#arihima

[almasexya]

Return of the King (King Kong vs. Godzilla, 1962)

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of King Kong vs. Godzilla, the third movie in what was to become the Godzilla series and the first to be shot in color, yet a movie that has also been almost completely overshadowed by everything that came after. Produced to coincide with Toho’s 30th anniversary, King Kong vs. Godzilla was the most ambitious kaiju movie to date, a landmark production involving two of the most famous movie monsters put on screen. To try and give a modern day comparison, this was the equivalent of the first Avengers movie or Avatar (remember Avatar??)

That said, something tells me if you’re out looking for a Godzilla movie from this era, you’d pop in vs. Mothra or Mechagodzilla or one of the other more popular entries. The fact that until 2019, the only legal version that most of us in the west could get our hands on was the inferior English cut due to a licensing agreement between RKO (the original owners of King Kong) and Toho didn’t exactly help either.

But really it goes deeper than that. King Kong vs. Godzilla is a downright weird movie no matter which version you watch. And I’ve seen both of them, the Japanese cut a few times and the American version exactly once last night, since it came with my Criterion Blu Ray set. More importantly, that set came with a decent restoration of the notoriously shitty-looking Japanese cut, and represents the first time that version was ever legally available stateside, so that’s nice!

The Japanese cut was put together by the usual crew, with Ishiro Honda directing, Eiji Tsuburaya on effects, Akira Ifukube on soundtrack duties, and Tomoyuki Tanaka producing. The writer is again Shinichi Sekizawa, though from what I’ve read, the sheer wackiness of the plot has more to do with Honda and Tsuburaya than it does Sekizawa, though I highly doubt he wasn’t an unwilling partner in all this.

The main plot (of the Japanese cut at least) is that the constantly riled up Mr. Tako (Ichiro Arihima) is tired of the TV shows his pharmaceutical company produces bombing in the ratings, so when he hears of the news that a giant monster has been sighted in the south pacific, he sends two of the salarymen in his employ off on an adventure to bring the monster to Japan so they can make a TV show about it.

This plot, frankly, is fucking ridiculous. Even knowing what comes later in Godzilla’s career, it’s really difficult to take the first half of this movie seriously, and even when the second half introduces some tension, it barely ever lasts, usually foiled by the monsters mugging and clapping, or the antics of Mr. Tako and his two cohorts.

This was, in part, Honda’s idea. He had apparently been disgusted with the “ratings wars” numerous TV producers were engaged in at the time, and took that idea to its logical extreme by making a TV producer start a literal monster war.

And go to war they certainly do. Sakurai and Fujita, Mr. Tako’s subordinates, bring Kong back from the island just in time for Godzilla to pop out of the arctic fresh from his seven year nap after Godzilla Raids Again, and after some general dicking around they go at it for the first of two times, and the results are... interesting. Tsuburaya apparently wanted to take the monster action in a lighter, more family-friendly direction, a move which Honda was very much opposed to. The result is the inception of the boulder-flinging (get used to it) and a lot of mugging and general wackiness that couldn’t be more different from the animal savagery in Raids Again. Harou Nakajima and Shoichi Hirose, who played Godzilla and Kong respectively, apparently did their own choreography, and took a lot of their inspiration from pro wrestling.

It’s here that I’ll bring up the effects which, sufficed to say, are a disappointment. While the few city sets that the film shows look good, Kong sure as hell does not. With a dopey, blinking face and ratty fur, Kong looks like an old rug somebody forgot to throw out. Godzilla fares quite a bit better in his first color appearance, with a mean, angular face and great proportions. The matte work used to put the human characters in the same scenes as the monsters is downright repugnant, and has been done better in earlier movies. I’m inclined to think it was just that Tsuburaya’s team bit off more than they could chew, but it’s still hard to look at the effects of a movie this big and see literal green screen outlines around the main cast.

That said, the movie is still a fun watch, if only to try and make sense of it all. Kong miraculously gains the ability to eat lightning, (a relic from when the movie was planned to be a Frankenstein vehicle, let’s not get into it) Akihiko Hirata has a small role as a doctor, and this also is the first movie to use Ifukube’s famous Godzilla theme.

Almost none of these praises can be sung of the American version, which is a dreadful and boring disaster of a movie that seems to have had a singular objective of making as little sense as possible.

The team producing the English dub did have their work cut out for them, if I can say this one thing in their defense. The plot they had to work with of a deranged TV producer sending his underlings out to bring back a monster in order to boost ratings was so distinctly Japanese that, instead of trying to work with it, they just threw it out entirely.

Well, they threw out as much as they could. Sakurai and Fujita’s expedition to Faro Island and their retrieval of Kong takes up a significant portion of the film’s first act, to the point that they’re so integral to the plot that you really can‘t remove them and then explain where the hell Kong even came from.

The English cut solves this problem by trimming their appearances down to the sheerest atoms of footage they could, resulting in a movie that has no real protagonist or focal point at all. While Mr. Tako and his dynamic duo were hardly great protagonists, they at least have some claim to the title. Characters from the Japanese cut whizz by with the slightest possible introductions when they get one at all, leading the viewer to not understand what the hell they’re doing their in the first place.

In place of the original plot, we get a pair of talking head newscasters and a doctor who reads dinosaur facts out of a big picture book. I would have been alright with the removal of the original plot if what they’d replaced it with was worth something, but this just isn’t. The general plan was to present the movie as if it was being told through a newscast, meaning that many of the new actors stare unnervingly into the camera while reading their lines, which are often presented with the complete absence of emotion, befitting the detached newscaster aesthetic. Not to mention there’s something really disappointing about seeing shots that were simply part of the movie in the Japanese cut shrunk down to the size of a TV screen in the English version just to service this frame story that’s not worth shifting focus to.

To give them credit, this strategy worked for the American edit of the original Godzilla, a movie I decided not to cover due to the fact that it’s generally fine at what it does in that it tells the story through an American narrator but generally leaves the plot alone. Not so here, where the bizarre first half is replaced by something equal parts confusing and dull, with stock Universal monster music replacing Ifukube’s score to boot. They did at least dub over the American submarine crew who become Godzilla food, who sound like they’re reading their lines at gunpoint in the Japanese cut.

I don’t hate this movie, though it may seem like I do. King Kong vs. Godzilla is more of a mixed bag than anything else, a film that’s remembered more for what it started than what it is. Pretty much every Godzilla sequel we’re in for follows the whimsical template that started here, and whether that’s good or not is totally your call. But we did get Godzilla’s infamous dropkick out of the deal, so it isn’t all bad. Watch the Japanese version while you wait for Godzilla vs. Kong to come out, but stay far away from the English cut.