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.