There’s something deeply unsettling about the opening credits of Ishiro Honda’s 1954 film Godzilla, a work that has spawned a seemingly endless succession of films featuring giant monsters wreaking havoc on a hapless Japan (a subgenre termed kaiju films). The credits are stark and bombastic—in the fashion of many features from legendary production company Toho—consisting of simple white Japanese text scrolling vertically over a black background. It’s the score by composer Akira Ifukube that sets a viewer’s guts squirming, however: a cacophony of thunderous percussion punctuated only by Godzilla’s distinctive, unearthly roar. (The composer achieved that trademarked bellow, so the story goes, by slowing down the sound of a leather glove rubbed on a loosened double bass string.) In those frightful tones, one can discern not only Ifukube’s affinity for traditional Japanese and Ainu music, but also the influence of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, which allegedly had a profound effect on the young composer. The music announces Japan’s most enduring pop cultural symbol with startling gravity, establishing that a force both mighty and merciless has been born.
Heavy stuff, to be sure, and perhaps unexpected for viewers who associate the Godzilla franchise with rubber-suited, scale-model cheesiness. There is cheese in abundance in Honda’s film, certainly, although its presence has less to do with the film-makers’ laziness than with the notoriously cold-blooded constraints that Toho placed on budgets and production schedules. Accordingly, Godzilla features repetitive action sequences, an over-reliance on stock footage, and some staggeringly unconvincing special effects, even by 1950s standards. (Fortunately, the titular monster, to the lasting credit of actor Haruo Nakjima and effects director Eiji Tsuburaya, has a certain otherworldly fearsomeness that overshadows its goofiness.) Nonetheless, viewers who are more familiar with later Godzilla features—where the reptilian star battles and then allies with a motley assortment of other radioactive beasts—will likely be astonished by the somber, shell-shocked tone of the original film. The Criterion Collection’s new Blu-ray and DVD editions of Godzilla provide an opportunity for fans of Japanese cinema and monster movies to savor its grim pleasures with fresh eyes.
Godzilla himself does not appear for the first third of the film, and later emerges only briefly, usually to rampage in gloomy shots through a suspiciously destructible mini-Tokyo. In subsequent films, the beast would take on a more overtly villainous or even heroic role, but in Honda’s film he is all amoral destruction, crushing buildings and spitting atomic fire in a fit of animalistic rage. The film’s ambiguous stance towards Godzilla is highlighted by Dr. Yamane (Akira Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura), a paleontologist who is deeply conflicted about the government’s plan to annihilate what he believes is a unique Jurassic-era creature awakened by humanity’s reckless hydrogen bomb tests. Godzilla’s allegorical aims lie close to the surface, to the point where they are barely allegorical at all: witness a scene where Japanese ministers openly debate the morality of nuclear weapons and public transparency. Such concerns seem eminently reasonable, given that Japan was still reeling from the mushroom clouds that had bloomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the horrific fire-bombing of Tokyo itself. The more direct inspiration for the film, however, was the accidental contamination of a Japanese fishing vessel during a 1954 hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, an event that caused a national outcry.
Godzilla was a modest box office hit when it premiered, although native critics derided its allegedly exploitative qualities (a view that has diminished with time). Director Honda—who co-wrote the film with Takeo Murata—was a protégé of Kurosawa himself, and would go on to assist with that director’s late-period films. Although he had made a name for himself at Toho with a succession of World War II melodramas, Honda could hardly be characterized as an out-of-touch opportunist. Indeed, Godzilla has a deeply mournful and conflicted atmosphere that belies its somewhat undeserved reputation for Saturday matinee silliness. Centering the film’s human narrative is a love triangle between salvage captain Ogata (Akira Takrada), experimental chemist Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), and Dr. Yamane’s daughter Emiko (Momoko Kochi). Between the lines of wildly inaccurate scientific exposition and clunky romantic dialog, one can perceive the ingenious depth of the film’s script, in which Emiko’s indecisiveness mirrors Japan’s ambivalence about the utility and dangers of the atom. Such bipolar tensions are everywhere in Godzilla’s narrative: traditionalism vs. modernism, development vs. conservation, secrecy vs. openness, acclaim vs. notoriety. That such concerns should occupy a low-budget monster movie at all is fairly astonishing, but Honda and his performers elevate the material with their unwavering mindfulness of Japan’s still-fresh nightmares and contemporary conundrums.
Criterion’s new Godzilla Blu-ray features a new digital restoration of the film with an uncompressed monoaural soundtrack. The disc also includes the 1956 American version of the film, Godzilla, King of the Monsters!, a strange, English-dubbed cut with inserted footage featuring Raymond Burr. Criterion has included a bumper crop of extras to accompany the feature: commentary tracks from film historian David Kalat; new interviews with actors and effect technicians; a documentary featurette on the film’s photographic effects; and more. Finally, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman contributes an incisive new essay for the liner notes, “Godzilla: Poetry After the A-Bomb."
St. Louis native Andrew Wyatt is the founder of the film aficionado website Gateway Cinephiles, where he has been an editor and contributor since 2007, authoring reviews, essays, and coverage of the St. Louis International Film Festival and Webster Film Series.
