October 8: Godzilla/Gojira (1954 -- Ishirô Honda)

★★★

It’s clearly not reading too much into the film to see it Godzilla as about Japanese concerns with nuclear weapons.  There’s a clear reference to the Daigo Maru incident at the beginning of the movie, scientists amply warn and speculate about H-bomb testing, Godzilla leaves radioactive footprints and Serizawa’s ethical qualms about the Oxygen Destroyer parallel the same concerns that the early atomic researchers famously had.  Of course, they made one decision, and Serizawa made another.  Add all this to the contemporaneous revelations about the extent of atomic bomb devastation in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and there’s a definite concern here with nuclear weaponry in the nuclear age.

But Godzilla is also a thriller with a big beast, and there are some familiar elements here.  For one, the movie has an easily recognized, engaging structure.  It starts with a big disaster like many thrillers do today, and we’re drawn into the film the same way Spielberg draws us into Jaws, showing us effects and glimpses of the beast before we get the full impact of what we’re dealing with.  And Godzilla falls somewhere between Kong and the shark in Jaws as a movie device – Godzilla’s path of death and destruction leave us without the sympathy we have for Kong, but the dinosaur at least represents an idea in Godzilla, unlike the shark in Jaws, who functions only as a thrill plot device.

Godzilla puts some familiar characters around its monster, too.  There is a young couple to give us a sympathetic point in the film, just like we have in King Kong and Island of Lost Souls.  And like in those two films, the couple doesn’t develop the theme of the movie a lot.  The idea content, instead, comes from leadership figures; in Godzilla, the leaders are the two scientists.  One scientist thinks in the intellectual world where Godzilla is a unique zoological specimen that should be studied, and the other scientist more pragmatically realizes that science has an effect on the real world and that such effects should factor into research.  With the radiation monster on the rampage, Godzilla urges prudence through the portrayal of its scientists.  In King Kong and Island, too, the leader figures develop the intellectual themes of the movies: the sociopathic director Carl Denham shows how destructive obsession can be, and the mad Dr. Moreau epitomizes the brutal in the human.  In all three films, a young couple gives us a someone to identify, but it’s the scientist/leader figures who lie at the center of significance.

It’s interesting that, twenty years after Island and King Kong, Godzilla uses a similar cast of characters to develop its ideas.  While Ishirô Honda couldn't  achieve the thrill effects of King Kong or Island, all three of these films focus on an idea and develop that idea using a similar rhetorical structure.