King Kong vs Godzilla

King Kong vs Godzilla (1962)
Toho Studios
Director: Honda Ishirō, Tsuburaya Eiji (special effects)

1962 was Toho's 30th birthday, and the company was in a celebratory mood. When Hollywood producer John Beck approached them with a script treatment for a film pitting King Kong against a giant-sized Frankenstein’s monster, unwanted by any studio in America, it must have seemed like an absolute gift. Who in Japan in 1962 didn’t love King Kong (1933)? The Frankenstein part of the concept seems to have been a harder sell (although you haven’t heard the last of it...). In the end, Toho paid RKO for the rights to use the character of Kong but brought him together with their own tribute to Kong, the brawling lizard Godzilla, in a new story scripted by Sekizawa Shinichi, the writer of the previous year’s hit Mothra (1961). King Kong vs Godzilla was the studio’s birthday present to itself and a huge box office success.

The film opens with a segment from a pop science TV programme called World Wonders, which talks about warming in the Arctic Ocean and rising sea levels. The United Nations has sent a team to investigate on board the American nuclear submarine Seahawk.

We cut to the advertising department of Pacific Pharmaceutical, the company that sponsors World Wonders, where marketing director Mr Tako complains about how boring the programme is. When he learns that one of Pacific Pharma’s researchers has returned from Faro Island with a sample of red “soma” berries with narcotic properties and tales of the island’s “giant demon god”, he orders Sakurai and Furue, two of his employees, to travel there and investigate. The company might be able to find a commercial use for the berries, but Tako’s real interest is in the “demon god”, which could generate some sensational media exposure for Pacific Pharma.

(Sidenote 1: The fictional “Faro Island” is not to be confused with the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic – it’s in the South Pacific, about 100km from the Solomon Islands. Since Kong's former home, an island near Indonesia since named as Skull Island, was destroyed at the end of Son of Kong (1933), it seems reasonable to find him on a different island here. In any case, this presumably isn't meant to be the same Kong who fell to his death in the original film. But just how many islands with giant apes are there?)

(Sidenote 2: It’s notable that this film, coming hot on the heels of Mothra and written by the same scriptwriter, also features a red juice with mystical properties found on an isolated Pacific Island. I’ve no idea if this was a topical reference – perhaps a health craze of some kind? – but it’s one of the odder kaiju eiga tropes.)

(Sidenote 3: The fact that, until his first on-screen appearance, Kong is referred to as “demon god” – in Japanese, “Majin” – might give a chuckle to anyone who’s seen the later Daimajin movies (1966) produced by Daiei Film.)

Sakurai pops home to tell his sister Fumiko he’s off on a sea voyage, and is irked to discover she’s next door with her boyfriend, the engineer Fujito. Fujito demonstrates a new, thin, high tensile wire he’s invented, which will obviously become significant to the plot later.

Meanwhile, the Seahawk has homed in on a glowing iceberg that’s emitting Cherenkov radiation (or, as the American actors insist on pronouncing it, “Chelenkov” radiation). The submarine crashes into the iceberg; as water floods in, a familiar roar is heard and someone on board the sub shouts out the name “Godzilla”.

Godzilla was last seen being buried under an avalanche on an island made of volcanic rock, yet here he is breaking out of an iceberg. Later dialogue refers to him having been trapped in there, which seems to be a fumbled reference to Godzilla Raids Again (1955). Everyone knows who he is – the crew of the American helicopter who search for the Seahawk also recognise and name him. He looks a bit chunkier than he did before. His radioactive breath is still kind of misty, but in colour we can see that it and the glow of his dorsal plates have a blue tint.

As Godzilla heads for land, the JSDF try several methods of repelling him, without success. Tanks don't work; a big pit full of explosives and poisonous gas has no effect on him; 100,000 volts run through a chain of electricity pylons diverts him but doesn’t deter him. The news of Godzilla’s return dominates the media and infuriates Mr Tako, whose sole concern at this time is that nobody’s watching the programmes sponsored by his company.

Sakurai and Furue have meanwhile arrived at Faro Island and ingratiated themselves with the locals with gifts of transistor radios and cigarettes. Like the inhabitants of Infant Island in Mothra, the Faro Islanders are all played by blacked-up Japanese actors and portrayed in an over-the-top “primitive” way. Their language seems to be a variety of pidgin English. Their village is positioned in front of a massive wooden framework that keeps their god contained in the island’s interior. The ad men are sceptical, but hear some ominous roaring sounds that they can’t explain.

During the night, a gigantic octopus emerges from the sea and attacks the village. It’s now that the “demon god” shows up in person – Konno, the ad men’s Faro Islander guide, immediately names him as King Kong. There’s a brief tussle, but Kong drives the octopus back into the water by throwing things at it (including the wooden scaffolding which was supposed to hold him back from the village and which, in hindsight, clearly wasn’t fit for purpose). He then drinks several vats full of the red berry juice prepared by the islanders and falls asleep.

Anyone expecting Kong to look like he did in 1933 will be disappointed. His fur is paler, even a bit mangy, his skull is oddly misshapen and his teeth stick out all over the place. He’s let himself go, frankly. Sakurai and Furue take the opportunity to tie the sleeping giant to a raft, laden with dynamite in case the plan really goes wrong, and start to tug him back to Japan. Tako is delighted, not least because Kong (and Pacific Pharma) has knocked Godzilla out of the news headlines, and travels out to meet the ship. Unfortunately, so does a JSDF battleship; the official who boards the expeditionary vessel says that Kong has been classified as smuggled goods and tries to hustle Tako for money. The crew decide to cut Kong loose and blow up his raft, but Kong escapes and swims towards Japan, on a collision course with Godzilla.

In the next half hour of to-and-fro, we discover several things. In close quarters combat, Godzilla likes to bludgeon his opponent with his tail while Kong prefers to throw large rocks. Godzilla doesn’t like high voltage electricity but Kong weirdly seems to thrive on it – when he encounters the pylons erected to stop Godzilla, he tears off the cables and stuffs them into his mouth, as if the power were literally feeding him. Later on, a lucky bolt of lightning to the head gives him his second wind in the climactic fight against Godzilla. He doesn’t like fire, though, and his fur is easily singed by Godzilla's radioactive breath.

After the kaijus’ first fight, Kong wanders through Tokyo, takes a shine to Sakurai Fumiko and climbs the Diet Building with her in his hand. (Like his RKO namesake, he has an eye for the ladies and enjoys scaling tall buildings.) By this time, Pacific Pharma have managed to extract the active ingredient from the soma berries, and the JSDF are able to use this in aerial bombardment to put Kong to sleep. Fujita, who was on hand to run in and carry Fumiko to safety, now offers the JSDF his high tensile wire as a means to relocate Kong while he’s asleep, which they do by suspending him from several weather balloons and escorting him towards Mt Fuji, where Godzilla is. Their plan is let their two daikaiju problems sort each other out.

Kong and Godzilla wrestle each other across country from the foothills of Mt Fuji to Atami Castle on the coast. (Note: that’s maybe 40km as the crow flies.) They fight each other to a standstill (but demolish most of the castle) and fall together into the sea. Godzilla is not seen to re-emerge, but our protagonists suspect he might return. As Kong swims off into the distance, back to Faro Island, we hear a dubbed over roar from Godzilla, then one from Kong.

This is a very self-aware film. It’s the first to revolve around a big fight between two daikaiju – although we saw Godzilla settling a territorial dispute with Anguirus in Godzilla Raids Again, that was all over by half time, and in any case the film wasn’t called “Anguirus vs Godzilla”. This will become the standard format for most Godzilla movies, but here it feels like we’ve already been given the parody, with Mr Tako cast as the promoter of a big celebrity boxing match, the Don King of the kaiju world. When he’s not claiming corporate ownership of Kong, he describes himself as Kong’s sponsor. He gets very excited at the thought of staging a clash between Kong and Godzilla, prompted by one of his underlings musing on which of the two would win in a fight – a conversation I’m sure the staffers at Toho must have had more than once, even before John Beck approached them. Someone else responds by grumbling that they’re not organising a wrestling match, yet that’s exactly the plan the JSDF settles on. And when Tako’s fuming about all the press attention Godzilla gets, a Pacific Pharma employee needles him further by noting that there’s even a film...

There still isn’t a defined Godzilla series at this stage. Toho were trying all kinds of things with tokusatsu (special effects driven media) and seeing what did or didn’t work at the box office. Having done a few films that were specifically about daikaiju, they experimented with Gorath (1962), a space adventure released five months before King Kong vs Godzilla that included an entirely gratuitous kaiju; Atragon (1963), an anti-war action movie prominently featuring an experimental flying, burrowing submarine and, less prominently, a kaiju; and Dogora (1964), produced shortly after the next Godzilla film, a gangster heist movie whose plot is derailed by a diamond-eating kaiju. This is the context into which King Kong vs Godzilla fits: an experiment in kaiju comedy, a lampooning of post-war consumerism (very ironic, for a film studio loudly celebrating 30 years of commercial success) that expresses itself through the medium of kaiju.

Godzilla no longer represents Japanese anxiety over atomic weapons tests or US military aggression – he's just a hugely popular movie monster and therefore, like King Kong, a product to be commodified. There’s a revealing moment in a scene in the middle of the film, when the public have been told to evacuate Tokyo and the Sakurais run into one of their neighbours, when the neighbour’s young son excitedly says that he wants to see Godzilla. We’re already hitting the tipping point between Godzilla as the stuff of nightmares and Godzilla as a figure of family-friendly fun.

Speaking of family-friendly fun, the castle that Kong and Godzilla demolish in their final battle is not a historic monument but, appropriately, a great big commercial fake. Atami is a hot spring resort a little way around the coast from Tokyo. Atami Castle is a tourist complex and was built in 1959 – so, like the Tokyo Tower in Mothra, it’s a recently built and well-known edifice that can be torn down by kaiju to the delight of the audience. But it also ties in handily with the film’s overall theme.

There’s comedy beyond the film’s spoofing of consumer society, and again it focuses largely on Tako. His first scene sees him berating his team for not finding something better than World Wonders to sponsor, then he immediately gets a call from the Chief Executive giving him the exact same lecture. There are slapstick shenanigans a-plenty with him leaning against the emergency plunger for the dynamite on Kong’s raft. Then there’s the scene where a battleship draws alongside the ship and a customs official comes aboard. In the American version of the film, he merely tells Tako that Kong can’t be allowed into Japan because he’s a threat to public safety, but in the original he says that Kong has been classed as smuggled goods and invites Tako to pay his way out of trouble. He also advises that Tako will be held financially responsible for any damage Kong causes in Japan, which prompts a clownish show of anguish from Tako.

Some familiar faces pop up again. Appearing as Fujita, the engineer and romantic male lead, is Sahara Kenji, who played the young hero Shigeru in Rodan (1956). Hama Mie, playing the female lead Fumiko, hasn’t appeared in this blog before but will be better known to Western audiences as James Bond's love interest in You Only Live Twice (1967). In that same year she played the villainous "Madame Piranha" in Toho's less well-known giant ape flick, King Kong Escapes (1967). Wakabayashi Akiko, James Bond’s other love interest in You Only Live Twice, here plays a supporting role as Fumiko’s friend Tamie.

Naturally, Hirata “Dr Serizawa” Akihiko turns up as a scientist. He plays Professor Shigezawa, a knowledgeable scientist and evidently a figure of some authority. He's first seen at the Defence Agency, which I think is the basis on which the American re-edit recasts him as the Minister of Defence. Secondary sources suggest that he's meant to be the Prime Minister, but there's no obvious sign of that on screen. When asked to explain the emergence of ancient creatures in the present day, he pulls out the same line about a 3,000-year-old lotus seed germinating that his character gave in Rodan (1956).

The special effects are a mixed bag. The giant octopus is notable for not being a puppet (except in the shots of it flinging itself at Kong’s face) or a man in a costume, but a real octopus. This is fine when the octopus is interacting with miniature model huts, but the composite shots that put it alongside objects thrown by Kong or the human characters are rarely convincing. The mismatch of lighting and colour balance between the elements of the scene is far too obvious, and there are a couple of shots where one layer of the image moves and the other doesn't. The costume for Kong is distractingly shabby, although Godzilla looks fine. On the positive side, the miniatures are superb, especially the model of Atami Castle, and the practical effects are supplemented with nice moments of stop motion when Faro Islanders are seized by the octopus’ tentacles and cel animation when the JSDF soldiers clamber in silhouette over a drowsy Kong to tie the weather balloons onto him. Whatever its faults, you can’t say the film’s not ambitious.