BEFORE: You may be getting your costume ready or buying some last-minute candy for trick-or-treaters, but for me it's just about time to wrap up the Halloween season - I've got two slots left and two films about Godzilla in my possession. They happen to be the first one and the most recent one.
I watched a lot of lousy Godzilla films in my day, as a kid they ran them all the time on TV in Boston, channel 38's "Creature Feature", so I've probably seen a bunch of them, where he fought Rodan, Gamora and even the Smog Monster. But I've never seen the original film from 1956, either the Japanese or the U.S. version. So here goes.
I had great plans for Godzilla films, like the Marx Brothers or Fred Astaire I was going to watch this forum to see a great number of them in a row, but I've only got the two right now. Rather than wait to acquire more, I'm going to follow the linking that tells me to watch these two now - carpe diem and all that. Frank Puglia from "20 Million Miles to Earth" was also in "Without Reservations" with Raymond Burr. And just before I started my Halloween chain back on October 1, I watched another film with Mr. Burr in it, the Martin + Lewis film "You're Never Too Young". So there's sort of a palindromic feel to my horror chain this year, it kind of ends how it began, with a silly film from the 1950's with low-quality special effects. Tomorrow I'll start detailing my plans for the final 38 films of this year.
AFTER: I know this is probably regarded as a classic, but I'm just not seeing it. The effects are SO low rent, and it's SO obvious when Godzilla was being played by a guy in a suit and when it was essentially a hand puppet. This is a joke, right? This film was never meant to be taken seriously, I'm thinking, because even the giant ants in "Them!" and the insect in "The Deadly Mantis" looked more realistic than this rubberized giant lizard.
To make matters worse, the original Japanese film from 1954 was not released in U.S. theaters until they first added framing sequences with American actor Raymond Burr, so that the whole story about the suffering of thousands of injured Tokyo citizens could be seen from an American perspective. That sells the U.S. audiences very short, I think, to suggest that they needed to view everything through a white person's eyes, as he narrates the tale. Did the filmmakers think we wouldn't notice that Burr never interacted with the important Japanese characters?
(It's almost comical, Burr's reporter character - who happens to be named "Steve Martin" - keeps mentioning how these Japanese scientists are his college roommates, or long-time friends, but every time he tries to have dinner with them, some emergency comes up and they have to cancel by phone. All because the Japanese actors were not available to re-shoot any scenes with the added actor. Sure, they all went to that university that offers degrees in paleontology, nuclear science and news reporting - you know the one...)
Or maybe it's worse to think of this as some kind of cultural penance for having dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki a decade before, to end World War II. As it is, probably not enough Americans felt enough grief and sorrow for being part of the only country to use nuclear weapons on civilians, but I don't think adding a fictional giant lizard, awoken by the bombs, is going to create the right apologetic atmosphere, but what the heck do I know?
Several similarities to "The Creature From the Black Lagoon", since both films feature made-up creatures that were believed to be extinct millions of years ago, and the best defense offered against them is to fill the ocean with explosives, because that won't damage the environment or the local fishing economy at all. And like the Creature, or Dracula, or Frankenstein's monster, Godzilla is seemingly beaten and/or deceased by the end of this film, only we all know that he came back, again and again.
Starring Raymond Burr (last seen in "You're Never Too Young"), Takashi Shimura, Momoko Kochi, Akira Takarada, Akihiko Hirata, Sachio Sakai, Fuyuki Murakami, Ren Yamamoto, Toyoaki Suzuki, Tadashi Okabe, Toranosuke Ogawa, Frank Iwanaga, Mikel Conrad.
RATING: 3 out of 10 electrical towers
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