godzilla on Kamiko Island, which sports a range of icy mountains that's surprising in such a small Pacific island. (Perhaps it's just an iceberg with pretensions.) While trying to stop Godzilla wandering off before the JASDF can arrive, Kobayashi dive-bombs a little too close – his plane is winged and he crashes into a mountain, starting a small avalanche. This gives Tsukioka the idea of deliberately burying Godzilla under ice. The jet pilots go back to re-arm with rockets while their JSDF colleagues pen Godzilla in with burning oil barrels, then return to finish the job.

So if Godzilla (1954) is the nightmare replay of the Second World War in Japan, this is the wish fulfilment version – the armed forces ride back in, turn things around and immobilise their foe. I think it’s the only time a movie has ever ended with the Japan Self-Defence Forces successfully defeating Godzilla. And this does look a little bit like a showcase for the new air force, the JASDF, which had been formed in July 1954 and kitted out with shiny jet planes licensed from North American Aviation by Mitsubishi. The ending is poignant rather than triumphalist due to the death of Kobayashi (to say nothing of several unnamed JASDF pilots), but then again the “avenge a fallen comrade” storyline is a popular jingoistic ploy in war movies, and this isn’t far removed from that genre. I wonder how contemporary audiences, Japanese or American, felt about seeing a squadron of Japanese pilots “finishing the job” for their comrades who’d crashed in action.

Overall, this film has more of a personal touch than its predecessor. We get more detail of the characters' lives. We spend time with Tsukioka, his buddy Kobayashi and his girlfriend Hidemi the radio operator. We see them relaxing at a nightclub in Osaka, drinking sake with the boss in Hokkaido, hanging around in the office. I assume the detail of former wartime pilots taking on civilian jobs like tuna spotting is true to life, and the mid-film reveal of their connection to their friends in active service in the JSDF doesn’t feel like it comes out of left field. All of this gives the human drama a pleasing sense of authenticity.

The addition of a second monster keeps things fresh, even if poor old Anguirus only makes it halfway through the movie. Already the filmmakers are setting the template of Godzilla vs Something that will come to define the franchise. The special effects are again pretty good – the composite shots of the spotter pilots witnessing the first monster tussle on Iwato Island, shot from the ground up for extra impact, are outstanding. But Tsuburaya doesn’t yet seem to have settled on the trick of overcranking the camera to add weight to the monster shots, so they don’t look ponderous enough for their size.

Now’s a good time to start playing Spot the Actor. With so many of these movies being made by Toho, and with Toho employing actors on the same sort of “repertory theatre” system that used to be common in Hollywood, kaiju fans can expect to see some faces crop up in film after film. (A familiar game to fans of 1970s Doctor Who, in which every castle, secret military installation and alien embassy seems to be guarded by diminutive stuntman Stuart Fell and there’s roughly a 20% chance that one of the villains will be played by Michael Wisher or Frederick Jaeger.) Shimura Takashi returns here as Dr Yamane, but that’s a straightforward reprise from the previous film – we’ll see a lot more of him in other roles. This film marks the blog's first encounter with Koizumi Hiroshi, playing the hero role of Tsukioka, and he’ll pop up again in a variety of sympathetic roles in subsequent films. And the fighter pilot Tajima is played by Tsuchiya Yoshio, later to star in a handful of movies about mutated super-criminals as well as several other kaiju movies.

Although the conversation about US re-edits that differ significantly from their source films is one for another day, I should just quickly note the four-year delay in getting Godzilla Raids Again into American cinemas, and under a disorientingly different name. Toho had sold the US rights to Godzilla to Jewell Enterprises, who had quickly turned around Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) for distribution by Trans World Releasing Corp and Embassy Pictures. For whatever reason, they offered Godzilla Raids Again to another film company, American Broadcasting-Paramount Theatres (AB-PT), who ran into financial difficulties before their version of the movie could be produced. Producer Paul Schreibman bought the rights a little later, and naturally decided against putting out something that was obviously a sequel to an Embassy Pictures movie, so all references to Godzilla were removed and the daikaiju’s name was changed to Gigantis. Schreibman then sold the film on to Warner Brothers for distribution. It was this set of circumstances, and not any anxiety over the militaristic aspects of the movie, that caused the delay and the change of studio.

Godzilla

Godzilla (1954)
Toho Studios
Directors: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

Also discussed: The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). Or, to give it its full title from the cinematic trailer: The Beast, the Beast, the Beast, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms!

Not also discussed: Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956). Bear with me, we’ll come back to that another time. This post will refer to a specific additional source, however: Jeffrey Angles' 2023 translation, with afterword, of Kayama Shigeru's 1955 novelisations of his scripts for the first two Godzilla movies.

Picture it: Sicily, 1922.

I'm sorry, I was briefly possessed by the spirit of Estelle Getty there. Let's try that again.

Picture it: Tokyo, 1954. Two years since the post-war American occupation of Japan ended, except for Iwo Jima and Okinawa which the United States would hold onto for another decade and a half, plus all the US troops still stationed in Japan. The Japanese public's relationship with all things American was... complicated. On the one hand, resentment over the occupation and the terms under which it officially ended continued to boil over into large public protests. On the other, the imposition of a new political constitution and the inevitable influence of all those American troops wandering around had liberalised Japanese society a bit, at least compared to what had gone before. I think it's fair to say some Japanese were happy to see the back of the military regime that had dragged their nation through World War Two, notwithstanding the circumstances.

On the third hand, Japanese interest in American culture wasn't a new thing. It might be possible to chart an increase in American influence in Japanese cinema and, through that, Japanese fashions and lifestyles post-1945, although that's outside the scope of this blog. But one thing I can confidently state is that King Kong (1933) had made a huge impact on Japanese cinema audiences and filmmakers - local imitations such as Japanese King Kong (1933) and King Kong Appears in Edo (1938) had quickly followed, and the RKO original had enjoyed a re-release in Japan in 1953. So that's one of three important factors in the development of Godzilla, Toho's surprise hit of 1954.

The second is that Toho Studios producer Tanaka Tomoyuki had just had a film fall through and needed a quick replacement. He’d been expecting to work on a historical drama shot overseas and co-produced with an Indonesian company, but they’d backed out under public pressure because of ill feeling over Japan’s wartime actions in the area. He’d had a wasted journey to Jakarta to try to change the Indonesian producers’ minds. On the flight back, he thought of capitalising on the popularity of Kong and came up with a proposal that also took in some of the flavour of another hit monster movie, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). The Beast hadn’t been released in Japan, but some details of the movie and its success in America were known through the film trade press. Tanaka’s outline revolved around a similar core concept: a reptilian behemoth brought out of hiding by nuclear tests, attacking ships and wading ashore to cause havoc on land.

The third important factor is The Bomb. America had taken control of the Marshall Islands, formerly occupied by Imperial Japan, during the course of the Second World War. They were formally put in charge in July 1947, as administrator of the United Nations' Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, but a full year earlier they’d already tested nuclear weapons on Bikini Atoll. These were plutonium fission implosion devices of a type similar to the one dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. In March 1954, the US Army went back to Bikini Atoll to test a new variety of two-stage, fusion-fission thermonuclear weapon that employed a combination of heavy hydrogen isotopes and uranium. The test exceeded expectations: the Castle Bravo explosion was measured at 15 megatons, two and a half times the expected yield, lighting up the sky 250 miles away and contaminating more than 7,000 square miles of the surrounding area. A Japanese fishing boat called Daigo Fukuryū Maru (“Lucky Dragon Number Five” – the “Maru” suffix just indicates that it’s a ship’s name) was fishing for tuna 40 miles outside the anticipated danger zone, but was one of several fishing vessels to be showered with radioactive fallout. By the time the boat returned to port two weeks later, the crew were showing severe signs of radiation sickness; one crewman died later that year.

The incident caused an international scandal and was the subject of Shindō Kaneto's biopic film Daigo Fukuryū Maru (1959). By the time that came out, the administrator of the United Nations' Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands had carried out two further series of nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, in 1956 and 1958. But let’s turn our attention back to 1954.

Tanaka, formulating the idea for a movie with some superficial similarities to the atomic-era cautionary tale The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, commissioned a script treatment from Kayama Shigeru, one of Japan's most popular science fiction authors. Kayama wove this topical bit of news about nuclear testing into his script. Directors Honda (overall/live action) and Tsuburaya (special effects) were brought on board. Honda had strong pacifist leanings and turned the script into something more about and against the war and its aftermath. Tsuburaya was a firm Kong fan and was keen to make a stop-motion monster movie, but that would have been impossible in the time available to him, so Godzilla was instead realised through a combination of miniature models, puppetry and stunt actor Nakajima Haruo wearing a monster costume. Thus a legend was born.

The story opens in the Pacific waters near the fictional Ōdo Island. In rapid succession, the cargo ship Eiko Maru, the rescue vessel Bingo Maru and a local fishing boat are destroyed in a blinding flash of light. The islanders blame the disasters on the folkloric sea creature Godzilla, and shortly after their whole village is flattened during a storm. The paleontologist Dr Yamane visits the island and discovers a gigantic animal footprint, along with a prehistoric trilobite and a high dosage of radioactivity. As if these clues weren’t enough, Godzilla himself appears over the brow of a nearby hill.

(Google Translate suggests, and Jeffrey Angles' afterword to Kayama's novelisation of Godzilla confirms, that the name of Ōdo Island can be rendered in English as "Big Door Island", making it quite literally the portal through which Godzilla enters our world.)

Godzilla is a large dinosaur-like creature. He walks upright, like a Tyrannosaur but with proportionally longer arms (or like a man in a costume!). He has a distinctive line of plates down the length of his spine, with something of the shape of a sycamore leaf about them. He towers similarly over the hill on Ōdo Island and over the National Diet Building in Tokyo, which gives some idea of his size.

(It seems to be a generally accepted convention that all daikaiju, barring a very few exceptions, are referred to as "he". This will be worth considering in more depth in a later blog entry. Suffice here to say that it often leads to rarely answered questions about the social and reproductive habits of daikaiju. Angles confirms that gendering of this kind isn't required in Japanese, and that it doesn't happen in Kayama's Godzilla script. That's not to say that it doesn't happen in any other kaiju movies - sometimes it's clearly stated, but mostly I'm unable to tell because I don't have the necessary linguistic skills. I suspect the general bias might be down to the choices of the people who scripted the US dubs of these movies, and probably following the precedent set by the male Kong.)

Dr Yamane theorises that Godzilla is a prehistoric creature who’s been driven from his underwater home by the hydrogen bomb test. The government is convinced to reveal his existence to the public, which causes panic across Japan. The government are keen to find a way to protect Japan by killing Godzilla, to the distress of Dr Yamane who wants to study him. Godzilla wades out of Tokyo Bay several times, causing increasing damage and venturing ever further inland. He is undeterred by depth charges, a high voltage electric fence, conventional artillery and missiles. He also reveals the alarming ability to exhale a radioactive mist at will, which he uses to melt the high voltage pylons and to level central Tokyo. (His dorsal plates light up when he does this.) His attack leaves thousands dead and the city in ruins.

As luck would have it, one of Dr Yamane’s associates, the chemist Dr Serizawa, has made a discovery that could save the day. Dr Yamane hopes that his daughter Emiko will marry Serizawa, but she’s secretly engaged to Ogata Hideto, who works for a salvage company. Emiko and Ogata confront Serizawa and persuade him to use his invention, the Oxygen Destroyer, against Godzilla. The Oxygen Destroyer attacks the oxygen atoms in water, dissolving any living matter around it. Serizawa is horrified by his discovery’s destructive capabilities and its potential as a weapon, and fears that if it were more widely understood, it could lead to an arms race that would leave the oceans ruined. To prevent this, he agrees to oversee the use of his device against Godzilla but destroys his research.

The mission is a success: Godzilla is found napping underwater in the bay, and a team supervised by Serizawa dives to plant the Oxygen Destroyer next to him. Serizawa contrives to remain on the sea floor with Godzilla as the device goes off, thus ensuring that he won’t be made to create another one. Just to cast a final downer on the proceedings, Dr Yamane speculates that the continued nuclear tests will probably rouse more creatures like Godzilla.

There’s not much I can add to what’s already been said about Godzilla. Its roots in the topical plight of the crew of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru are plainly shown in the opening scenes of ships blasted with light and the surviving fisherman in hospital raving about what he’s seen. Contemporary critics found this tasteless – one of the crewmen of the Daigo Fukuryū Maru had died between the film’s production and its release, and there was a more general concern about playing on the public anxieties over nuclear testing. Nonetheless, the film was a success. Naturally there was a reflex sequel, which we’ll look at next week.

As far as commenting on nuclear testing is concerned, both Godzilla and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms go there but I think the way Godzilla does it is fundamentally more honest. In The Beast, we see an American team carrying out the test that awakens the titular threat, but it’s being conducted safely away in an uninhabited part of the Arctic circle, and it’s easy for the characters to feel remorse for their part in the nuclear arms race when the monster they’ve unleashed devastates their own homeland. Godzilla comes right out and says: the American tests are happening on our doorstep, and they have a human cost that the Americans won’t feel. (What it doesn’t add is any mention of the Marshall Islanders themselves, whose story is a harrowing one.)

Judging by the example of Dr Serizawa’s sacrifice, the makers of Godzilla also had something pretty pointed to say about how they thought the fathers of the atomic bomb ought to feel.

What I don’t recall seeing anyone else mention before is the very specific imagery of the Oxygen Destroyer as a fantasy super-version of the hydrogen bomb. Like the bomb, it has a spherical chamber inside a larger casing (transparent in this case, so we can see the sphere inside it), but instead of imploding on a payload of fissile material when it’s detonated, the two halves of the Oxygen Destroyer’s inner sphere pop apart. And instead of triggering that implosion with a fusion reaction of isotopic hydrogen, it targets oxygen – the other atomic component of water – and tears it apart. It’s actually a kind of Opposites Day H-Bomb. I find this striking.

The imagery of Godzilla’s assault on Tokyo has some further resonance with Japan’s experience of being firebombed during the Second World War, and the film doesn’t stint on the trauma in showing the survivors cowering during the attack and huddled in makeshift hospitals afterwards. With the exception of Godzilla Minus One (2023), I can’t think of another Godzilla movie that’s presented scenes quite this grim.

King Kong

King Kong (1933)
RKO Radio Pictures
Directors: Merian C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack (effects by Willis H O’Brien)

Also discussed: Son of Kong (1933), Mighty Joe Young (1949).

The word “classic” is a loaded one, isn’t it? In the mouths of most cinephiles and film pundits, it means something a cut above, something iconic, something imbued with a gloss of quality that has stood the test of time. King Kong is certainly that. (Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a revisionist take-down of a beloved film.)

In another sense, and I’m thinking particularly of the field of literature, it can mean a text that everyone is supposed to have read, or feels they ought to have read, but that many haven’t. Something that’s gained a kind of authority through seniority, but that younger generations don’t have a natural connection to. I think that can be true of film, and it might be true of the 1933 Kong. Other Kongs are available, and anyway Kong has long since escaped the bounds of his own film and become part of the cultural furniture. So a recap of the plot of this extremely well-known film might not go amiss.

Ann Darrow is an actress in New York who has fallen on hard times. (What no one’s saying out loud, but must have been on the minds of everyone who scraped together the ticket money to see the film, is that we’re in the fourth year of a global economic depression. Apple-stealing Ann must have been quite a relatable everyman protagonist.) She’s offered a job by Carl Denham, an eccentric filmmaker who – rather like directors Cooper and Schoedsack – likes sailing off to exotic climes and filming the wildlife. He charters a ship to take him and his new star to a little-known island near Indonesia whose inhabitants have supposedly built a gigantic wall to contain a mysterious being called Kong. (Although the island features a “Skull Mountain”, it isn’t yet known as “Skull Island”. That’ll come later, with the remakes and the tie-ins.)

The travellers find the island as expected, with its tribal people and its huge, gated wall. The local chief offers to buy Ann from the Americans so that she can take centre stage in a ceremony to appease Kong; that doesn’t go down well, so he has her kidnapped instead. Her rescuers arrive just in time to see Kong appear and take Ann away into the jungle.

Kong is an enormous ape, about 15 metres tall, a bit like a gorilla but with quite stumpy legs and a narrow, bony head. He has a very expressive face and is obviously infatuated with Ann, despite the size difference. He seems to be the only outsized simian on the island, and apart from the local tribe throwing parties for him, he’s clearly starved of company. Other strange animals abound, but mostly dinosaurs – the odd thing there isn’t their size, but their survival at least 65 million years after they supposedly all died out. It’s also not clear how they’ve survived as species when we see so few of them, but that’s true of Kong too. The only other unusually large animals we see are a carrion bird and, in a famous cut scene, a pit full of insects and other creepy-crawlies.

Denham and the sailors endure a series of adventures but manage to rescue Ann and flee back to the ship. When Kong pursues them through the jungle – and the village – Denham, who’s obviously planned ahead, ambushes him with knockout gas and has him chained to a raft so that he can be shipped back to America. In a career shift from filmmaker to theatre impresario, Denham plans to exhibit Kong to audiences in New York and rake in the cash.

Things go wrong on the first night when the press dazzle Kong with their camera flashbulbs; in a frenzy, he breaks out of his restraints and goes on a rampage through the city. He finds Ann and carries her to the highest vantage point, the top of the Empire State Building. Army biplanes are called in to shoot him down. Ann is left safely on the roof of the building, but Kong falls to his death, where an unrepentant Denham delivers a final quip over his corpse.

King Kong has its roots in the wildlife travelogues and ethnographic features made by its directors and others like them for the wide-eyed entertainment of American audiences after the First World War. It’s just... bigger, and more obviously fictional. Cooper and Schoedsack had at least been overseas and brought back genuine footage for their earlier features, notwithstanding they framed it with actors and scripted narratives. Others, like the makers of the infamous Ingagi (1930), were less scrupulous, producing schlocky, racist “documentaries” that suggested bestial relations between blacked-up women and men in gorilla suits filmed on an American studio backlot. There’s undeniably an echo of that in Kong’s pursuit of Ann, although here it’s played as a larger-than-life doomed romance, which I think does much to soften it.

The visible unreality of the special effects also helps to reinforce the fantasy nature of the film, but let’s just take a moment to appreciate those effects. (And maybe at some point I’ll take a moment to share my thoughts on just what “realism” in fictional media is worth anyway.) Willis O’Brien’s stop-motion Kong is great, a monster both destructive and sympathetic. His expressiveness makes the melodrama work. And the compositing of the effects is tremendous – the scene of Kong rolling sailors off a log to their doom (or, in the cut scene, into a pit full of lethal giant bugs) is sensational. It’d be contrary of me to suggest that 90-year-old special effects haven’t been bettered since, but at least they stand up well enough.

According to an interview cited on Wikipedia, Cooper rejected any suggestion that King Kong might be taken as some sort of racial commentary in the manner of the exploitation flicks. His intention, in juxtaposing Kong with the audience’s familiar world of skyscrapers and biplanes, was apparently to tell a tale of “the primitive doomed by modern civilization”. While this choice of phrasing isn’t great, the idea of King Kong as a lament for nature overtaken by human industry appeals to me, and would chime nicely with quite a few other giant monster movies.

Besides, the film doesn’t portray America in 1933 as unconditionally better than Kong’s world. Again, bear in mind that this was economically a miserable time for the industrialised world, so the audience wouldn’t necessarily consider New York the more desirable of the film’s two destinations. The juxtaposition of New York and Kong’s island invites comparison (something the 2005 Peter Jackson remake takes a lot further).

And while Carl Denham – who looks suspiciously like a self-insert by Merian Cooper, who co-drafted the story – might have been intended to be a lovable rogue, he’s not the hero. (That would be either Ann Darrow or First Mate and love interest Jack Driscoll, if we insist on a human hero, but it’s actually more likely to be the tragic figure of Kong himself). When told that the planes got Kong in the end, Denham ripostes that “it was Beauty killed the Beast”, implying that Kong’s love for Ann was his fatal flaw and turning the whole thing into an inevitable fairytale tragedy. This neatly sidesteps the fact that, in reality, it was Denham killed the Beast. Kong’s death, the untold loss of life and damage to property in New York and the enormous counselling bills Ann is going to rack up would never have happened if Carl Bloody Denham hadn’t hunted and captured Kong and displaced him for the sake of other people’s entertainment to begin with. We should have been tipped off to Denham by the obvious parallel with the island chief, who also wanted to buy Ann’s participation as a sacrificial damsel in a staged performance. (Which makes the recipient of the performance, Kong, a monstrous mirror for Denham’s audience... and us?)

I think it’d be a step too far to suggest that the character of Denham was meant to be a comment on the trouble thoughtless entrepreneurs can cause. Even now, the jury’s out on what the root cause of the Great Depression was – I don’t suppose people at the time were blaming freelance film directors for it. Still though, I wonder if contemporary audiences felt a frisson at the spectacle of this amoral man exploiting Kong and Ann in pursuit of a fast buck, then turning his back on the fallout.

Back to those planes. In just about all the American monster movies that followed this, particularly in the 50s wave of creature features, the American armed forces are the heroes and the whole purpose of the exercise is boosting them in the public eye. The monster is there to provide something large and dangerous for the military to shoot at for an hour and a half, and its death is meant to reassure the American public that guns, tanks and planes will keep them safe. That’s not the case here. Kong, too, is shot down by Army biplanes, but it's presented as a tragedy rather than a military triumph. It's a compounding of Denham's error, injury on top of insult.

Kong himself, for all that he bridged the gap between the stop-motion dinosaurs that preceded him (including many created by Willis O’Brien) and the stranger creatures that came after, doesn’t fit the same pattern as The Deadly Mantis or The Giant Claw (both 1957). He isn't an aggressive invading force, he's just a gigantic ape who wants to go about his business without being kidnapped, shipped across the ocean and exploited. (He is, ironically, the “little guy”.) He has more in common with the antagonists of Universal Pictures' monster movies: he has his own unique personality, including a proper name, which is more than the Mantis or the Claw can boast. Those other creatures rarely feel like characters at all, but Kong is a headline act on a par with Dracula or Frankenstein’s Creature, and he doesn't just dominate the title but the whole film. And yet, unlike Universal’s monsters, Kong doesn’t have his roots in Gothic literature or folklore – he’s part of the natural world, albeit oversized, which puts him back in line with the dinosaurs and the giant bugs. He’s a hard one to place.

Because King Kong was a huge success, there was of course a reflex sequel. It’s hard to believe Son of Kong (1933) came out in the same year as the parent movie, given how painstakingly slow stop-motion animation is, but they made it happen. A few of the actors reprise their roles: Robert Armstrong as Denham, the ship’s captain and cook, a couple of the islanders. Son of Kong presents a warmer, softer story than King Kong, and this time Denham actually is the hero, trying to redeem his earlier behaviour and becoming the romantic male lead.

Denham’s facing bankruptcy after being held accountable for the events of King Kong (ha, Schadenfreude!) and the ship’s captain who brought Kong to New York isn’t too popular either, so they take the ship and become itinerant cargo haulers in Asian waters. At a Dutch-controlled port, they meet Denham’s future love interest and, in a surprising twist, the Norwegian sailor who first sold Denham the map of Kong’s island. (The port’s called Dakang, which doesn’t exist in the real world, but the name suggests it’s somewhere in what used to be the Dutch East Indies.) The sailor claims there’s an ancient treasure on the island, so back to the island they go.

There they encounter another giant ape, albino and only about twice as tall as a person, which Denham decides (on rather scant evidence) must be Kong’s son. He dubs him “Little Kong” and repeatedly helps him out or openly apologises to him to make up for what he did to Kong. Little Kong is friendlier than his dad and protective of the humans for more apparently altruistic reasons (there’s no suggestion that he lusts after Denham, for instance). More adventures with stop-motion dinosaurs ensue, then a massive earthquake sinks the island. Little Kong bravely gives his life to save Denham, who has in fact found the ancient treasure and plans to split the proceeds with his crew and his future wife.

Son of Kong is less fondly remembered than King Kong.

Some little while later, RKO brought out Mighty Joe Young (1949), a fantasy caper about a gorilla of roughly the same size and temperament as Little Kong who is brought to America (from a settled home in Tanganyika, this time) to perform in a Hollywood nightclub, goes on a rampage when some drunken customers upset him but ends up heroically helping to clear a burning building. Yet again Robert Armstrong features as the entrepreneur responsible for putting the ape on the stage and again Cooper and Schoedsack direct. The film’s notable for featuring the first professional stop-motion effects of Ray Harryhausen, working under the supervision of his hero Willis O’Brien and somehow delivering an even more expressive ape. In Germany, it’s known by the title Panik um King Kong, just in case the reprise wasn’t obvious enough.

Kong himself has appeared in a couple of remakes of the original film, which this blog won’t trouble itself with, and an assortment of other, stranger movies, of which we will hear more anon.

Massive Organisms Approaching

Welcome, whoever you are, to this blog about giant monster movies.

Once a week over the course of 2024, in chronological order of cinematic release, I’ll post something about a movie, or occasionally about more than one. The blog won’t be exhaustive, by any means, although I do intend to cover all the Japanese Godzilla movies. Why? Because it’s the 70th anniversary year of Godzilla (1954), of course!

Up front, let’s clarify what this blog is and is not. It’s not about reviewing the movies (or not only that) – I’m not interested in rating and ranking them. I am interested in laying out my thoughts on them and hopefully sharing some of what excites me about them.

Why this? Why giant monster movies? I realise no one’s likely to think of them as High Art (barring, possibly and only on public holidays, the original King Kong (1933) and Godzilla (1954)), but what does High Art really tell us? High Art, in any medium, is rarely anything more than a way for middle-class people to show off to other middle-class people how clever they are. Pop culture actually tells us something about the world in which it was made. The creators are rarely expounding their grand vision at their leisure and are more likely struggling to churn out something entertaining on a budget and to a deadline. They might put in some intended socio-political message, but they’re as likely or more likely to reflect the prevailing mood without thinking about it, which makes their work a more useful socio-political document.

Taken out of the context of their time and source culture, pop cultural works can still be fascinating – intriguing in their strangeness to the viewer’s eyes. They might give us a mind-broadening glimpse into another society. (Equally, of course, they might exhibit attitudes and behaviours we wouldn’t find acceptable in our own society or time, or they might be reinterpreted in unintended new ways.) With a bit of effort, we can learn more about the works and the context within which they were made and maybe understand them a little better.

Not that I’m promising to do that for you, you understand. I just like watching giant monster movies and now I’m hoping to like writing about them. And you know, sometimes it’s just soothing to watch an actor in a rubber lizard costume trampling all over a tiny model city.

Most of the movies under discussion in this blog are Japanese, and will be known under English titles quite different from their original Japanese titles. The majority of them were produced by Toho Studios, and fortunately we know exactly what we should call those ones because Toho have clearly stated the titles under which they would prefer their films to be distributed in Anglophone markets. Those are the titles I’ll be using. I’ll be noting some of the alternative English titles they’ve been given by American distribution companies, but for the most part I won’t use those. For non-Toho, non-Anglophone movies, I’ll use what I think are the correct English titles.

I’m going to assume some familiarity on your part with the genre, but not too much. I imagine you’ll know the Japanese word kaiju (weird creature), or even daikaiju (giant weird creature), but maybe not much more than that. That’s fine – nearly all of the handful of Japanese words I know, I’ve picked up from watching kaiju eiga (monster movies). For the most part, when I make a confident statement about the meaning of a Japanese word or monster name, you can assume I’ve been led by the Kaiju Wiki (wikizilla.org) or by Google Translate (uh oh). I intend to present Japanese names in the Japanese style, family name first (although I might not get it right all the time).

Hopefully you’ll already know the words Shōwa and Heisei – these are formal names for periods in Japan’s history defined by the rule of a particular Emperor, and are also used to refer posthumously to the Emperors themselves. Because of the decline in Japanese genre cinema towards the end of the reign of Hirohito, the Emperor Shōwa, and their reviving fortune during his son’s reign, Japanese kaiju movies fall conveniently into Shōwa era and Heisei era groups. The term “Millennium era” is sometimes used to distinguish the third major wave of Godzilla movies from the Heisei era second wave. Although Akihito’s still alive as I write this, he abdicated in 2019 (so the Heisei era of Japanese history is already over, but Akihito isn’t yet referred to as “Emperor Heisei”). We’re now in the Reiwa era, defined by the reign of Emperor Naruhito, and some fans have taken to referring to a current Reiwa era of kaiju movies.

I imagine you’ll have seen at least the better-known American blockbusters under discussion here, but for convenience I’ll assume you’re not familiar with any specific film or films. It’s often convenient to be able to refer to the plot of a movie when discussing it, so I’ll be including brief summaries in most cases. Warning, therefore: this blog will contain spoilers. If you haven’t seen a particular movie and don’t want the plot spoiled, don’t read that entry. (Or at least, skip past the plot summary section.)

Beside the plot summaries, I’ll be throwing in what I might generously call my own insights or theories. These will be focused more on trying to understand the context around the movie than on the fictional world of the movie, although there might be a bit of that too. Because this is a scratch blog with a breakneck weekly pace, I won’t be rigorously footnoting everything. (I might come back in subsequent years and add in footnotes, but let’s not hold our breath on that.) There are a lot of excellent fan-written non-fiction books out there, and inevitably I’ll repeat some information from those around the production of these films, as well as from wikizilla.org. But rest assured, I have some thoughts of my own about them, and in a couple of cases, I’ve even done a little original online research in trying to place them in their historical context. What would be the point of doing this blog if I didn’t?

Since I’ve mentioned them, and before we go any further, here’s a curated list of relevant books that I’ve found informative, entertaining and useful, and you might too. You may have difficulty finding copies of some of them, but in a pinch there’s always Abebooks.com:

• Carrozza, JL, Japanese Special Effects Cinema: Godfathers of Tokusatsu, vol 1, Orochi Books. 9798986077901.
• Erb, Cynthia, Tracking King Kong: A Hollywood Icon in World Culture, Wayne State University Press. 9780814334300.
• Kalat, David, A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series, McFarland. 9781476672946.
• LeMay, John, The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies, Bicep Books. 9781734154641 (Showa Completion 1954-1989) and 9781734781649 (Heisei Completion 1989-2019).
• Mustachio, Camille DG and Jason Barr (editors), Giant Creatures in Our World: Essays on Kaiju and American Popular Culture, McFarland. 9781476629971.
• Rhoads, Sean and Brooke McCorkle, Japan’s Green Monsters: Environmental Commentary in Kaiju Cinema, McFarland. 9781476631349.
• Ryfle, Steve, Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of “The Big G”, ECW Press. 9781550223484.

---

My fondness for kaiju movies dates back only as far as my 20s, quite late in life by comparison with a lot of other fans. I was certainly exposed to the stop-motion adventure romps of Ray Harryhausen, featuring such notable giant monsters as his Cyclops, Talos and Kraken, and it’s unthinkable that I wouldn’t have seen King Kong at some point in my childhood. But if the dubbed American versions of any of the Godzilla movies were shown on British TV, I don’t recall hearing about them. (I mean, they were, rarely – the old TV listings can be found online to prove it. I just didn’t hear about them.)  I would only have been aware of Godzilla through the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series – which got more than enough airtime in the UK – which means I would have thought of it only as a sort of tame sea monster that guest starred in the adventures of the human characters and their pet Godzooky, whatever the hell that thing was.

So three cheers for the much loathed Tri-Star Godzilla (1998), which spurred a flurry of British interest in the Japanese franchise that preceded it. BBC2 offered Monster Night, an evening’s programming hosted by comedian Bill Bailey that included Godzilla vs King Ghidorah (1991) and the Jeff Bridges King Kong (1976) – I enjoyed watching at least one of those – as well as a new documentary about the Japanese Godzilla. Through the framing gimmick of being set in a seedy gambling den, Monster Night also included monster “fights” that showed off clips from King Kong vs Godzilla (1962), Ebirah, Horror of the Deep (1966) and the bang-up-to-date Gamera, Guardian of the Universe (1995). None of this seems calculated to raise the audience’s interest in the American movie that justified its broadcast, but it was a fair introduction to the kaiju genre.

The local bookshop got in a few copies of Japan’s Favorite Mon-Star, a glossy coffee table paperback by Steve Ryfle that also seemed carefully timed to recruit new fans for the Japanese Godzilla franchise off the back of the American movie. I bought this and was duly amazed to discover how many previous movies there’d been.

Around the same time, 4 Front Video released about half of the Shōwa era Godzilla titles on VHS in the UK, with heavy advertising in genre magazines – I tracked down a couple of those, guided in my selection by the Ryfle book. On subsequent shopping trips, I was pleased to discover VHS copies of Godzilla vs King Ghidorah and Gamera, Guardian of the Universe, released by Manga Entertainment. And a little later again, around Christmas 1999, Channel Four broadcast a handful of movies in the very early hours of the morning under the banner heading “Vidzilla”.

In the decades since, it’s become a lot easier to get your hands on these old movies. (And I’m not talking about dodgy pirate copies – well, not only those. Most of these films can be bought legally, and as a general rule it’s a good idea to support niche home media distributors if you see them taking pre-orders for licensed Blu-ray releases of hard-to-find goodies. If they break even on one, maybe they’ll try again with others.) The market for giant monster movies – old and new, Japanese, American or other – seems to have blossomed in the last ten years or so, no doubt helped by the success of blockbusters like Pacific Rim (2013) and Legendary Pictures’ Godzilla (2014). I was fortunate to move to New Zealand right around the time local distributor Madman Entertainment put out four large Godzilla box sets on DVD – very nearly the full run up to Godzilla: Final Wars (2005), and a little online shopping helped fill the gaps. UK-based Arrow Films have done a sterling job of releasing box sets of other kaiju and kaiju-adjacent movies, and there’s more out there for those who are willing to look for it.

Which is one good reason for creating this blog now. I had planned to do this ten years ago, in time for Godzilla’s 60th anniversary, but ended up too busy with other things. Now seems like a more auspicious time for it, not least because of the tremendous global success of Godzilla Minus One (2023). That, and the increasing availability of his back catalogue, might make Godzilla’s 70th birthday his biggest yet.