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Review

Electrical wires! Those’ll kill me dead! Not like that other time!

It’s remarkable how different the first three Godzilla movies are from one another. The first is a serious, ominous, and potent piece of cinema. The second is a sloppy and dull monster movie. And the third is weird, even silly. Now, there are two reasons for this sudden change. One is that Toho ordered Ishiro Honda and his crew to make Godzilla a more child-friendly property; presumably, Toho felt that they could get a series out of such a thing, whereas a series of towering allegories of atomic destruction would be maybe less viable. Honda didn’t like it, but he did as he was told. The second reason for the silliness of this movie is more unusual: Kingukongu tai Gojira is, among other things, a satire of monster movies. Where before Godzilla was entirely a threat, here he becomes a Japanese cultural obsession. We see the press go wild when he appears; a small child begs his mommy to go and see him. There are piles of magazines, plans for a movie, and then, when Kong appears, all this attention swiftly switches over to the ape. People start taking bets on the outcome of the inevitable fight. Kong and Godzilla are media superstars, and that, friends, is a comedy joke, a wry commentary on monster movies in general. This silliness spirals out into the rest of the film; Tako and Furue are both played as rather broad comic relief. And the former is blithely willing to sacrifice the safety of his country for the sake of pharmaceutical promotion – advertising is another major satirical target here.

Of all the weirdness of this film, the fight choreography might be the most famous example. Kong grabs Godzilla by the tail and swings him through the air. Godzilla bats thrown boulders back at Kong, using his tail. Kong stuffs a tree into Godzilla’s mouth, and Godzilla dislodges it with his atomic breath. It is said that Tsuburaya’s staff was incredulous about some of the effects they were asked to produce. For all this, though, the fights aren’t bad; there’s a bit of a remnant of the too-quick combat of the last film, but overall the fights are varied and well-paced and fun to watch.

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Synopsis

Sakurai (left), Mr. Tako (center), and Furue the Singing Cowboy (right)

After the opening sequence, in which we see shots of the final battle between Kong and Godzilla that will come later, we see the planet Earth, and hear pithy commentary about its mysteries. This turns out to be part of a TV science show sponsored by Pacific Pharmaceuticals. Now, Mr. Tako (Ichiro Arishima), an executive of this company, hates this show, and is fanatically desperate for better publicity for the company. Hearing of a monster worshipped by the natives of Pharoh Island (spelled here as it is in the subtitles of the review copy; many other spellings exist), an island near the Solomon Islands, he dispatches two of his employees – Sakurai (Tadao Takashima) and Sakurai’s unnamed sidekick, called ‘Kinsaburo Furue’ in the literature (Yu Fujiki) – to bring said monster back, for advertising purposes.

Meanwhile, the American submarine “Seahawk,” investigating a seemingly radioactive iceberg in the north Pacific, crashes into that iceberg, There is a familiar, screaming roar, and the helpless, idiot Americans see their sub set afire.

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Statistics

Japanese Title: Kingukongu tai Gojira (“King Kong vs. Godzilla”)
Toho Studios’ Official English Title: King Kong vs. Godzilla
Other American Titles: None
Noteworthy International Titles: Il Trionfodi King Kong (Italian, “The Triumph of King Kong”); Die Ruckkehr des King Kong (German, “The Return of King Kong”)
Director: Ishiro Honda
Producer: Tomoyuki Tanaka
Screenplay: Shinichi Sekizawa
Music: Akira Ifukube
Special Effects: Eiji Tsuburaya
Japanese Release: 8/11/62
American Release: 6/26/63 or 6/3/63; reports vary
U.S. Distributor: Universal
Review Copy DVD Distributor: Universal
Running Time: 98 min./ 91 min. (American version)
Monsters: - Godzilla (Japanese: “Gojira”) – The same Godzilla as was entombed in ice at the end of Gojira no Gyakushu
- King Kong (Japanese: “Kingukongu”; the Us are not vocalized) – A 45-meter-tall apelike creature, plainly not the original Kong
- Giant Octopus (Japanese: unknown, but often referred to as “Odako,” which roughly means “great octopus”) – A cephalopod of enormous size, that seeme fairly comfortable on land
Principal Cast: - Godzilla – Haruo Nakajima and Katsumi Tezuka (in scene wherein Godzilla climbs out of ice)
- King Kong – Shoichi “Solomon” Hirose
- Sakurai – Tadao Takashima
- Fumiko – Mie Hama (known to American audiences as “Kissy Suzuki” from You Only Live Twice)
- Kinsaburo Furue – Yu Fujiki
- Kazuo Fujita – Kenji Sahara
- Mr. Tako – Ichiro Arishima
- Mr. Shinagawa – Akihiko Hirata (previously “Dr. Serizawa” in Gojira)

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What you are about to see is almost identical to an earlier post entitled “Godzilla Month: Acknowledgements and Bibliography.” This is, of course, because I am using many of the same resources for subsequent episodes of the Godzilla Project. So what I’m going to do is re-post it here, with updated information, and then go back and edit/update it at the end of every reviewed film, and link back to here from there. Get it? Well, it’s not incredibly important. But credit where it’s due!

First off, I would, of course, like to thank everyone who read and everyone who commented. Your support makes it all worthwhile; I already know all this stuff, after all. Particularly supportive were Elizabeth Conway, Michael Callies, and Craig Duncan; much of this would have been literally impossible without them. And thanks once again to Dan Swensen, for letting me clutter up his website with this nonsense.

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The American Version

Wait a minute, what?

A shooting script, by Ib Melchior and Edwin Watson and dated 5/7/57, exists for a movie called The Volcano Monsters. This was to be the American release of Gojira no Gyakushu, sort of. In fact, all that The Volcano Monsters was going to cull from no Gyakushu was the footage of the monsters fighting; a whole new movie, with American actors, was going to be made around these scenes. And even these scenes were to be chopped apart, as the monsters were now supposed to be regular dinosaurs, and so every scene of Godzilla breathing his ray was to be specifically excised. Toho was apparently all for this, and even sent two apparently unique Godzilla and Anguirus suits to America, for shooting additional scenes. (These suits have long since disappeared, and indeed, only a single photograph exists as solid evidence of their ever having been real). However, the brand new studio that was to make this film, AB-PT Pictures, folded with terrifying speed. And so The Volcano Monsters never came to pass. This is, perhaps, fortunate; Ib Melchior went on to use some of his concepts from this script in the screenplay for Reptilicus, which happens to be the worst giant-monster movie in this or any possible universe.

Instead, Gojira no Gyakushu was released in the U.S. in 1959, under the title Gigantis, the Fire Monster. “What the hell?” you ask? It seems nobody really knows what the hell, though one of its American backers has said that this was to fool local audiences into thinking this was an all-new monster. So an all-new monster would be better than Godzilla? Wha? In any case, Gigantis was re-edited by Hugo Grimaldi, and dubbed by voice actors including Keye Luke and Paul Frees. It was released on a double bill with Teenagers from Outer Space. One of its radio ads began, quite honestly, with the exclamation, “Hey kids!”

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