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Ever since I switched majors midway through college, I joked that my two
favorite Japanese movies were Kurosawa's 'Rashoman' and Honda's: Godzilla. Of
course - I meant this in the sarcastic hipster sort of way. Something happened
to me tonight. I can no longer say Godzilla is one of my favorite Japanese
movies in a humorous way anymore.
The other day had I been looking at the discount previewed DVD section and
found a copy of the two disc set containing both Honda's 'Gojira' and 'Godzilla:
King of All Monsters'. What's the difference? Well- most of the monster
footage is exactly the same and so is a lot of the love story plot. There are
two major differences.
- Raymond Burr was literally edited into Godzilla: King of All Monsters.
The American producers and distributors thought that an American audience would
need a point of view character. Given the political climate and that the typical
age of the sci-fi film goer in 1956 was a child between the ages 8 and 12, they might
have been right. These days - fans tend to be a lot older and more
sophisticated.
- The overall context of the entire movie. The Americanized version paints
a portrait that says: 'You woke up this sleeping giant, you help us fix it.'
In my history of film class, we studied what Japanese movies were allowed to do
during the U.S. occupation. One of the rules was anything that portrays
Americans or their actions in a negative light was not permitted. There are
several scenes that directly reference Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the horrors
they inflicted on the Japanese people. It is amazing such a thinly veiled
anti-nuclear war allegory was allowed to be shown in the Tokyo of 1954. (It
took eighteen months for Toho to find a distributor willing to help them release
Godzilla upon the United States.) Here the message is clear: 'Nuclear weapons
are not the way. We are strong. We survived a war with the Chinese and the
Russians. We can endure, this shall pass.' For that alone, Gojira is a very
brave movie.
The look of the film is also fantastic by early 50s sci-fi films, even by the
movies being shot in the United States for a much larger sum of money. It's
hard to tell if the noiresque technique was out of design to made Godzilla seem
more sinister and foreboding or if it was a simple matter of what they could
afford to do. Or was it some odd synthesis of both? After all, none of the
Godzilla movies that were shot in color were any where near this good.
Godzilla is the king of all campy movies. Gojira on the other hand, is the Citizen
Kane of giant monster flicks.
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