Under the rule of Gen. Douglas MacArthur appointed the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces , numerous clampdowns were designed to democratize Japan, including strict oversight of the movie industry. Once the Allies left Japan to govern itself, a number of bomb-inspired films were made, including Children of the Atom Bomb , in which a Hiroshima schoolteacher searches for students who were victims of the blast; Hiroshima , an angry film accusing the U. As a monster film, Godzilla is usually considered little more than light entertainment, but in terms of theme and tone, it has much in common with these antiwar, pacifist movies that appeared after the occupation restrictions were lifted.
Godzilla is unaffected by modern technology. He is stronger than the weapons that brought Japan to its knees. Honda had a personal stake in the subject matter. In , he was drafted into the Japanese Imperial Army and forced to put his film career on hold.
Over the next eight years he served three tours of duty as a foot soldier in Japanese-occupied China, and in , while stationed along the Yangtze River, he was taken as a prisoner of war. The son of a Buddhist priest, Honda was a quiet, cheerful man and a skilled director with a humanist streak, his films usually populated by everyday Japanese characters working at everyday occupations. For Honda, Godzilla was not a metaphor for the bomb but a physical manifestation of it.
The atomic bomb had emerged and completely destroyed Hiroshima…. If Godzilla had been a dinosaur or some other animal, he would have been killed by just one cannonball.
So, I took the characteristics of an atomic bomb and applied them to Godzilla. The story was handed to director Honda and his cowriter Takeo Murata a longtime assistant director at Toho , who spent three weeks holed up in a Japanese inn in Shibuya, fleshing out the screenplay. Godzilla begins with a series of mysterious shipping disasters in Japanese waters. Authorities are baffled, and there are only a few survivors, suffering radiation sickness, who describe the sea catching fire before they sank.
In a tiny, rustic fishing village on Odo Island, a fisherman named Masaji washes ashore on a raft. The local waters are suddenly devoid of fish, and an eccentric old man believes the spate of strange occurrences must be the work of Godzilla, a legendary sea beast that could only be pacified by human sacrifice. The others just laugh, but late one night an eerie typhoon strikes Odo Island, thunderclaps shaking the Earth like giant footfalls.
Masaji, awakened by the tremors, steps outside his house and is nearly frightened to death by a horrifying sight. He takes cover indoors, but a powerful, unseen force flattens his home and tramples the village. The government dispatches a scientific team to investigate the Odo Island disaster, led by a prominent paleontologist, Dr. While Yamane is surveying a huge, radioactive footprint, the eerie din of those giant footsteps is heard again, and suddenly, a giant reptile pokes its head up from behind a low ridgeline and roars mightily before disappearing.
Emiko and Ogata secretly want to marry, but first she has to terminate her arranged marriage to Dr. Serizawa Akihiko Hirata , a reclusive, eye-patch-wearing scientist bearing physical and psychological scars from the war. He takes Emiko to his creepy basement lab and shows her his latest experiment, the sight of which off camera terrifies her; then Serizawa makes Emiko promise never to tell a soul about it. The bombs only anger Godzilla, and it storms ashore after nightfall, trashing the harbor before retreating to sea.
To protect the city from further damage, the authorities erect a huge electrical barrier along the shoreline, but Godzilla easily melts the power lines with its radioactive breath and proceeds to lay waste, mercilessly, to vast portions of the metropolis.
Serizawa at first refuses to hand over the weapon, fearing it would ignite a new, even more dangerous arms race. In the dramatic climax, Serizawa agonizes over his predicament: to introduce a new weapon of mass destruction or allow the human carnage to continue?
Ultimately he relents, only after destroying his research papers to ensure the Oxygen Destroyer cannot be rebuilt. King Kong is often called the greatest monster movie of all time, and deservedly so. Godzilla , then, is arguably the most important and enduring postwar monster movie—important because it attempted to address a global issue that still resonates 50 years later.
At first glance, several similarities between Godzilla and Kong jump out. Both monsters were born in the folklore of island dwellers, giving them a godlike mystique. Both Kong and Godzilla move from their primitive worlds to a final showdown in a modern metropolis, and both can be killed only by the most advanced weapons technology of the time Kong by fighter planes, Godzilla by a pseudonuclear device.
The contrasts between these two giants are even more interesting. Another important difference is the size of Godzilla, about ten times as big as Kong; whereas the big ape walks the streets of Manhattan and climbs buildings, Godzilla plows through entire city tracts without much effort. When Spider-Man glides through the Manhattan skyline, most people hardly even blink, much less gasp in awe.
Digital-age special effects have made amazing feats possible on film, but almost no one is amazed anymore because heightened realism is taken for granted. In the fifties, the opposite was true: audiences were wowed by effects that now look all too obviously fake. Back then, the state of the art in big-scale motion picture magic was Cecil B. Ray Harryhausen took King Kong —style stop-motion animation to the next level in The Beast from 20, Fathoms and other films.
What he did have, however, was a vivid imagination, a willingness to experiment, and an opportunity to fulfill a dream. Tsuburaya began his career as a cinematographer in the early s, and although he experimented with trick photography early on, only after seeing King Kong did he dedicate himself to advancing the art of special effects in Japanese cinema. Using detailed miniature models and elaborate pyrotechnics, Tsuburaya re-created military battles in the air and on the sea.
The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malaysia was both an amazing piece of wartime propaganda and the biggest display of Japanese special effects to date. By the time Tsuburaya returned to Toho Studios in the early s, he was entering his fifties, but his most creative days still lay ahead. Even though it was far removed from the war scenes he specialized in, the challenge of creating Godzilla was tailor-made for Tsuburaya, who had longed to make a Kong-style monster movie of his own.
But questions remained. For one thing, what did Godzilla look like? Several concepts were discussed during the planning stages. Tsuburaya dusted off an old idea, a story about a gigantic octopus attacking Japanese ships. Producer Tanaka passed on all of them and eventually took another cue from The Beast from 20, Fathoms , deciding Godzilla would be a reptile. Tsuburaya would have preferred to film Godzilla with animated models, but the tight production schedule allowed roughly three months to supervise the design, construction, and filming of all the effects scenes.
Stop-motion animation was meticulous and time-consuming, requiring tiny increments of movement to be photographed one frame at a time, so it simply was out of the question. And even though the man-in-suit method was technically inferior to animation, in a strange way it was an innovation. No one had done it quite like this before; there had been a few American-made dinosaur movies with actors wearing T-rex costumes, but Godzilla, as it turned out, would be a prototype for a new genre.
An inner frame was built of bamboo and wire, covered by wire mesh and cushioning, and topped with several coats of molten rubber. The costume weighed about pounds and felt like a straitjacket. Breathing was nearly impossible. The huge tail dragging behind felt like a dozen sandbags. Honda, Mr. Tsuburaya, Mr.
I was able to walk about ten meters, but Mr. Tezuka could only walk about three meters and then he fell down. Nakajima suffered blisters and fainting spells and dropped about 20 pounds under the blazing studio lights, but he relished the role and would play Godzilla and other monsters in dozens of films before retiring in The ominous, psychologically striking music of composer Akira Ifukube underscores the dread as Godzilla advances like a slow-moving nuclear explosion, the force of the blast plodding methodically across the city.
Stragglers who ignored evacuation warnings are trampled under outsized feet. Tanks hurl artillery shells at the giant, and retaliation is swift and deadly.
As the destruction builds to a crescendo, a ring of fire encircles the metropolis from the shoreline to the outskirts. Next morning, daylight reveals the magnitude of the damage. Nothing remains standing; the streets are buried under rubble, and a thick smoke layer hangs above, a blanket of gloom. Disaster shelters overflow with the dead and dying. A doctor tests a child for radiation, and the Geiger counter goes berserk.
A little girl wails as she watches her mother die of terrible burns. Are these images merely the stuff of science fiction, of a B-movie? Visually, the monster and the havoc it wreaks allude to the bomb, the war, and the victims at ground zero. Scenes of Tokyo on fire, with flames streaming out of windows and licking the sides of buildings, clearly evoke the American firebombing in , an attack in which a napalm-like chemical was used.
Thematically, the story brims with tragic figures and symbols. Serizawa is a reclusive genius haunted by the global implications of his own terrifying discovery. Godzilla is not an angry film, not a simplistic indictment of the United States for the events of August It is a powerful condemnation of the atomic age and a plea for nuclear powers to end the march toward oblivion.
Why has the world ignored the message behind the monster, unable to see anything more than a city-stomping goliath? Because for fifty years, that message has been lost in the translation. This is my report as it happens. But Toho, spurred by the creative and productive climate of the day, was taking a lot of risks.
These gambles paid huge dividends. To capitalize on the trend, Toho opened an office in the Little Tokyo section of downtown Los Angeles, offering movies to distributors in the U. Meanwhile, across town, Hollywood was swept up in an era of exploitation-movie madness. These were the days when legendary B-movie men such as Samuel Z. Arkoff, Roger Corman, Bert I.
Gordon, and the illustrious Ed Wood earned their rightful place on the fringe of cinematic history with classics like. Godzilla was brought to America by Harold Ross and Richard Kay, two Hollywood bottom-feeders whose biggest success thus far was Untamed Women , an un-epic story of soldiers marooned on an island inhabited by cavegirls.
By and large, the atomic bombings were seen as a necessary evil, and Americans had little sympathy for the Japanese and their postwar plight. To merely add English-language dialogue and release Godzilla to the U. They hired Raymond Burr who, in those days, was playing heavies like the wife-killer in Rear Window and filmed new scenes, using body doubles, clever editing, and other tricks to make it appear Burr was interacting with the Japanese cast. Entire sections of the original movie were excised, and the new material was spliced in.
For scenes that required English dubbing, just three actors two men, one woman did all the voices. To put the whole thing together, Ross and Kay recruited Terry O.
Morse, a no-name director and editor who had toiled in the lower echelons of Hollywood for two decades. Levine —87 , a Boston-based distributor who had a knack for exploiting gimmick films with loud, obnoxious publicity campaigns. Levine was so confident he had a major hit that he simultaneously booked the film in hundreds of theaters, a rare feat at the time. When that evil is unleashed, the townspeople are forever…changed…and a small group of survivors must work together to uncover the truth behind Umbrella and make it through the night.
Avan Jogia as Leon S. You must be logged in to post a comment. Connect with us. Related Topics: Godzilla resurgence Toho. Related Posts. Published 2 months ago on August 30, By John Squires. Continue Reading. Editorials 7 days ago. TV 2 days ago. Movies 4 days ago.
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