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Furankenshutain no kaijû: Sanda tai Gaira (1966)
Characterization is an asset? Weird.
A direct sequel (with some small retconning) of Frankenstein vs. Baragon, War of the Gargantuas is mostly a generic Honda kaiju (or kaijin?) movie. There's still the thin characters, the insistence on categorization as a major plot thread, and then Eiji Tsuburaya's great special effects work. There's an extra wrinkle in the final act that makes things slightly more interesting, though, so we have that in the end.
Two years after Frankenstein was supposedly killed fighting off first Baragon and then a giant octopus, a giant octopus attacks a vessel off the Japanese coast. I honestly don't know why the giant octopus returns, but it does represent a nice kind of symmetry with the end of the previous film. Anyway, only one sailor survives, and the others didn't die at the tentacles of the octopus. They died at the hands of a giant humanoid monster who bears a striking resemblance to the (retconned) Frankenstein, except he's green and can live underwater. The scientists at the lab who fostered the original Frankenstein become interested in protecting their reputation by categorizing the new Frankenstein as not their Frankenstein. Dr. Paul Stewart (Russ Tamblyn) and Dr. Akemi Togawa (Kumi Mizuno) go out and try and search for evidence of this new Frankenstein.
Now, I have a rather constant refrain of complaint against many of these monster films in that they needlessly stop for this quest on correctly categorizing the monster. The nadir was probably the effort in Rodan, but it's been prominent in many others as well. This is the first time where there feels like an actual narrative reason for the categorization: the science lab needs to defend its reputation. It ultimately comes to nothing, but at least there's motive behind it all. I mean, correctly identifying which dinosaur Rodan is does nothing. Correctly identifying the new Frankenstein as something new and not the old protects Dr. Stewart's reputation. That's something.
So, their investigation leads to them discovering that yes, this isn't the old Frankenstein. It is some kind of offshoot that grew from a cluster of cells that washed out to sea and became a new entity. They're brothers, sort of. Also, the old Frankenstein is still around and alive, and that leads us to the single most interesting thing in the whole film: the relationship between the two. It's done completely wordlessly without the Infant Island princesses translating or anything. That lack of translation, their actions dictating everything, provides a nice opaqueness that requires audience attention and participation to get through. It's nothing terribly deep or complicated, though. New Frankenstein (renamed Gaira) is violent and has no compulsion in killing the little people while Old Frankenstein (renamed Sanda) is non-violent and wants Gaira to stop. Again, it's not overly complicated, but that it's handled wordlessly is nice.
And then there's the special effects. Tsuburaya keeps the hits coming with his use of little military cars and trees and buildings to stomp around in. It's quality special effects work, and there's a fair amount of it from beginning to end, the film not relegating all of it towards the ending. There's the opening terror on the boat, a fight between the Japanese Defense Forces and Gaira in the mountains, and then the final fight tearing up parts of Tokyo. It's fun.
It's just that...the humans aren't that interesting and they take up such a large portion of the film. Tamblyn apparently hated the assignment and project as he worked, and his boredom shines through. The effort to clear the lab's name regarding the identify of Frankenstein is something, but it's just not much and doesn't ever feel all that important to the characters. It's just kind of there. There's also a bit about Akemi having an attachment to Sanda that feels underserved, at best.
So, it's largely generic, but the special effects are still fun and the creatures have some slightly more thought put into them than normal. It's a step up from the direct predecessor film, but I wouldn't quite get to the point of calling it good. Still, I do have affection for these efforts at just moving along quickly and throwing monster mashups on screen. They're amusing. Lightly.
Kaijû daisensô (1965)
The best of the Showa Era
Huzzah! A Godzilla movie I actually like! Sure, it's still not great cinema, but it doesn't try to be. Invasion of Astro-Monster still only carries the modest ambition to entertain, but the writing is finally the kind of well-assembled series of events where character arcs and motives have bearings on the plot. It's just about what I expect from B-movie efforts, to be honest. Throw on top Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects work, and you've got an entertaining package of a film.
The two astronauts of a rocket to the mysterious Planet X, Kazuo Fuji (Akira Takarada) and Glenn (Nick Adams), are barreling towards Jupiter behind which hides the strange heavenly body that has eluded astronomers for so long (because it's too dark because the science has to be goofy, unintentionally, of course). Back home, Fuji's younger sister, Haruno (Keiko Sawai), wants to marry the hopeless inventor Tetsuo (Akira Kubo) who has developed a portable alarm for women that emits a loud, annoying sound when triggered. Will this be relevant later? Considering the track record of Honda's first acts paying off in the third, don't bet on it. But, let's just watch to find out.
Let's just take a moment to notice that the first act of Invasion of Astro-Monster feels different. There's a wittiness to how things are presented, particularly in the editing, that are more than just basic filmmaking. For instance, Tetsuo and Haruno meet the representative, Namikawa (Kumi Mizuno) to a company to sell his invention. Walking away with the contract signed, Tetsuo says that Kazuo would have to do a handstand to make up for his resistance to him and the idea that he would ever sell his invention. The film then cuts to a shot of the two astronauts upside down. I mean, that's kind of clever and fun. It then also has an explanation in that Glenn accidentally orientated the ship upside down, which he then corrects.
Moving on, the astronauts land and discover that Planet X is inhabited by Xiliens, led by the Commandant (Yoshio Tsuchiya). They have built their society underground to hide from Monster Zero who terrorizes the surface. And, Monster Zero is, of course, King Ghidorah from Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster. The Xiliens have a proposition: they will trade a cure for cancer for the use of Rodan and Godzilla to fight off Ghidorah on Planet X.
The writing on the film isn't perfect, despite my overall appreciation of it. The film kind of stops for a bit as the astronauts return to Earth, bring the proposal before the UN where the housewife delegation gets a say (I mean,...that's supposed to be funny, right?). Then the Xiliens just show up anyway, show how they can take the two monsters, and pretty much just hand over the cancer cure without much say from humanity. Considering how things progress from there, it really is curious why the Xiliens felt the need to ask for permission to get the two monsters. They obviously could without asking, and they obviously have precious little respect for property rights. It'd be cool if there was something in there about humanity being the guardians of Godzilla, or something, but it's just a giant hole in the narrative that never gets explained. Oh well.
So, the two monsters go to Planet X, fight off Ghidorah, and then Planet X reveals itself fully: they want to conquer Earth with all three monsters. Why they wanted to get the two Earth-bound monsters makes sense (especially when you consider the events of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster which the film makes no real mention of beyond Glenn knowing the monster when he sees it), and the rest is humanity finding ways to break the Xiliens' control over the monsters. And, surprise!, it uses Tetsuo's invention! It's nice how things get set up and then paid off. That's just the basics of writing, right there.
So, the finale is a lot of busy action, but it's actually moored into what was setup before. It feels significantly less random and more planned out. The humans have ways to actually affect what's going on, and they contribute. The little bit of character-based storytelling (namely the conflict between Kazuo and Haruno over her affection for Tetsuo) pays off and actually contributes to the story.
And all of this happens while Tsuburaya's model work continues to stretch the bounds of what he could convincingly pull off while being delightful to watch.
So, the script still has some issues. The idea of all Planet X women looking the same gets introduced and dropped for no reason. The middle act feels a bit aimless. The Xiliens' plan doesn't make the most sense when you think about it. However, the basics are in place, and they work. The light tone (not comedic, just light and propulsive through most of it) helps to keep things moving. The monsters still feel dangerous, even with Godzilla giving his victory dance on Planet X. This is just solid B-movie fun, and I had quite a good time with it.
Furankenshutain tai Chitei Kaijû Baragon (1965)
What is this categorization fetish?
Toho was always searching for the next monster to add to its pantheon, wasn't it? Taking and modifying the particulars of the Creature birthed from Dr. Frankenstein's work and throwing it together with another giant lizard thing, hidden away from the ravages of time and coming up because coincidence drives all of this stuff. Bringing back some of the more irritating habits of Honda's earlier monster movies, Frankenstein vs. Baragon mostly ambles around slowly for most of its runtime until it reaches its action-spectacular conclusion, which ends up feeling completely random and haphazard. I get that these were getting made super fast, but was no one willing to try and come up with reasons other than coincidence that newly discovered monsters find themselves in the same place?
Before the fall of Berlin at the end of World War II, German scientists sent the heart of Frankenstein (it's honestly unclear if there's supposed to be a difference between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster at all in this, so it's just Frankenstein) to Japan. Taken to the military hospital in Hiroshima where we get explanations about how the heart can never die from Takashi Shimura in his little cameo, the action swiftly moves to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Is that horribly tasteless? I'm going to be honest, it feels horribly tasteless.
Anyway, fifteen years later, Dr. James Bowen (Nick Adams) is investigating the effects of radiation on the human body when stories of a feral boy (Koji Furuhata) start popping up. He's seen by Bowen's girlfriend (?) Dr. Sueko Togami (Kumi Mizuno), and they bring him into the lab when some local villagers corner him in a cave. At the same time, Kawai (Yoshio Tshuchiya), the naval officer who brought the heart to Hiroshima, witnesses an earthquake and what looks to be a new monster peeking out from the cracks in the earth, but don't worry. That thing's not coming back for a long time.
No, we have to spend a lot of time with Frankenstein. One thing we haven't seen in Honda's monster films in a while is the movie coming to a screeching halt in order to properly categorize the monster (the last time that it was really an issue was Rodan), and that's exactly what this film ends up doing. They wonder endlessly about whether this is Frankenstein or not after Kawai gives them a visit and connects the dots for them. They even send the third of their trio of scientists, Dr. Kawaji (Tadao Takashima) to Germany to talk with the scientist who sent the heart to Japan in the first place. This happens while they give Frankenstein more food and he starts to grow at an accelerated rate (it's never explained why he suddenly starts growing, but I assume it's because he has access to a steady food source for the first time). In fact, it goes so far that Dr. Kawaji approaches Frankenstein's cage to cut off a limb as the only way to prove that Frankenstein is Frankenstein (the cut off limb should regrow).
And that's where the movie just kind of lost me. Why is this so important? Why is it so important that Dr. Kawaji would be willing to sneak in and do it without permission? Why is this effort to catalogue Frankenstein so key to everything? It's just not. He's a monstrous man, and ironing out the connections with another IP (in the public domain, of course), just feels like an excuse to burn some script pages on the way to 90. This would be weird enough if Dr. Kawaji's propensity for monster murder didn't come back later in the finale, but it does. And...nothing ever comes of it. It feels like an attempt to make any character interesting but not being able to follow through on it or do anything with it.
So, Frankenstein ends up escaping because flash bulbs make him cranky (the extension of the fire thing from the original Universal monster movies which Honda reportedly rewatched while writing to give Frankenstein similar traits as his most famous incarnation), and he disappears into the Japanese Alps. The trio of scientists go in pursuit, not being able to track him but wanting to help him anyway. At the same time, the mysterious underground monster (remember him?) shows up in the same area. He's dubbed Baragon and causes havoc, killing a bunch of dancing teenagers having a dance party in a small, remote mountain village. This gets blamed on Frankenstein, and there's a small push and pull between the scientists and the military about what to do.
This is, of course, just set up for the big action spectacular to end the film. Now, it's time to talk about Eiji Tsuburaya again. Once more, he works on a Honda film, and he does it well. I think the effort is helped by the fact that the model work is at a larger scale, going generally for 1/4 scale rather than 1/25. This allows more forgiveness around improper lens choices and film speeds, making the effects feel generally more convincing while retaining the same levels of effectiveness. There's also an embrace of composition in the special effects that ends up being really effective, especially when Honda and Tsuburaya frame Frankenstein holding Baragon over his head with flames from a forest on fire. It looks great. It's honestly what saves the film from being a complete misery. You're always able to count on Tsuburaya coming through in the end, no matter the narrative deficiencies that lead up to.
And then Frankenstein fights a giant octopus for no reason. It's random and dumb, but, again, at least it looks good.
This is not some hidden gem of Honda's career. The only thing saving it is that Tsuburaya has gotten a lot better at special effects since the days of something like Varan. It's a bit of a slog getting to those special effects, but it's also helped by the fact that, outside of the categorization effort, the film moves along quickly. I mean, it's not good, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad. It's...okay.
Uchû daikaijû Dogora (1964)
Underrated and fun
Most of Ishiro Honda's science-fiction films have started out as another kind of film before moving into the genre promised on the posters. Dogora is the first that...never really leaves the genre it starts out in. I liked that. This film seems to be negatively viewed for a couple of reasons, the first being that it never really fully commits to being a monster movie, the other being that the English language version is apparently incomprehensible nonsense, but seen in the original Japanese version, I think it's a charming and different heist movie that just happens to take place during a monster invasion at the same time.
Inspector Komai (Yosuke Natsuki) is looking into a series of diamond robberies, and his attention is fixed upon an American, Mark Jackson (Robert Dunham), who is having interactions with a small cartel of diamond thieves led by Natsui (Akiko Wakabayashi). There's also a professor, Dr. Munakata (Nobuo Nakamura), who studies geological formations and has developed artificial diamonds, his assistant Professor Kirino (Hiroshi Koizumi), and Kirino's sister Masayo (Yoko Fujiyama). As the opening moments of the film play out, it's mostly a look at a heist of a bank, tense as the police patrol unknowingly outside, that gets fuddled a bit when a mysterious flying space jelly floats through, levitates everyone, and makes off with the diamonds while cutting through the vault with temperatures too hot for an oxygen-powered flamethrower.
I was really expecting this to follow the rather normal pattern so far of Honda's career where this heisting plot gets dropped steadily until about halfway through the film when it's dropped completely. And yet, it continues to be the main focus of the film. Dr. Munakata is there through it all to both talk to the properties of diamonds and the weird force wandering around the skies over the world, stealing into vaults to take diamonds while also hoovering up giant piles of coal, but mostly it's about Komai tracking down Jackson, figuring out his connection to Natsui, and a series of heists around diamonds that always get interfered with by the space jelly.
There's a moment in the latter half of the film where Komai's superior chastises him for caring about space monsters at all. They have crimes to solve. I mean, that's just uniquely framing the central plot. This is a heist movie with monster action influencing it.
And the heist stuff is pretty good on its own. It's not La Cercle Rouge or anything, but it's well-realized, clear, and moves nicely. There are little double-crosses and unknown loyalties, and it would stand decently well without the monster action. However, the monster action also adds. Firstly, it adds the contrast between the characters and their focus with the larger events unfolding around the plot. Secondly, the monster action itself. It's never the focus of the film, but it does a good bit on its own.
And, of course, one must take the time to recognize and praise the work led by Eiji Tsuburaya, the man behind the special effects. The monster, eponymously called Dogora, is a floating jellyfish in space, and it looks really good. The film's opening moments are not actually the heist stuff but space footage that is shockingly well put together, even within Tsuburaya's own accomplished body of work. When Dogora floats down to suck up coal mountains, it has this marvelous floating structure to it captured by filming flexible vinyl underwater, a new practice they invented during production. It's colorful with a bright blue sheen, and it moves wonderfully on screen.
Really, this is a heist movie that has some monster action in it, and the monster action is both kind of great and really different. No more men in suits stomping on little Japanese villages, this is a successful effort to make something new, and Tsuburaya and Honda accomplished that well.
And, through the end of the third act, the heist plot never diminishes. Honda stuck to his guns on this one, and I think it works. The chase is about diamonds, but it's happening in the middle of sci-fi nonsense about wasp venom attacking Dogora and crystallizing it. That's delightful.
I think this is one of those Honda films that deserves something of a re-appraisal, but you apparently need to watch the Japanese version and also recognize that it's not really much of a monster movie. Oh, there's a monster in it, and it's great. It's just that the focus is elsewhere. I mean, I had no idea what I was walking into and had a good time, but that expectation game is apparently really important for a lot of people.
Mosura tai Gojira (1964)
Pure-ish Kaiju Mayhem
I'm of two minds on this one. On the one hand, this is typical monster fare from Ishiro Honda, especially the early efforts to shoehorn in another kind of film into the first act. On the other hand, this is also the purest kaiju film I've seen so far in this series of Godzilla films as well as Honda's overall efforts at making science-fiction spectacles. It's really captured in the film's two halves, and while I appreciate the continued efforts by Honda to make something other than a kaiju movie while making a kaiju movie, it's the latter half that I embrace more fully.
A giant egg lands on the shores of Japan, and it causes a sensation, obviously. The egg gets purchased by Kumayama (Yoshifumi Tajima), a business man who is a front for another business man, Jiro Torahata (Kenji Sahara). Frustrated at this development is Professor Miura (Hiroshi Koizumi) who wants to study the egg and will essentially be our eyes and ears once the monster action heats up. But, we've got to wait a bit. You see, the start of this film is a corporate satire with Jiro having plans to build an amusement park around the egg. Like much of Honda's efforts to build in other genres into his kaiju films, though, it's kind of thin and doesn't really go anywhere. It's also not really related at all to the monster action because Godzilla just emerges from the ground at one point. Maybe (maybe) it's supposed to have something to do with the effort to clear the land to build the park, but it honestly just feels like coincidence. It's not like the whole film is about how building amusement parks is bad.
So, the egg is, of course, Mothra's, and the two princesses from Mothra (Emi and Yumi Ito) show up to beg humanity to give the egg back (how Mothra lost the egg in the first place is never explained), but Kumayama and Jiro won't allow it, leaving Miura unable to help. However, with the rise of Godzilla, Miura goes to Infant Island to beg Mothra's help. So, the effort to get Mothra to face down against Godzilla is drawn out and distracted (there are also a pair of journalist characters because this is that kind of movie). It's not bad, but it's not great. However, once the monster action starts, the film really takes off.
Firstly, it should be noted that these are the best special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya in this series and while working with Ishiro Honda. We return to the slow-motion efforts to try and recreate scale with Godzilla's steps feeling weighty and terrifying. There's a lot of aircraft flying around doing different things, including dropping nets. There are electric bolts firing from large towers. It's bright, big, and colorful, and there's also an embrace of compositing in real people into shots. That helps blend the two realities of miniature and real life.
And once that action starts, it hardly lets up. The only serious hiccup is the destruction of the dreams of Jiro and Kumayama which turns surprisingly violent, but Godzilla is in the background trudging toward them at the same time. Mothra, of course, shows up, and there's a twist where Mothra will never be able to return to Infant Island because she's going to die out there. Is that predictive? Is she just old? Or, is it just an excuse to have a moment of tension when Mothra lays down to die after a fight with Godzilla, protecting her egg, and the audience wonders what is going to happen next?! It's the latter, of course.
I was wondering if the film was going to willfully forget that Mothra is supposed to have a larval stage, but the film actually leans into it. Two larvae come out and use their unique skills to fight Godzilla. Really, I enjoyed the heck out of this. It's inventive, fun, colorful, and well executed.
And then I remember that the first half of the film is a largely middling corporate satire that doesn't really tie into the action in any more than the most basic of plot mechanical ways. I mean, I get that Honda didn't just want to make monster movies, but that didn't mean that they had to be so completely separate. Even a super basic, "We shouldn't despoil nature or Godzilla will come," would be good enough. Instead, as the battle is won and our characters look off into the sunset for the final seconds, they give a message about how we need to just be better? Whatever.
So, the corporate satire is decent, but it goes nowhere. The monster action is really good, but it barely ties into the first half. So, I'm caught in between. I want to like it more than I do, but I still think it's larger two halves simply don't connect very well. Oh well, it's honestly the best this franchise has been since its inception.
Kaitei gunkan (1963)
Science nonsense and post-WWII self-reflection
I'm always most interested in how Ishiro Honda is going to take his next bit of science-fiction nonsense in the limited new direction he could find. It's almost always in the setups, usually in the first act, and Atragon, the story of a Nemo-like captain who built a powerful submarine, puts a toe back into the realm of the Japanese culture's continuing efforts to deal with its legacy after WWII. And then there's science-fiction nonsense buoyed by adorable model work that almost never makes a whole lot of sense. Rushed together from concept to completion in four months, Atragon represents the limits of what Toho could push out using their assembly line process: moderate entertainment. There are worse things.
Mysterious humanoid figures rise from the sea and try to kidnap Japanese citizens. The focus falls on former Rear Admiral Kusumi (Ken Uehara), now the president of a large company, whose assistant is Makoto Jinguji (Yoko Fujiyama), the daughter of a WWII submarine captain, Hachiro Jinguji (Jun Tazaki, in a role written for Toshiro Mifune which he couldn't take because production on Kurosawa's Red Beard was taking forever), who supposedly died when he took his submarine in a revolt that Kusumi covered up to protect Jinguji. When the police capture one of the mysterious figures, an agent of the ancient lost continent Mu, Number 23 (Akihiko Hirata), with threats of raising the Mu Empire and bringing the entire world under their control once more, as well as with orders to find Hachiro, the only man Mu considers a threat.
Kusumi, despite knowing that Jinguji isn't dead (a secret he kept from Makoto for twenty years), has no idea where to find the old sub skipper. They get that information, though, from a spy Kusumi sent to ensure the safety of his daughter, caught by the police coincidentally just in time for him to give the information over to Kusumi. So begins the quest to find Jinguji...which ends pretty quickly because they have a guide.
Alright, so the most interesting thing about this film is when we finally meet Jinguji. He's been removed from the changes of the world for twenty years and still acts like the war is on (no mention of America, though). This is, of course, a parallel with real Japanese soldiers hiding out on tiny islands, waiting for orders for decades after the unconditional surrender, and that Honda and his writer Shinichi Sekizawa chose to deal with it in this context is fascinating. I mean, they do very little with it seriously, but it's interesting to watch.
Essentially, it becomes this argument between old-school nationalism and new-school internationalism (with Japan leading, of course, because, you know, nationalism didn't die). That the film doesn't quite see the irony in that is probably more of a blindspot to the filmmakers than anything else. It's not that important. All that's important is that we get some dramatic tension when Jinguji demonstrates the power of his new submarine called Atragon which can fly and has a cold ray and then refuses to use it to help. He's there for Japan, not the international order, you see.
One curious decision was to make the Mu Empire Egyptian in design. According to the graphic shown on the screen, the Mu Empire was a giant continent roughly the size of Asia in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, very far from Egypt. The decision to make it Egyptian was probably just a quickly made one to find a way to make it exotic to Japanese audiences, but it also creates one of those weird situations where a highly advanced civilization is decked out in silly, ancient garb, dancing ancient-looking dances in ancient-looking halls, while sliding it aside to reveal switches and buttons from time to time. It's always weird to me.
Speaking of the look of things, this is a special effects movie made by Ishiro Honda, so there must be time dedicated to talking about the work for Eiji Tsuburaya. This isn't his best work. The problem is that it's honestly too ambitious. The Mu Empire is a miniature, but it never feels like anything else because it's mostly filmed alone. What helps make the miniatures work in the other stuff is when there's actual action going on, so the long, dreamy shot through Mu that doesn't have a single person or thing moving just looks fake. However, in the spectacle-laden ending, when the Atragon shows up to cause destruction, including some halfway decent compositing of people in the foreground from time to time, it works better. It's still not believable, but it's more effective.
I should also note that since the movie brought up WWII itself, I don't think it's untoward to bring up WWII regarding its ending. Japan is attacked. They have a secret superweapon. They use this superweapon to literally destroy an entire continent, including civilians, to end the conflict and protect themselves. If that's not a parallel to what happened to Japan in WWII, I don't know what is. I do wonder if either Honda or Sekizawa recognized the connection.
Anyway, it's...okay. It has some interesting ideas that it doesn't explore in any serious way, but the ideas are there. The action is silly. The character-based storytelling is thin and unpursued. It's pretty typical fare, but it's not the worst thing. Spectacle has some benefits.
Matango (1963)
Creepy atmosphere
It's the smaller films by Ishiro Honda since he got pigeonholed into the sci-fi/horror genre that I'm finding far more interesting than the bigger ones. This and The Human Vapor are missing the grand scale of something like Gorath or Rodan, but in place we get a stronger focus on character and atmosphere. That ends up combining with Honda's strong technical skills, never in doubt even in his lesser work, to create more complete packages of genre thrills that simply work better overall.
I suppose that I only have two main complaints with the film. The first is the wraparound, a pair of scenes as the one survivor of the film's events speaks, with his back to the camera from a room overlooking the Tokyo skyline (the first real modern look at Tokyo in Honda's work), laying out how many survive while giving the audience the assurance that, yes, they've paid for a horror movie. Just give it a minute because the film's real beginning is almost akin to a beach picture from the 50s as a group of rich Tokyo residents take a yacht out for a couple of days of relaxing boating. My other complaint is that there are probably two or three too many characters, several of them blending together slightly confusingly.
Anyway, the whole affair was arranged by Kasai (Yoshio Tsuchiya), the president of Kasai industries, bringing along his mistress, the television singer Mami (Kumi Mizuno), the writer of mystery novels Etsuro (Hiroshi Tachikawa), the professor of psychology Kenji (Akira Kubo), the student Akiko (Miki Yashiro), the ship's captain Naoyuki (Hiroshi Koizumi), and his first mate Senzo (Kenji Sahara). They're out having a good time, demonstrating their characters in small ways, when a storm comes up. Kasai decides, as the owner of the boat, that they'll keep on, a decision that turns sour when the storm gets too powerful, and they find themselves lost in a fog, sailing in sight of an island that they seek shelter on considering the damaged nature of the boat.
It honestly doesn't take too long for the film to start feeling like a weird, very Japanese, horror film. It's maybe twenty minutes. However, once they get to the island, it's obvious that it's not anything like normal. There are no animals to be found. The place is too quiet. They cross the landmass and find an abandoned vessel with rooms filled with weird growths all over them except the infirmary where the growth won't seemingly thrive around antiseptics. They also find some canned food hidden away, but never any sign of the former crew aside from the log which just stops without an answer.
Trapped, the seven begin to grate on each other with their different priorities, desires, and goals. Kenji is the most pro-active of them all, trying to organize hunting parties for food. Kasai just wants to buy his way through every problem. Mami plays with the men because she's bored. Naoyuki is concerned with fixing the boat. Akiko keeps to herself, all shy-like. Etsuro, perhaps because he's the writer, is the first to eat the local mushrooms, called Matango, that Kenji insists they shouldn't.
It's in this environment that weird things begin to happen. They're visited at night by some kind of man-like creature with growths all over it that may or may not have actually shown up. Kasai tries to steal food in the middle of it all, and he's only stopped by the horror he witnesses and desire to save his own skin. The thin bonds between the men fray. Tensions mount. A gun is used to threaten. People get kicked off of the ship. Bribes are attempted. People disappear and then reappear with surprising smiles and the insistence on eating mushrooms.
I really like all of this. The weirdness of the setting. The focus on characters as they deal with it. The unexplainable nature of the events (well, not unexplainable, but definitely outside the realm of possibility and easy explanation), and the abandonment of any desire to come up with scientific explanations for it. There is some early-ish dialogue about how the previous crew of the abandoned ship were studying the effects of radiation and atomic weapons, but at no point is there a scientist in a lab coat saying that radiation caused people to turn into mushrooms for two straight minutes. That's a blessing.
So, it's a horror movie. It's a very effective horror movie. I get lost in the characters, trying to keep all of them straight, and I don't like the wraparound all that much, but the rest is very solid stuff. I get into the weird atmosphere of it all as the characters go steadily insane while bizarre things unfold around them and engulf them. It's well filmed, well directed, well performed, and well put together. It's a good time at the movies.
Kingu Kongu tai Gojira (1962)
Monster mashup
Now, the monster mashups begin. Godzilla's first squaring off with another creature is the result of a script that originally pitted King Kong against Frankenstein's monster that Toho got their hands on and retooled for their marquee monster that they were discovering they could bring back repeatedly without turning off their Japanese and American audiences. They also brought back the original filmmaker behind Godzilla, Ishiro Honda, though without his original writing partner, choosing instead to use Shinichi Sekizawa, one of two writers who had become Honda's regular partner. The result is what one might expect from this period of Toho monster movies: thin, a bit (though not incredibly) silly, and with an effort to make another kind of movie in there somewhere.
The head of Pacific Pharmaceuticals, Mr. Tako (Ichiro Arishima), has decided that his media and advertising contract is not performing to standards, so he demands that the television studio create a sensation to up their ratings which should lead to more sales of the company's drugs. Here is the heart of the film, the satiric look at the Japanese television industry and its quest for ratings no matter what, and it's probably where the film works best. It's unfortunate that Sekizawa wasn't a good enough writer to bring it into the whole of the film, picking it up and dropping it from time to time as other types of film dominate for large sections of the film, but Mr. Tako doing everything he can to push the reporters into making things sensational across the action of the film provides some solid chuckles here and there.
Sakurai (Tadao Takashima) and Furue (Yu Fujiki) end up being sent to Faro Island (also the name of the place Ingmar Bergman called home for decades, but it has to just be a coincidence, right?) to investigate a mysterious spirit that the locals live in fear of. Yes, it's King Kong. They witness him battling a giant octopus and then getting so drunk that he falls asleep in a ceremony the locals provide him, giving them the perfect opportunity to get the Japanese boating crew to tie him up and lash him to a giant raft. Where the original King Kong outright ignored how to move a giant ape from one side of the world to the other, King Kong vs. Godzilla embraces it, and the sight is always inherently silly. Granted, the raft sight isn't hilarious (though the combination of man-in-suit and water just doesn't mesh all that well), there's a moment late where they transport him by giant balloon that is just...kind of hilarious.
Meanwhile, at the same time, Godzilla has decided to awaken for no reason at all, heating up the ice prison that he was trapped in at the end of Godzilla Raids Again, and he heads straight for Japan. This (so far) short series has developed a little tic of bringing back scientific characters from the previous entry to explain the science or behavior of Godzilla in the new one. Takashi Shimuri had a cameo in Godzilla Raids Again after his near-star role in Godzilla, and this time it's Dr. Shigezawa (Akihiko Hirata), who was also in Godzilla, to appear in a couple of scenes and explain Godzilla's behavior. I mean, for this weird little series in the 60s, the commitment canon is surprising.
Anyway, the two monsters have a fight, but King Kong is bested by Godzilla, leading to a retreat, some business with a girl being kidnapped by the giant ape, drugging it based on the stuff it got drunk off of on Faro Island, and then transporting him to face Godzilla again when the scientists decide that despite Kong losing his first battle maybe a day before, Kong is definitely strong enough now. It'll help if he gets miraculously struck by lightning to make him much more stronger at a down moment, too.
So, it's silly. There is some more character stuff around Sakurai's sister and Furue's fiancée (I might have mixed those up, but it just doesn't matter in the least), Fumiko (Mie Hama), but she's forgotten for long sections in favor of bits of satirical comedy around Mr. Tako and monster mash action. Focusing more purely on the satirical elements would have been a net-positive, I think.
Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects are, once again, the star of the show, but I have to say that he repeated the decision to play monster action quickly here like he did (supposedly accidentally) in Godzilla Raids Again. Moving these guys quickly makes them feel smaller, not bigger, and it makes the action itself inherently sillier. So, the suits are mostly pretty good (Godzilla is pretty good, Kong looks...not great, to be honest), and there's this wonderful continued embrace of miniature destruction. However, I just wish Tsuburaya had gone back to how to film kaiju from his first effort rather than his second.
So, it's fine. It's an excuse to pit Godzilla against another monster. The character stuff works slightly better this time than most because it has that satirical edge, even if it doesn't really go very far. So, it's decent, on the brighter side of this kind of film in this era. It entertains slightly. It's just, you know, not good.
Yôsei Gorasu (1962)
Science nonsense
I never knew that Ishiro Honda made a prequel to Moonfall. Okay, this is slightly less stupid, but it's still pretty stupid. Also, I much prefer miniature effects to CGI, so this has some charm to it in overdelivering special effects. This isn't near the top of Honda's science-fiction oeuvre, but it does provide a nice platform for Eiji Tsuburaya to showcase his skills on some kind of weird ideas.
A star, named Gorath, has been noted as heading towards our solar system, and the crew of the Japanese led spaceship, the JX-1 Hawk, change course from their mission to first study Saturn and collect data on the mysterious object. They discover that it's 6,000 times as dense as Earth but a quarter of the size, and that it's headed straight for Earth as they plunge to their deaths to collect the data and transmit it back. On Earth, scientists both nationally and internationally through the UN discuss the situation. The only real ideas to note here is the continued self-impression of the Japanese people as leaders of the free world, being the most advanced in terms of science since their rockets are further along than the rest of the world's, and they take on a key leadership role in the UN. So, despite being ravaged into the Stone Age in WWII because of their military adventurism gone wrong, Japan is still the smartest, best, and most successful country on the planet. Sure.
Anyway, the key scientist (and honestly the only character worth mentioning since they're almost all just thin caricatures) is Dr. Tazawa (Ryo Ikebe) who comes up with the plan to use nuclear power (Honda's anti-nuclearism seems to have begun to soften with Mothra, and that continues here) to build...giant rockets on the South Pole to move the Earth out of Gorath's path. I mean...that's stupid. That's real stupid. That's an idea that Roland Emmerich would say, "That's too far." And yet, the innocent nature of its presentation, helped in no small part by the miniature work, helps save it from being completely ludicrous. It edges into camp just enough so that it's not a total disaster.
There's business about getting another ship up to collect more data (for reasons), and the little bit of a love story between Tatsuma (Akira Kubo) and Tomoko (Yumi Shirakawa), daughter to prominent paleontologist Kensuke (Takashi Shimura) who is friends with Tazawa. It's thin, deals with Tomoko's old love for one of the first ship's crewmembers, and feels like a weird little distraction in the whole thing. It's a half-hearted attempt to inject human drama in what is ultimately a procedural film about professionals doing a professional job to overcome a problem.
It's just that everything about the professional job and the problem is ridiculous while everyone takes it very seriously. I mean, that just limits my enjoyment of the whole thing, but, again, so much is carried out by those charming miniatures from Tsuburaya. There are the rockets, the super-dense star (that seems to have been some kind of inspiration for the antagonist in The Fifth Element), the South Pole base (which is rather large, to be honest), and even a bit of Tokyo when destruction needs to happen. It's a lot, and there's quick movement from one thing to the next, keeping it from being boring.
There was one moment where I almost just lost what little interest I had in the film, and that's when the monster on the poster appeared. The rockets have fired, and it somehow wakes up a dinosaur who does some damage. "Is this what this movie is going to become? Another Godzilla?" Well, it was dead moments later, and the film refocused. It's a weird moment, at best some kind of wink between nuclear power and monsters that created the previous kaiju, but then we're back to the good ridiculous nonsense: Japan leading the world in an engineering effort to shift the planet's orbit with absolutely no negative side effects whatsoever.
At least the special effects through all of this are charming and kind of wonderful.
So, it looks expensive. There's a decent amount of English dialogue including the final declaration of victory, indicating that this was made with an American audience in mind. It's charming to look at but never engaging while also never rising above its innate silliness. It's not good, is what I'm saying, but it's not a complete waste of time. I've seen far, far worse mindless entertainments. I'll take this over Moonfall any day.
Uchû daisensô (1959)
Starring: Special Effects...in SPACE!!!!
Ishiro Honda returns to the cinemas with another big, special effect spectacle ala The Mysterians. I'd say that this is a step down from the previous film, not having the same kind of narrative verve (the modest amount that The Mysterians demonstrated) and is more of a straightforward sci-fi adventure. That could work if, again, there were characters of any depth to be had, the kind of lynchpin necessary to bring audiences into an adventure. But, alas, the script by Shinichi Sekizawa is just too thin to accomplish that.
Alien ships attack a Japanese space station, destroying it and causing a panic in the upper-echelons of the world governments. In addition, strange weather events dealing with cold are doing terrible things like lifting entire bridges off the ground, sending trains to crash in the valleys below. There's a surprising amount of time trying to explain how cold temperatures lessen gravity (nonsense), the sort of science deification that is sadly constant in Honda's science fiction films which mixes really badly with the fact that the science itself is, well, nonsense. Anyway, the film is better when it just accepts nonsense without trying to explain it, like when Dr. Ahmed (George Wyman) gets remote controlled by the aliens, turning him into a saboteur. What's the science behind that? Doesn't matter. It just happens. That's better.
Anyway, the governments of the world decide that the only action is to send up two rockets to the moon, where the alien radio signals are originating. The first is commanded by a Japanese commander (Minoru Takada), and the second is commanded by Dr. Richardson (Len Stanford). The inclusion of the American commander is interesting mostly because he's barely in the film, but he gets prominence near the beginning and the end, like some sort of half-thought-out sop to American audiences and distributors who were eating this stuff up at the time. It sort of reminds me of the common practice these days of including minor Chinese characters in big budget films like The Martian to appease the Chinese market and funding.
Anyway, the actual main character is probably Major Ichiro (Ryo Ikebe), the Japanese commander's second hand man. He seems to be the focus, but this is such a plot-heavy film with hardly any sense of character that it doesn't really matter. He's strong, professional man in the middle of special effects. There's also his love interest (I guess) Etsuko (Kyoko Anzai) who accompanies the team to the moon. The only real bit of actual character work goes to Iwomura (Yoshio Tsuchiya) who gets controlled by the aliens (intermittently, only when they actively send commands). He's the navigator, instructed to sabotage the mission at certain points (but never the best times to completely destroy the ship because plot), and he feels guilt at his lack of command of his own actions. It culminates in a nice moment in the first of the two action spectacular finales that doesn't quite seem to make the most sense, but it's fine.
That leads me to the actual appeal of this film: the special effects. Like most of Honda's films in this vein, the main attraction is Eiji Tsuburaya's model work, and there's a lot of it here. This was obviously an expensive film at the time (probably a reason for the sort of prominent and out of place American character, a potential necessity of funding), and Tsuburaya throws a lot at the screen. The rocket launches, the alien base on the moon, the extended fight on the surface, the counterattack on Earth, it's a lot, and it's genuinely fun. There's a lot going on, and it's inventive and just a joy to watch.
So, the plot is threadbare but functional, an excuse for special effects. The characters are threadbare and don't take up too much screentime (except the early scenes when scientists try to explain stuff which is...please stop). However, the film has its focus on what it does best: models doing action and science fiction things. It's a clear line through the action from one beat to the next, and the characters almost never get in the way. It's an expensive film of modest narrative ambitions, but it manages those with flare and fun.
I mean, it's not quite good, but it's decently amusing for long stretches.
Mosura (1961)
Decently entertaining
The first kaiju film from Honda that actually feels like it owes something to the original King Kong, Mothra was Toho's efforts at appealing explicitly to the female part of the movie-going audience. You see, Mothra is a girl this time. And there's singing. Other than that, it's pretty typical of this era in terms of kaiju action. The character work is thinner than it needs to be. The action is big and brash and fun. There's an effort at a different kind of movie for a while because Honda already seemed bored of kaiju movies when he started making them. It comes together in a decently entertaining package that doesn't quite work totally but is a somewhat fun time while it lasts.
A ship wrecks in a storm off the coast of Infant Island, and a rescue operation finds four survivors on the coast. This is remarkable considering the levels of radiation there due to atomic bomb testing (yup, there it is). They attribute their survival to a juice that the locals gave them, initiating an effort by the Japanese government to try and organize an exploratory and scientific team to see what's going on in the island's interior. They invite the involvement of the Rolisican government. What is Rolisica? It's a combination of how the Japanese say Russia and America, but mostly it's just a thinly veiled America (the movie ends in New Kirk City, not Kirkcow). Anyway, the Japanese government wants Dr. Shinichi Chujo (Hiroshi Koizumi) to be part of the time since he was part of the Rolisican government's previous expedition. There's a bit where he's shy about having his picture taken by two reporters, Fukuda (Frankie Sakai) and Michi (Kyoko Kagawa). It leads to nothing other than a reveal of stubble on his face, though.
The expedition is led by Clark Nelson (Jerry Ito), a Rolisican who's obviously not trustworthy from the moment we see him. I think the film is perhaps most interesting during the actual expedition. It's like a natural adventure where professionals go into a strange new place and discover strange new sites. There are strange plants, strange rock formations, strange words etched into rock. All of this is given a lighter tone by including Fukuda who sneaks on board the ship as a cabin boy and gets accepted as part of the expedition as long as he promises to not write about it (any excuse to keep these characters around, it seems). The central strange sight is a pair of diminutive princesses (Yumi and Emi Ito).
One of my biggest problems with the film is how a bunch of the elements never seem to come together into a cohesive whole, and Nelson becoming greedy at the prospect of becoming a stage producer with these little princesses is probably the biggest example. According to the dialogue, he's actually a meteorologist. I mean, it's a leap that the film never tries to bridge. He's just evil and wants to put the princesses on stage (this is where the connection to the original King Kong is most apparent). There's also a weirdness where there was obviously a late editing choice to get Nelson kidnapping the princesses at a different point, but not that different. It seems like, originally, he just went back at night while the ship was just off the coast and picked them up, but the film puts the scene after they get back to Japan. I suppose it's supposed to paper over the idea that he'd have the princesses without anyone noticing on a closed ship for days or weeks (I'd imagine there are deleted scenes around it), but it's still weird to see it play out.
The film then focuses on Nelson's successful efforts to make money off the princesses singing, but they are telepathic and singing back to the other natives of Infant Island (all regular sized for some reason), a song they use to wake up the titular Mothra. We get lost in some business of Chujo, Fukuda, and Michi trying to convince Nelson to let the princesses go. There's also a bit about coming up with a material that will block their telepathic powers that Nelson ends up using to hide the fact that he's fleeing Japan for New Kirk City. All this time, Mothra steadily awakes.
Now, in terms of the monster action (Eiji Tsuburaya is always the star of these), this is interesting because it's the first in Honda's filmography where the monster has multiple forms. The first is the larval stage, erupting from the giant egg, swimming across the sea, and heading towards Tokyo, the last place she sensed the princesses. She causes destruction, the Japanese defense forces unable to make a dent in her thick skin, until she gets to the Tokyo Tower and forms a cocoon. Her life cycle for such a large monster is really fast, but monster movie. Let's get on with it.
I would just say that monster action happens with Mothra developing her wings, flying across the world, and leveling a good part of New Kirk City, but there's an extra bit in the resolution where Chujo recognizes a similarity between one of the prominent symbols found on the island and a cross on top of a church, haloed by the sun. Normally, if you do this sort of thing, especially with one of the most recognizable symbols on the planet, you're doing it to draw some sort of comparison. I was reminded of the 1976 version of King Kong which had a visual comparison between the World Trade Center in NYC and some large rock formations on Skull Island. That felt like coincidence and a direction to look for Kong. This, though? It feels like there's supposed to be some kind of intended meaning. If I were being generous, I'd say it's an implication that Christianity is right in some way, but this is a Japanese film written by Shinichi Sekizawa who never seemed to put meaning into his films one way or the other. It just ends up feeling random, but the use is so prominent. It's the second big thing in the film where stuff just doesn't come together in ways that it feels like it should.
Anyway, the monster action is inventive and good (also adorable, I love miniatures). The character work is thin but functional except for Nelson who has some logical leaps in characterization. It looks good, moves quickly, and has some nice sights along the way. It's decently entertaining as it plays out, but it really could have used a rewrite.
Gasu ningen dai 1 gô (1960)
A hidden gem worthy of reappraisal
Well, this is a surprise. I did not expect to so thoroughly enjoy The Human Vapor. A curious mixture of film noir, The Invisible Man, The Phantom of the Opera, and even a soupcon of His Girl Friday, this genre-bending horror film from Ishiro Honda is his most effective and entertaining film since he got stuck in the science fiction ghetto. A lot of credit has to go to the script by Takeshi Kimura who had written some of Honda's better science fiction fare over the previous few years, so it's nice to see that Honda's confident filmmaking supported by a script that mostly gets things right.
A bank robber is foiling the police, namely Detective Okamoto (Tatsuya Mihashi). The robber gets the money, leaves no trace of his presence (including fingerprints or footprints), and vanishes from the car crash scene during his flight. The car crashed near the house of semi-retired Noh dancer Fujichiyo Kasuga (Kaoru Yachigusa) where her live-in, elderly servant Jiya (Bokuzen Hidari) insists no one has been seen in or near the house other than the two all day. Okamoto tells his suspicions that Kasuga must be involved somehow to his girlfriend, the reporter Kyoko (Keiko Sata) (her scenes seem to be influenced directly by Howard Hawks' newspaper film) and his superiors at the police station. So begins the film's feel of film noir as Okamoto trails Kasuga, a femme fatale, and investigates seemingly disparate paths towards one mystery. It's quiet with a bit of tension that feels appropriate for the opening of a noirish mystery and thriller.
There's also a surprising reticence to jump into over-explanations of nonsense science. In fact, we don't even get an explanation for the bank robberies until halfway through the film. Honda and Kimura show a really strong amount of restraint before jumping into Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects, establishing character to build the story upon. I suppose the only complaint I have with this opening is that the relationship between Kyoko and Okamoto is too thinly drawn, like it needed one full scene of them being romantic instead of buddy-buddy. It's a small part of the film since the romance is more of a character-based subplot than the main story, so it's easy to forgive. However, there's a moment late in the film that relies on the relationship that doesn't hit as well as it should.
It takes until about halfway into the film before the man responsible shows up, Mizuno (Yoshio Tshuchiya), whom the newspapers end up calling the gas man since he can literally turn his body into gas at will. His demonstration to the police is interesting because if you take the perspective that this is a science-fiction film, it's frustrating because the police should know the rules that weird things are gonna happen, right? Except they don't know that, so it's this weird moment where we have to push aside all of our knowledge of movies to accept perfectly acceptable actions by police. It's not really a criticism, just an observation.
Anyway, I love Mizuno as a bad guy. The inspiration from The Invisible Man extends well beyond just the use of empty suits walking sometimes. It goes to how Mizuno acts and the reasons behind it. There's a mad scientist bit, Mizuno being the victim of Dr. Sano (Fuyuki Murakami) and his experiments shown in a brief flashback (with mercifully no effort to explain the nonsense science), which is a tie to James Whale's film, but Mizuno also has a line about how he's no longer human. He doesn't need to follow human morality which is exactly the sort of madness that plagued Claude Rains' character, derived from the eponymous character in Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse films. It doesn't extend in dialogue beyond that, but it provides the foundation for his actions and madness.
His plot, though, is to fund the comeback by Kasuga to the stage, stealing the money and giving to her to put on a large recital that should cost at least ten million yen. There's a plot to try and capture and kill the gas man who can filter under doors at will, introduced by another minor scientist character who gives no real detail on it (mercifully), allowing greater focus on our characters as we go to the ending. The real emotional core of the film ends up being Kasuga (making the underdevelopment of the relationship between Okamoto and Kyoko slightly less important), and it's a surprisingly strong culmination of her and the overall story.
So, I have some small issues with a couple of character moments. The other is Mizuno's affectation towards Kasugo is more implied than shown (there's a moment where Okamoto announces it when he first meets the guy that feels off), but otherwise this film is really, really good. It's an homage to classic Universal monster movies, film noir, and Howard Hawks that manages to feel alive on its own. This is, I think, deeply underappreciated. It's really good. I'm a fan.
Daikaijû Baran (1958)
Dull retread
What if Ishiro Honda made a cheap Godzilla ripoff for Japanese television that was quickly recut into a feature length motion picture? Would you believe me if I told you the result was not very good? That it does nothing to set itself apart from the movie it's copying? Well, as can be said for pretty much every Honda monster film, the special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya are the star, even if Varan himself ends up looking like Godzilla's brother from another mother.
A pair of entomologists go into what is called the Tibet of Japan, a remote region in the inner mountains of the nation, where a butterfly only known to live on mainland Asia has been found. Does this butterfly have anything to do with the inevitable monster? Nope. We do get a knowing wink at the audience when one of them says that it's too early for monsters as they drive out from the small village, so that's nice, knowing that Honda and his writer Shinichi Sekizawa are savvy enough to know not to reveal their monster too early. Anyway, the pair are killed in mysterious circumstances, mostly after they feel an earthquake that isn't an earthquake. This sends the sister of one of them, Yuriko (Ayumi Sonoda), to their lead professor, Dr. Sugimoto (Koreya Senda), and attaches herself to the expedition to investigate what happened. The investigation seems to be one person, Motohiko (Fumindo Matsuo), until Yuriko joins which then convinces Kenji (Kozo Nomura), another entomologist, to join. So, that's weird. Anyway.
They go to the village, learn that the locals worship a god named Baradagi, and insist on investigating despite the warnings. They end up chasing after a small boy who is, in turn, chasing after his dog, and awaken the wrath of Baradagi. Of course, there are efforts to properly categorize this monster, labeling him as Varanapode, hence the name Varan, which is de rigeur at this point in these films, but thankfully it doesn't last too long.
However, the film jumps right into the whole, "Japan must use all of its terrifying military might to destroy this thing that was being all alone and isolated until scientists stuck their nose in a place they were told not to go." You know, for a genre of films that almost deify scientists, it's the scientists who start most of the problems. The overall theme is, however, a plea for responsible science, but the scientists who start things never seem to learn a lesson and often are strategizing how to create larger weapons (never nuclear) to defeat the thing that they started. It's weird.
Anyway, irritating Varan just leads to him deciding to fly away (he has flying squirrel-like wings which seem insufficient for flight, but whatever, at least we don't have 3 minutes explaining it), and he heads towards Tokyo. The military has to get on alert to fight it off, and we have our standard look at how conventional weapons have no effect. They must come up with another weapon! Well, good thing that Kenji has developed an explosive that burns twenty times hotter than TNT! (But no nuclear, remember, nuclear burns a whole lot hotter than that.) They have to use it! But it isn't effective! They have to find another way!
Seriously, this is just rote. There's nothing particularly interesting about anything that happens. The characters are, again, threadbare, having something close to stories around them that are mostly ignored (Kenji and Yuriko become an item, I guess, not that it matters). The plotting is just standard giant monster stuff. The highlight is, once again, Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects. Sure, Varan is essentially Godzilla with some fleshy stuff under his arms, spikes along his spine, and the ability to crawl on all-fours, but he's decently realized and looks pretty good on screen. The destruction is always nice to see, the embrace of miniatures making it all the more adorable, and there's a good amount of it towards the end.
It's just that there's nothing else of interest to really talk about. The story around it isn't so much horribly handled as just boringly repeated. The characters are largely just there. The performers do what they can, but they have so little to do that they don't really make an impression. At least Varan himself looks decent as he stomps on tiny buildings.
That's something.
Bijo to ekitai ningen (1958)
Good monster, underwritten gangsters
Moving away from giant monsters for a moment, Ishiro Honda brings Eiji Tsuburaya's special effects skills on a smaller, perhaps more effective, scale in service to a monster movie disguised as a gangster film. It's a curious mix where we get Honda's now expected over-explanation of scientific nonsense in combination with underwritten characters who never feel terribly distinct. The spectacle is on a much smaller scale and with less screentime, leaving these thin characters to fill in the gap which creates a less enticing overall genre experience. I mean, it basically functions as it lurches from one bit of special effects to the next, but at least the special effects are pretty good.
Misaki (Hisaya Ito) is running through the rain with a parcel of heroin when he suddenly gasps in pain, shoots downward, and vanishes, his clothes left behind. The police are baffled at the happening, the investigation being led by Tominaga (Akihito Hirata). They are approached by Dr. Masada (Kenji Sahara), a specialist in radiation, who has a theory that Misaki was dissolved because of radiation from H-bomb tests off the Japanese coast. At the same time, Tominaga is watching Misaki's girlfriend, Chikako Arai (Yumi Shirakawa), a lounge singer who purportedly knows nothing of Misaki's work with organized crime smuggling drugs.
So, this being a Honda science-fiction film, the scientist is definitely going to be right, dragging the civilian authorities towards the truth, and the film is going to take a good amount of time laying out why all this silly nonsense purported to be science is right and true. I just don't understand this need to try and prove to the audience that men being turned into gelatinous monsters who crawl up and down walls and turn people into water (or other monsters, it's just a bit unclear) when it's so obviously nonsense. I mean, it's part of an effort to scandalize H-bomb testing and atomic power in general, but by putting such weight onto stuff that's obviously not true about what radiation does feels counter-productive to the point. It desensitizes the audience to the dangers of nuclear power rather than sells them an actual case. This is why combining silly genre thrills with serious points about the world is a tricky balance to pull off.
Anyway, most of the movie is actually about the investigation around Misaki that touches on the organized crime angle. It's honestly not great. There's no strong sense of anyone in the organization, so the investigation feels half-hearted. It ends up focusing on Uchida (Makoto Sato), another low-level gangster who pretends to be eaten by the monster, leaving his clothes behind, and going after Chikako because he desires her. Since Dr. Masada and Chikako had grown close during the investigation, it provides what little character-based thrill is in the film, but none of the character-based stuff is terribly well-done. But, at least it's there. There's something. It's not great, but it's there.
The highlight is the monster itself. Filmed inventively using upside-down sets from all angles to simulate movement along with a weird ghostly image at heightened moments, the monster is surprisingly effective for being just a glob of goo that snakes around on the ground. It's helped in no small part by the actual visual of the bodies dissolving when attacked. It's quite gruesome in a non-gory way, and it's very effective. Honda saves the visual for later in the film, not giving it away too early, which would have been a great thing if what filled those early minutes were effective storytelling. But, it's, at best, moderately functional storytelling that precedes that reveal.
So, I wouldn't go so far as to call it bad. It's interesting to see Honda squeeze in another genre into his monster movie, implying that he had some desire to work outside the realm that his producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, was forcing him into all of the time. The monster stuff is really good. There's a flashback scene to the shipping tanker where it all started that's decently well-done. However, the gangster stuff is massively underwritten, the characters are paper-thin, and the overall plot is nothing terribly exciting while the thematic point is degraded to the same level of silliness as the science that "explains" the monster. It's a mixed bag, but Honda has made worse. There's some halfway decent entertainment to be had in this film, but only halfway.
Chikyû Bôeigun (1957)
B-movie fun
Up until the final ten minutes or so, I was a bit more mixed on this science fiction effort by Ishiro Honda. It's silly but doesn't realize it. It's got that singular obsession with dull scientists that Honda has included with every monster movie he's made so far. It's both underexplained and overexplained at the same time. But, with ten minutes to go, a character is reintroduced in a narratively interesting way, and it pushed my appreciation up just a bit more. This, reportedly the personal favorite of Honda himself from his own work, is a small gem from a shaky and uneven filmography.
In a small village at the base of Mount Fuji, astrophysicist Ryoichi (Akihiko Hirata) insists on doing his research despite no seeming reason for it at that particular place, causing confusion in his friend Joji (Kenji Sahara), his sister Etsuko (Yumi Shirakawa), and his fiancée Hiroko (Momoko Kochi). Before we get time to settle on these questions, though, presented during a local and colorful festival, the forest surrounding the village is consumed in flames. A few days later, an earthquake eats up the entire town and, supposedly, Ryoichi himself who stayed behind to further investigate. Out of this hole comes a giant dome, populated by the eponymous Mysterians, an extraterrestrial race that come from a planet Ryoichi had theorized was once in between Mars and Jupiter. The translation around celestial phenomena seems to be not great, but I think it's supposed to have once been the Asteroid belt. The subtitles say that it was original a star, which would make no sense, so I think it's really just a translation issue and not that Honda and his screenwriter, Takeshi Kimura, think that asteroids come from stars.
Anyway, the Mysterians come with a message that they only want three square kilometers of land for their own, and Japan is having none of it. They immediately set out to attack. One of the issues I have with the film is how we are expected to assume that the Japanese efforts are just. I think it may just be a "defense of the homeland" sort of thing, but there isn't even that kind of explanation given. No one says, "Not Japan! Go to China and displace those dogs," or anything. It's just, the Mysterians show up, and it's time to fight them. And fight them the Japanese forces do, helped not at all by the fact that the Mysterians' first appearance is a giant robot that comes crashing out of a mountain and causing havoc (put in to take advantage of that whole Godzilla craze for giant things stomping on stuff that Honda started with Godzilla).
The regular joy of these Honda monster/science fiction films is the special effects, and it's obvious that Honda had a good budget to play with here. The miniature work is very good, and there's a lot of it. Special flying ships. Lasers. Rolling antennae that shoot big beams of tech that are definitely not nuclear powered (it's an assumption going in at this point that Honda makes non-nuclear, at best, movies, if not outright anti-nuclear, necessitating often ridiculous leaps in new technology for characters to use). But, aside from some brief negotiations, television broadcasts from Ryoichi saying that the Mysterians are truly peaceful and humanity should do what it can to appease them, and some high-level discussions in the military and civilian government (including some international discussions with the UN) about what to do, the focus of the back half of the film really is those special effects.
The talk is mostly just excuses to use new-looking technology to try and explode things, and I do get a kick out of it. It honestly wasn't enough to save the film overall for me since pretty much the entirety of the human-side of the storytelling was dull, but I was having a decent enough time. And then, Ryoichi's friends sneak into the Mysterian base, and we get a reintroduction of a character who finally provides the rationale for the Japanese people to uniformly oppose the presence of the Mysterians, and it was a nice narrative effort to provide some small levels of complexity and even what one might consider a plot twist into things. Well, let's just say that I appreciated that a lot more than the inventor of the oxygen destroyer killing himself at the end of Godzilla as an effort to appease the guilty Japanese conscience.
So, it's colorful fun that almost doesn't have enough to come together as a whole but pulls it off in the end. It's not anywhere close to Honda's best film (I have to assume that Honda was talking about his science-fiction output when he called The Mysterians his favorite, purposefully separating them from his melodramas and war films because those are regularly far superior). However, in terms of his science-fiction work, it's a bit more thoughtfully crafted and comes together decently well. Also, I always get a chuckle at seeing Takashi Shimura in a film like this. It's so beneath him, but he was a contract player at Toho and was game for anything the producers assigned him.
Kono futari ni sachi are (1957)
Wonderful, Ozu-like melodrama from Honda
One of the last times Ishiro Honda would find time in his schedule of making monster movies to make something small again, Be Happy, These Two Lovers is the smallest film that Honda had made. It's more in line with the output of Yasujiro Ozu than anything Honda had made up to that point. It's also a wonderfully accomplished little family melodrama about two young people who marry despite their parents' objections and the travails of an early marriage. The focus on character is clear and precise, laying the groundwork for a marvelous bit of pathos by the end.
Hisao Wakao (Hiroshi Koizumi) works in the sales department of a fishery. One day, his branch manager, Nishigaki (Takeo Oikawa) asks him to marry his daughter, a girl he's met once. The same day, he receives a letter from his mother (Yuriko Hanabusa) telling him that she's arranged for a marriage interview with another girl. In response, Wakao walks up to Masako (Yumi Shirakawa), a girl in the office, invites her to a movie, and tells her his predicament. He loves her, and she is quick to return the feeling. The problem for Masako is that, after the death of her older brother, her father (Takashi Shimura) has become extremely protective of his two daughters, the older of whom, Chizuko (Keiko Tsushima), married Toshio (Toshiro Mifune) against her father's wishes.
Wakao's insistence on pursuing the desires of his heart with Masako instead of any potential benefits to his career by marrying the branch manager's daughter, an offer that goes to Nakajima (Yoshifumi Tajima) instead, is the defining choice of the film, and everything else feeds from that. The first half is defined by Masako's father trying to exert his will on her, Chizuko and Toshio offering what help they can, and the central pair going against every outside word to do what they want for their happiness. It ends with their wedding, and I've never gotten choked up hearing the Bridal Chorus by Wagner during a wedding scene, but the way Honda has it develop, with Toshio started it on his horn and it developing from there plays just right.
The second half of the film is on the two trying to make their way, on their own, in their troubling few weeks and months of their marriage. It starts with Wakao seeing the potential promotion go to Nakajima. He ruminates with Kosugi (Hirota Kisaragi), the section chief forced to move to Osaka to make room for Nakajima to become the new section chief in Tokyo. At his going away party, Kosugi decides to take a swing at Nakajima for his insolence at the whole situation, an altercation that Wakao gets in the middle of leading to him giving up his position at a time when there are 700,000 unemployed men in Japan. There are communication problems since Wakao doesn't want to tell Masako of his shame. Money grows increasingly tight. Their relationship continues to strain as it becomes obvious to Masako that Wakao is hiding things from her, including his frustration with the overall situation stemming from his decision to marry her.
The film's resolution is such a wonderful collection of events as the two look through their situation, get advice from Chizuko and Toshio, and reach a life-affirming place that feels wonderful as it plays out. Really, this is the sort of thing I was looking forward to when I decided to check out as much of the work of Ishiro Honda I could. I had this feeling that his real worth as an artist was in these smaller movies, and it pains me that I cannot find more of them. Lovetide, People of Tokyo, Goodbye, A Young Tree. These are the films I wanted to discover most, especially as a contrast to the monster mashes that defined Honda's career. If Be Happy, These Two Lovers is any indication, there's a wealth of artistic merit that Toho is simply letting languish in their vaults.
But that's a larger narrative.
The narrative here in this film is intimate, small-scale, and wonderfully realized. The central performance is Koizumi as Wakao, and he gets a lot of space to play his restrained emotions well. Mifune's part as Masako's brother-in-law allows him to charm his way through his scenes. Shimura has a surprising harshness as Masako's father as well. Honda films everything cleanly and intelligently, and, despite the obvious comparisons to Ozu, films far too actively to ever be confused with the quiet Japanese master.
Still, the overall package is a delight. A clear-eyed melodrama with restrained, Japanese form, Be Happy, These Two Lovers was a very good little discovery in the middle of a career that pushed in a very different direction. Honda was much more than monster mayhem. Now, though, that we're going to have nothing but monster mayhem for most of the rest of his career, let's make it good monster mayhem.
Sora no daikaijû Radon (1956)
Take out the categorization. Leave the monster action.
The most basely competent of the kaiju movies spawned from the first Godzilla film's success and in Ishiro Honda's output within that genre, Rodan does the basics of monster movie mayhem well enough. The middle act sidelines the action for a weird reason, though, but Honda's first color film is a decently entertaining look at another giant dinosaur waking up in the bowels of the earth to wreck havoc upon the unsuspecting people of Japan.
Where I admire the film most is in its first act. There's a very conscious effort at building tension and mystery that starts from a surprisingly human place: two men who don't like each other at work fighting. The workplace is a coal mine in the hills of the Japanese countryside, and the two men are Goro (Rinsaku Ogata) and Yoshi (Jiro Suzukawa). Things get heightened when Yoshi gets found dead in the mines and Goro is nowhere to be seen. Obviously, the immediate thought is that Goro gave Yoshi the slash across the head that killed him, and the film becomes something of a murder mystery for its opening ten minutes or so. Of course, we all saw the poster going into the theater. We know that this isn't just some little drama about two miners who dislike each other. There will be a giant flying monster at some point, but Honda and his writers are interested in building up the situation.
The investigation leads to huge larvae that kill more workers, breaks out of the mine, terrorizes the little mining village, and attracts increasing attention. The one worker who survives the attack is Shigeru (Kenji Sahara), one of the mine's engineers. He lives but has complete amnesia which drives us headfirst into the complete drag of a second act. As the creature grows to full form, gaining the name Rodan while it sprouts giant wings and flies at supersonic speeds, we're mostly watching Shigeru try to regain his memory. Why? Because Dr. Kashiwagi (Akihiko Hirata) needs to properly categorize Rodan as Meganulon. Why is the middle act so completely obsessed with this? Why do we spend any time at all beyond a quick scene designed to give this large slice of silliness a modicum of realism (the need for realistic explanations around giant monsters in giant monster movies always confuses me)? Why does everything seem to completely stop while Dr. Kashiwagi goes over bits of information pulled from random witnesses, including a picture taken of a wing and a talon, to try and properly categorize the creature? It's such a dud of an act, and it takes at least twenty minutes.
However, it's just a stopping point until the actual mayhem gets unleashed. Sure, Rodan (well, technically multiple of them) are flying around, causing some havoc, but the film has spent most of the previous act watching Dr. Kashiwagi look at pictures in books while Shigeru shivers at the sight of his fiancée because he can't remember anything. However, with the categorization question solved after Shigeru regains his memory and we get a flashback to his discovery in the mines, all out monster destruction happens. Sure, we can see the wire holding up the Rodan costume as he tears down buildings or fights off planes from the Japanese Self-Defense Force.
It's big. It's gawdy. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but there's a lot of booms and I like it. This is the purpose of monster movies, and Honda along with Tsuburaya deliver it all with clarity and style in Honda's first feature film with color.
I wonder if the need for the categorization chapter is because there "needs" to be a human element. One day, I'll find a kaiju movie that is literally nothing but kaiju and their antics, but it was never going to happen at this point in history.
That's not to say that it's impossible to make compelling human characters in a kaiju movie. However, Rodan doesn't accomplish it with what it presents. The amnesia thing is fake (all amnesia in fiction is fake, and writers should never use it ever), and the categorization stuff is boring and serves no purpose. However, the film does start with the conflict between the two miners which is a fascinating little way to bring us into the story. I liked that quite a bit.
So, it doesn't quite work as an overall package, hindered massively by its dull as dishwater middle, but the opening and close are surprisingly strong. I'd throw it on again for a light entertainment now and again.
Jû jin yuki otoko (1955)
There's some decent monster action, at least
Ishiro Honda, fresh off of making Lovetide instead of the first Godzilla sequel (Godzilla Raids Again), was given a similar task by Toho: another monster film. Instead of a giant reptile tearing up major Japanese cities, Honda directs the story of a slightly larger ape-like monster in the Japanese mountains. This isn't exactly a huge step up in the monster genre, being a confused combination of three storylines inelegantly woven together in ways that make the whole point of the film muddy at best. I get the sense that this script was thrown together very quickly, the production rushed, and no one was particularly invested in the exercise.
A mountaineering club is coming back from the mountains after an adventure that has left them shaken. They get interviewed by a journalist, and we get the whole thing in flashback (it's a structural decision that I don't think contributes anything to the film). Anyway, the club had gone into the mountains months previous for skiing when one of their group, Takeno, disappeared with mysterious large tracks marking where he went. The winter weather was too much, though, and the club returned after the spring thaw to look again. This group is led by Professor Tanaka (Nobuo Nakamura) and features most prominently Machiko (Momoko Kochi), Takeno's sister, and her lover Iijima (Akira Takarada). At the same time, another group, led by Oba (Yoshio Kosugi), are animal trappers looking to find the mysterious animal and bring it to a circus.
So, this would be enough for a story. Two opposing groups looking for the same animal with completely different purposes. However, instead of just some lonely yeti in the mountains who may or may not have a young Japanese student prisoner for months, we also get the introduction of a remote, isolated, and primitive village that calls the yeti the Old Master. This is honestly just one major subplot too many for a simple monster movie, and the plight of this remote village in competition with the rest of the story, especially the fate of Takeno, being the actual focus. It seems odd to say that the fate of a village is less interesting than the fate of a single missing student, but considering the point of view of the story and the general focus, yeah, it is.
And point of view is just a shambles here. The story is being told by the students who have their own recollections and the journal left behind by Takeno, but they're telling bits of the story that they never saw, mostly around Oba and his men. Without the flashback structure, this doesn't matter at all. With the flashback structure, it's weird and makes pieces that should fit together easily enough at a basic level no longer fit together. It's also a relatively minor complaint with the film.
The bigger complaints I have are about how isolated the three stories are from each other. The two that are the most connected are between Oba's men and the village through the young woman Chika (Akemi Negishi) since Chika actually leads Oba to find the yeti and the yeti's son. This action leads to the yeti being very mad and tearing up the village itself. However, the mountaineering club is completely disconnected from it. Hard cut all of this out and, well, you get a 40 minute movie. However, it would be a clear series of actions of the club getting into the dangerous valley and finding their way to a cave where the yeti resides. It still wouldn't be a smooth action because they do follow the village fire to get there, but heck, it could be just a random fire.
The other problem inherent in the film is that there are just so many characters in the limited runtime. Oba has henchmen who get attention. The mountaineering club is more than the three characters named. The village has an elder. And then there's the journalist on top of that. All of these characters have to compete for screentime with monster action and some beautiful photography of the Japanese mountains.
That being said, the monster action is...decent. It's not great like the attack on Tokyo in Godzilla, but the yeti itself looks decent (its face having a surprising amount of articulation), and the action around it has some skill. That's helped in no small part that even though the script is a mess, Honda can still frame things nicely and gets some good compositions pretty consistently, especially at the attack on the village.
Apparently the film is some kind of embarrassment for Toho not because it's kind of terrible but because its portrayal of the mountain people is supposed to be a manifestation of the Burakumin. It's supposedly kind of racist at this point. Honestly, it should probably be more ashamed because this was a rushed product that completely wasted a high quality talent like Honda to take advantage of a quick fad poorly. But it looks decently and the monster action is fine. That's not much, but it's not nothing.
Gojira no gyakushû (1955)
Lowered ambitions
Ishiro Honda was off making Lovetide (a film that I cannot track down) when Godzilla became such a smash hit in Japan, leading Toho Studios to rely on the talents of Motoyoshi Oda (as well as returning special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya) to execute the quick and dirty sequel to their unexpected success. Gone are the pretentions of any of this silly kaiju action meaning anything, replaced by basic, largely unremarkable character work in between monster action. The lowered ambitions work in the film's favor to some limited extent, especially in comparison to the previous film. I mean, it's not a good film, but it's fine.
Some time after the death of Godzilla in the seas off the coast of Japan, Shoichi Tsukioka (Hiroshi Koizumi) works as a pilot helping fishing vessels find their next quarry when his fellow pilot Kobayashi (Minoru Chiaki) crashes on a small island. Rescuing him, they witness another Godzilla fighting a giant monster called Anguirus. After a brief cameo by Takashi Shimura to recap the previous film's "science" (including film clips!), the authorities of Japan have to figure out how to deal with continued attacks from the giant monsters living just off the coast. They settle on using flares to attract the monsters out to sea whenever they show up.
What is both kind of interesting and also a dead weight on the film is that the little character beats just keep going (save for one important instance). Shoichi is sort of engaged to the boss's daughter, Hidemi (Setsuko Wakayama), and in the face of a renewed Godzilla threat, they still have their little romance. Kobayashi is loveless and wants love, so he wants to keep looking for his ideal girl. I mean, life goes on even in the face of impending doom, but the tonal contrast is sometimes quite striking here.
Godzilla approaches Osaka, and the plan to drive him away from the coast works. It works, that is, until a random group of prisoners being transported in a prison van overpower their guards, run off, steal another car, and run into the fishery where they cause a massive explosion during the blackout, attracting Godzilla's attention and starting the destruction all over again. It's a weird distraction and overcomplicated way to get the fishery burning with a worker accidentally dropping a cigarette and lighting something on fire would have done just as well.
The whole thing ends up attracting not only Godzilla but Anguirus as well, and the two fight. It's part of the film's behind the scenes trivia that the cameraman on the special effects unit undercranked rather than overcranked the camera, making the monsters move faster than normal rather than slower. I suspect that Tsuburaya simply didn't have the money to reshoot because the images of the two monsters quickly slugging it out is silly rather than having great scale. It's probably a reason later Godzilla films did the same thing, especially when they got sillier. So, the model work is still really good, the costumes look really good, but most of the time they move wrong.
The best scene in the film happens after the destruction of Osaka with the characters who work at the fishery trying to clean up the office and move on with their lives. They're positive and determined to be strong in the face of the damage (a marked contrast to the previous film where extras were shown waiting outside government offices demanding handouts), but it ends by going too far and concentrated for too long on Kobayashi talking about how he's going to go to the other office in Hokkaido and look for a wife, causing that tonal clash again.
The final fight with Godzilla happens on his island after Shoichi finds Godzilla's hiding place on another remote island (I assume it's another remote island), and the finale is a special effects extravaganza of models and miniatures. I mean, I really like miniatures. They're adorable and fun. The solution ends up making not the most sense (trapping in Godzilla in ice doesn't seem like it would work since he has, you know, atomic fire breath, but whatever, gotta keep him around for another sequel).
So, the character stuff is halfway decent, though it often clashes with the special effects. The special effects are mostly good, but filming the fight undercranked makes it look silly. It's a mixed bag, but it's a straight monster story that works sort of. Not great or even good. But it's sort of decent.
Gojira (1954)
Godzilla is great! Everything else is pretty much terrible.
Just for the record, yes, this is the original Japanese version, and no, I still don't like it. From a filmmaking perspective, I see a lot to like in Ishiro Honda's importantly formative kaiju movie, but from a storytelling perspective, I just cannot get involved. It seems to be built like a procedural in the vein of Fritz Lang's M, but it's silly randomness in pursuit of a solution to a problem helped none at all by the fact that there's arguably no main character. There are small snippets of efforts at character-based storytelling, but they're all under-formed and easily dismissed by the film itself in favor of thin-diatribes about the danger of H-bomb testing.
A mysterious force is drowning ships at the same spot in the sea off the coast of Japan. Local legend deems it to be an ancient monster they call Godzilla. To investigate a potential land impact, the Japanese government sends Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura) whose daughter Emiko (Momoko Kochi) is formally engaged to the recluse scientist Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) but spends all of her time and has affections for Hideto (Akira Takarada). This quartet is the closest we get to main characters, and they're all so thin, their little dramas so uninteresting, and the film's focus on them so irregular as to make them no more than side-characters, at best. It creates this weird space where we get these little bits of character drama (none of which work) in a film that's more purely a procedural that should be about professionals doing professional things to overcome a problem.
The problem is, of course, that not only does Godzilla exist, but he keeps encroaching further into Japan, wrecking destruction as he goes. After Yamane's (curious and thin) conclusion that we must accept that Godzilla was awoken by the H-bomb testing (without ever mentioning America), we get another little sliver of a theme in the form of Yamane wanting to preserve Godzilla while everyone else around him wants to destroy Godzilla because, you know, Godzilla is causing massive destruction. I mean, I get it. Yamane is a zoologist who studies animals, and Godzilla is a big animal from a different time who, on top of it all, survived H-bomb blasts. But, on the other hand...tens of thousands of dead people. I guess my bigger problem isn't the logical leap but the fact that it only gets brought up a couple of times (if its not actually the point, then why bring it up at all) but also has so much emotion tied to it. Yamane actually kicks Hideto out of his house at one point for having the opinion opposite his.
Anyway, with Godzilla rampaging (the destruction of Tokyo is honestly just outright great and easily the best thing in the film), the Japanese people are getting desperate. Their only salvation is the creation of a super-weapon made by Serizawa called the oxygen destroyer, a...something that he puts into water, destroys all of the oxygen and then...turns animal matter into just bones. It's silly, to be honest. Throw in the fact that the film half-heartedly adds in the little drama about Emiko wanting to leave Serizawa for Hideto in the mix, despite the fact that there was never any effort on the film's part except a couple of lines of dialogue to show that they were an item at all. It's unpersuasive drama told at a moment when the focus should be on the effort to kill Godzilla.
In the context of Honda's career, especially the thematic focus across his work, Godzilla is a conscious and marked departure. His previous two films (Eagle of the Pacific and Farewell Rabaul) were the works of a defeated nation facing its status as loser in a major war it started. Godzilla, the first fully fantastical film of Honda's career, takes a decidedly different path. It's really not hard to read the film as a reaction to the bombing of Japan in general (the images evoke the firebombing of Tokyo heavily) but also the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically (the blame of the H-Bomb for waking Godzilla as well as at least one direct mention of Nagasaki's bombing cement this). Contrast how there is a solution to the manifestation of atomic power in the form of the oxygen destroyer, and you've got a fantasy response to the power that defeated Japan in WWII. Throw in the fact that the knowledge of the oxygen destroyer gets, itself, destroyed, and you've got a model of the ideal Japan: smart, powerful, and responsible. Surely not the kind of nation that would Rape Nanking.
All that said, really the highlight of the film is the special effects. Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya had been effectively using miniatures for several years since the landslide in The Skin of the South, and this is their best use of the model work in their collaborations yet. It can't quite get past its reality of being miniatures, but it's still effective especially considering the stark contrasts that the two create in the black and white photography. It's almost dreamlike in its portrayal of destruction on a mass scale that obviously touched on the recent memories of the Japanese people. It's scary and effective. That the film uses so much is to its credit because when Godzilla isn't on screen, the film is dull as dishwater.
So, its thematics are thin and sometimes incoherent. Its personal dramas are half-hearted at best and kind of dumb. The special effects are great. It's also this weird alt-fantasy where Japan wins WWII by using a weapon of mass destruction against atomic energy responsibly, a marked contrast to the ideas behind The Skin of the South where nothing could be done against nature and one must merely endure. I really don't think this works, but Godzilla does stomp real good.
Saraba Rabauru (1954)
Ishiro Honda's best film
This is obviously meant as a companion piece of Eagle of the Pacific. Where the earlier film told the story of the Pacific War from the Japanese and leadership perspective, Farewell Rabaul tells the story of the same theater of war from the grunt perspective. Well, not quite grunt. More like lower officers, the pilots of the Imperial Navy. More than the earlier film, though, Farewell Rabaul is the story of a defeated people, a nation that lost a massive war so totally that there's no denying it, a military so thoroughly outmatched in terms of industrial might that its perception of total dominance was dashed so completely in a way that killed millions of its young men to prove it. The package that Ishiro Honda and his trio of writers tell this story is so well done and involving, that this might be one of the best films about WWII.
In the country of Papua New Guinea is a small village called Rabaul where the Japanese had an air base from which it attacked American ships and planes after the Battle of Midway (it's actually featured briefly in Eagle of the Pacific). At this base is a small naval air command led by Captain Katase (Rentaro Mikuni) and his second in command Captain Wakabayashi (Ryo Ikebe). Katase gets injured in the opening mission, leaving sole command to Wakabayashi who has gained the moniker of Captain Oni (meaning devil) for his harsh treatment of his men, mostly in pursuit of their focus on their missions rather than the chances of life or death. That opening mission sees thirty planes go out, about a dozen come back, and carrying reports of having met over 100 American planes in response. It's obvious from the start that no matter how good the Japanese pilots may be, they're outmatched from a mechanical point of view. The core of the film is Wakabayashi's personal journey in how he views the Imperial efforts at war against America.
He starts as much of a true believer as anyone else, at least on the outside. It's obvious that despite his talk about focusing on the mission, though, he has inner misgivings about how things are playing out. I was reminded of the botched romance in The Skin of the South as we watched Wakabayashi go through a romance here with the nurse Sumiko (Mariko Okada) where Wakabayashi won't say anything to her about his feelings. This being a Japanese film, there has to be a character with deep feeling who never mentions it, and the combination of Wakabayashi's feelings for Sumiko and the path he takes regarding Japan's involvement in the war perfectly mesh for him. It's a strong example of multiple aspects of a story coming together to feed one thing at its heart: silence.
The Japanese pilots are plagued by their own personal Red Baron whom they call Yellow Snake based on the painted image of the animal on his plane. Wakabayashi suspects that Yellow Snake must be a pilot of deep experience in order to take apart his pilots in their Zeros so easily. There's even a nice scene as Wakabayashi tries to talk one of his newer pilots through instructions on how to save himself after he has his fuel tank punctured, but the young pilot simply panics and falls to his death. Wakabayashi is also contrasted with Lieutenant Noguchi (Akihiko Hirata) who is more outwardly emotional and even wants to go back and try to rescue a fallen pilot who may be alive behind enemy lines, something Wakabayashi refuses outright.
The turning point is when they capture Yellow Snake (Bob Booth), an affable American who only joined the military after Pearl Harbor less than two years prior and had been a refrigerator salesman. Despite his good nature and even excitement at meeting Commander Oni (why the Americans would have the same nickname for Wakabayashi as the local New Guinian girl who hates him is unclear but whatever, that's tiny), Wakabayashi cannot bring himself to even look the man in the eye. The Japanese are being defeated by amateurs with the might of the American industrial complex behind them. In addition, Yellow Snake outlines how Japanese military tactics are antithetical to life itself, wasting life so easily, an accusation that comes right before the idea for Kamikaze flights in the Zeros to make up for lack of bombs comes to him from his superior officers. Life becomes important to Wakabayashi in a way that he had forgotten. The rest of his actions through the rest of the film aren't so much outright insubordination, but they do urge him into action to preserve life where he could in situations where he would have previously just let death happen.
Also, there's a sequence that if it wasn't inspired by the rescue sequence in Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings (or Ceiling Zero since they're essentially the same film), I'll eat my hat.
The emotional reality of the film may be a step or two removed from actual reality (the idea of Japanese pilots treating a captured American pilot so nicely seems...slightly farfetched), and there's definitely an ex post facto element of trying to get the Japanese people to forgive themselves for what they did in the war by providing idealized portraits of what it was like. However, within the context of this idealized portrait of a loyal yet conflicted soldier of great skill, Wakabayashi is a compelling subject. He is a Japanese ideal, and the tragic path he ends up taking towards the end is both heroic and sad at the same time.
Honda films remarkably well whether in the local bar, the officers' quarters, or in the sky. His use of model work (actually done by Eiji Tsuburaya) is effective and combines well enough with real footage (the biggest difference being the quality of the filmstock used, the war footage being mostly done with very grainy 8mm film) while keeping the action clean. The actors are very good as well, and they might be the best performances in a Honda film so far. Ikebe is the cornerstone that film is built on, and his quiet reserve just gets to me.
Honestly, I completely loved this film. I do think it might be one of the great WWII films. It's quietly emotionally resonant, a fascinating portrait of a defeated military force, and a look at the brotherhood of the skies, a subject I always find so compelling on its own. It also touches on the impermanence of life during war making Farewell Rabaul potential double-feature fodder not just for Eagle of the Pacific but also Only Angels Have Wings and even John Ford's They Were Expandable. Honda made an absolute gem here, and that Godzilla completely overshadows it is unfortunate. Farewell Rabaul is the superior film Honda made in 1954.
Taiheiyô no washi (1953)
Hagiography and history lesson, done quite well
I wonder if the portrayal of Admiral Yamamoto in Ishiro Honda's Eagle of the Pacific represents an ideal for the Japanese dealing with their country's legacy after WWII. Honda makes a hagiographic portrait of the man in the years leading up to the outbreak of war with America, the debates about the Tripartite Pact, and the two major engagements that defined Yamamoto, Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Midway, through to his death by American pilots. It's almost as much a history lesson as it is a portrait of a man, and the surprise is how well it works. I suspect strongly that the portrait of Yamamoto is too soft for who he actually was, but the effect within the film is still quite strong.
The film actually begins with an interrogation of a leftist assassin who made an attempt on Yamamoto's (Denjiro Okochi) life. It's an interesting quick look at the makeup of the higher levels of Japanese government from the outside, but we spend the next twenty minutes or so as we watch the Prime Minister Konoe (Minoru Takada) try to form cabinets, keep them, and watch them dissolve over constant efforts to join the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy. All the while, Yamamoto has been given a small position off to the side, admired by his men, but waiting for his retirement until he's given command of the Combined Fleet.
The ideal for the Japanese people would stem from Yamamoto's combination of sense of duty to his superior officers, repeated resistance to the war (for non-political reasons, it should be noted), and strong performance during the war. Essentially, the Japanese people could never deny being part of the war, but they could always say that they both opposed it and served admirably and nobly at the same time. It's a serious concern for a country accused of rather heinous war crimes, especially in Manchuria. This sanded down look at one of the better men in Japanese command, who died in pursuit of loyal service to his emperor despite his misgivings about the practicality of the effort, is a strong vehicle for that kind of self-congratulation masked as biography.
Still, despite my theory for how the Japanese people would consume this product, and the suspicion that Yamamoto was probably a bit rougher than this in real life (his wife and children are never even mentioned), I think it's a strong effort at hagiography, history, and war movie all rolled into one.
The height of the film is Pearl Harbor. It's built up to rather exquisitely with Yamamoto outlining his overall strategy in the war that he has insisted would rope in America for years (his political opposition insisting that the entrance into the Tripartite Pact would be purely anti-Soviet and not involve Britain, France, or America), and how Japan was simply ill-equipped to deal with a long war with the far superior nation's military and industrial might. It has to be a quick strike followed by appeals for peace, hence the attack on Pearl Harbor, hopefully crippling American naval power in the Pacific for a long stretch to give Japan bargaining power. All of this is very clearly laid out, and Honda does some very good use of miniatures to portray the battle, providing a surprising painterly quality to the action on screen. It should also be noted that there is a grand one American face in the whole film (a pilot at the Battle of Midway), Honda and his screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto feeling no need to provide other perspectives. This is a Japanese story, through and through, and I appreciate that.
The focus on Midway is probably the film's biggest issue. The portrait of the battle itself is actually quite good, emphasizing the confusion and paralysis that the lower commanders experienced as the plan that Yamamoto had laid out gets called into question because of facts on the ground (namely stemming from a call from a flight commander for a second bombing run on Midway Island itself). However, the problem is that Yamamoto is barely part of it. He sits in his command center on the Yamato as things collapse far from him, mostly without his knowledge. The Battle of Midway is an important biographical element to Yamamoto's life, but he honestly didn't have much to do with the battle as it was actually fought. Pearl Harbor happened according to plan. Midway didn't, so the plan becomes less important to the telling, putting the focus more firmly on the lower commanders who did make the decisions that day.
Anyway, the film ends nostalgically and quietly as Yamamoto marches straight towards his own death, a combination of what seem to be orders to end his own life and the American effort to use their knowledge of Japanese codes to take out one of Japan's most valuable battle commanders.
So, I found the portrait very compelling, save for the Battle of Midway because Yamamoto was pushed to the side for a long stretch of the film as events played out without his involvement. Other than that, it's a compelling look at a good man. Whether the film actually aligns with how the man actually was in history is not for me to say. I imagine it's knee deep in the truth, at least. Still, I was involved. It looks good. It's well acted (Toshiro Mifune has a small role as a pilot, which is nice to see). The miniature work is quite well done. It's really quite good.
Nangoku no hada (1952)
An overstuffed romance undermines an otherwise accomplished melodrama
Ishiro Honda's second feature film is a marked step down from his rather accomplished melodrama and freshman picture, The Blue Pearl. Also taking place in a remote corner of rural Japan, The Skin of the South, tries a similar balance between local flavor, concerns, and romance, but fumbles the last part rather starkly. Really the story of a Cassandra trying to get the people of a small community to see the future that only he can see, it suddenly becomes an overbusy romance for a solid third of the film's runtime. It's inelegant, at best.
In an impoverished corner of Kagoshima, Ohno (Hajime Izu) leads a small research group into the soil composition of the mountain above the village. Poised with his research and the recent example of another village that was wiped out by a landslide, Ohno has to convince the village to not only stop deforesting the mountain but also to relocate the village completely. This effort on Ohno's part, mostly captured in his interactions with Nonaka (Yoshio Kosugi), the developer who has hired a large number of hands to do the deforestation work. This dance between them, trying to influence and even manipulate the village locals and elders is the most interesting part of the film.
Where the film stumbles is in the aforementioned romantic angle. There are four primaries in it (a minor character even calls it a love square), Ohno, his assistant Takayama (Shunji Kasuga), the local girl Keiko (Harue Tone), and the new research assistant Sadae (Yasuko Fujita). Essentially, Ohno and Sadae fall for each other when Sadae shows up, but they don't do anything about it. Takayama loves Sadae, but he doesn't do anything about it. Ohno is also infatuated by Keiko who has a tragic background (involving a rape and the death of her parents) that has left her mute though enigmatic at the same time. In addition, Sadae's uncle shows up with a suitor who happens to be the man who raped Keiko. The vast majority of all of this, including little interactions around Sadae defending Keiko to some degree, happens just after the halfway point in a concentrated dose of storytelling that seems so disconnected from everything else. The business man having nothing to do with Nonaka, for instance, makes it stand apart.
The Cassandra element comes back for the final act, and I was honestly not sure if Ohno would be shown justified in his fears or not. Of course, I could have asked if the promise for special effects was going to follow through or not. It's also where all of the characters get moments either heroic or tragic depending on who they are. It's a spectacular little finish to the film, and it takes on a curious message in the end.
There's one very minor character with a single line of dialogue in the whole film. At a village meeting, he sets aside all of the concerns people have and said that there's no competing with Nature, that if Nature decides it is time for the mountain to collapse, then there is nothing that humanity can do about it. It's also noted, that the special effects of the film show that landslides can happen even in places where no deforestation have started. It's ultimately a portrait of humanity's impotence in the face of Nature's power. That does seem to be the central motif and theme which is why the whole romance angle unsatisfies so much. It just feels like random romantic offshoots in a story that's not about anything. I suppose that Takayama and what happens to him could fit in, but it's a stretch and minor since Ohno is the main character and his romantic pulls are surprisingly weak in general.
Anyway, it's a mix. It doesn't really work as a whole because of the romance which dominates a large section, but the Cassandra elements work decently especially when combined with the mostly implicit ideas around the power of Nature. The special effects stuff is also quite nice with some good use of miniatures that I always appreciate and that Honda would become well-known for. There's nothing wrong with any of the performances, and Honda keeps his nice eye to retain visual interest throughout. But, it also just feels like too much squeezed into too small a space.
Aoi shinju (1951)
Melodrama and Tourism in one, done very well
Ishiro Honda followed the typical route of a Japanese director in being an assistant director for several years before receiving his first assignment. Most notably, he did second unit work on Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog before Toho gave him his first chief directing job on The Blue Pearl, a small melodramatic love triangle given remarkable quality through its specific focus on a small slice of rural Japanese life and its traditions, helped in no small part by Honda's already well-practiced and quality eye for visual compositions. The Japanese model that was effectively an apprenticeship model seems to have been a good one.
Nishida (Ryo Ikebe) is the new schoolteacher and assistant at the lighthouse in the Ise-Shima region of Japan. He immediately attracts the attention of Noe (Yukiko Shimazaki), the best ama diver in the small village Nishida is now to call home. At the same time, a young woman who had grown up in the village, Riu (Yuriko Hamada), fresh from Tokyo with the clothes and accessories to get the local girls jealous of her new look and the young men slavishly following her and her obvious sexuality. That's a remarkable contrast to the traditional ways that women attracted men in the village: by being the best ama divers. Ama divers wear the largely sexless outfits of impoverished Japanese, but they provide most of the village's income through the finding of abalone.
The titular blue pearl is part of a local legend (most likely invented for the film or source novel by Katsuro Yamada) where a local ama diver was promised to a foreign groom who turned out to be a Dragon God. She died by jumping into a well, and she became incarnate in that pearl that no one has ever seen. As the chief of the lighthouse (Takashi Shimura) explains, it has a central message of keeping the ama divers marrying local men which also helps protect the local economy. This gets mentioned only a few times, but it's part of what gives the film a certain uniqueness. It's extremely tied to the location, down to its culture. It infuses people's actions and reactions to events. It creates a distinct flavor to what is essentially just a rather simple melodrama.
The actual plot follows as Nishida grows to like Noe, Riu rankles at the expectations put on her by the village and her own inability to perform at the same level as the rest of the ama divers, as well as Riu's insistence on just causing pain to the best ama diver, Noe, by stealing her man, an effort that Nishida resists. That plotline, in isolation, is handled well enough. There's the general Japanese layer around modesty and shame that feels like a more generic narrative approach (for Japan). The characters are well written, informed by their backgrounds and living conditions and desires, but what really drives them is the culture around them. And this is where the layers of information the film places onto the action really pays off.
When Riu decides to go off from the normal diving to find the pearl, it makes sense. We know why she does it. We don't need a reminder. We just need a quick line of dialogue about how she's swimming in the direction of the pearl. When Noe makes her final decision, haunted as she is in the end, it also makes perfect sense and provides the final bit of tragedy to the whole thing. It comes together to create this, in the end, surprising sense of tragic beauty around the film's action that, for most of its runtime, was mostly just a run of the mill melodrama in an interesting setting.
I need to note the visuals as well. If this film is famous for anything other than being Honda's first film (it's not famous at all, to be honest), it's because Honda used underwater photography for the first time in a Japanese feature film (he'd done some in a documentary a few years earlier as well). There's a certain Malick-like quality to the underwater photography since it has no natural sound and Honda chooses to heavily use poetic music (by Tadashi Hattori) overlaid on top. It works really well. However, more commonly is this practiced approach to composition that he can't quite manage in the underwater scenes. I had assumed that Kurosawa's ability with composition was unique to him at the time because of his background as a painter, but Honda has similar command in his first feature. Compositions have three-dimensional qualities with strong emphasis on balance. He can move the frame and go from one nice composition to another. He's showing real quality from the beginning regarding the physical qualities of putting together a film.
So, this is a gem, mostly forgotten by the world because to the world, if they think of Honda at all it's about Godzilla. Well, this is the reason I wanted to discover Honda. Not the walking, fire breathing nuclear bomb metaphor, but his command of smaller films and more human emotions. It's nice to see that I'm not disappointed from the very beginning.
Survival of the Dead (2009)
The best neo-western...set in Delaware...starring Irish Characters and zombies you'll ever see!
Well, it's not nearly as bad as Diary of the Dead. In fact, I'd call this George Romero's best zombie movie since Dawn of the Dead. That's honestly sad. Taking a minor character from the previous film and making him some sort of proto-protagonist in the middle of a familial feud that doesn't actually involve him, Survival of the Dead doesn't really work, but it's not nearly as much of a disaster as what Romero had been putting out over the previous few years.
Sarge (Alan van Sprang) leads a small unit of military officers a few weeks into the zombie apocalypse. After stealing all of the supplies from the college students of Diary of the Dead, he encounters some good ole boys in the woods who have decapitated a group of zombies, leaving their moaning heads on pikes. This is overwrought stuff, recalling the emotionally unmoored yelling predominant in Day of the Dead. Thankfully, though, it doesn't last long, the group killing all of the good ole boys and picking up Boy (Devon Bostick). This exists in comparison to the opening on Plum Island, off the coast of Delaware, where we see the exile of Patrick O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh) by Seamus Muldoon (Richard Fitzpatrick) over the question of what to do with the recently undead: kill them or preserve them in the hope for a cure.
So, this opening points to a major issue with Romero's dealing with the undead in his work since Day of the Dead. There has been this on-again, off-again effort to make the zombies sympathetic which contrasts wildly with the glee with which Romero films the killing of the undead. It's this real whiplash between efforts to use them for pathos reasons in one scene followed immediately by something like Sarge blithely shooting a flare into a zombie, which bursts their head into flame. He then lights his cigarette with the fire before kicking him off a boat. Were we supposed to sympathize with that zombie? Or were we supposed to just clap along with the violence? Romero is trying to have his cake and eat it too.
So, the army group heads to a port where O'Flynn has set up, sending out an internet video (that the internet still works more than a month into a zombie apocalypse either shows that the internet is super resilient or that the apocalypse isn't that bad) that attracts people with promises to Plum Island which end up being a trap. There's a shootout leading to the stealing of a barge, and O'Flynn ends up on the barge, acting as guide to Plum Island for the army group. The actual meat of the film is when they reach Plum Island. This is really a western filled with Irish characters set on an island off the eastern coast of Delaware (probably the best of its class!), and it's about two families at war with each other. The business of getting Sarge and his men to the island is really just because Romero had plans on making this the first of a trilogy that were probably going to star Sarge and however many of his group survived.
The conflict between the O'Flynns and the Muldoons is decently built with this emphasis on Muldoon trying to find a way to get the zombies feeding on something other than humans to try and save them. Romero films largely outside, and he takes in the sights well. There's a nice image of a zombie girl riding a horse that looks good but ends up making no sense when Muldoon tries to get her to eat the horse. If she's been riding it for weeks, why would she suddenly start eating it? I dunno.
Anyway, it's a decently put together series of events that work a bit better in isolation than strung together. It entertains basically enough while never really coming together as a complete film. Sarge and his group are out of place in the film's actual story. The zombies may be rehabilitated idea is underdone. O'Flynn has twin daughters (Kathleen Munroe), but the existence of the second is hidden for about half the film for some reason even though the first is in the opening scenes. There's also another overarching concern over cash that is so out of place if the world has actually collapsed, Romero apparently not understanding that the value of currency would vanish in a world where the government no longer backs its fiat money with its ability to tax since, you know, it's collapsed. I mean, cash is a great MacGuffin, but it doesn't work when cash has no value. In addition, it just gets forgotten for more than half the film. It's weird.
So, it's not good. However, it's decently performed (a huge step up from Diary), it looks surprisingly good, and it has some entertaining individual moments. Romero has lost all ability to make his films about something, and his efforts here are embarrassing. Still, as a neo-Western filled with Irish characters set on an island off the eastern coast of Delaware, it's not terrible.