Spare a thought for Ishiro Honda. Possessed with a brilliant eye for detail, Kurasawa himself would credit Honda’s second unit photography on Stray Dog as defining the film’s edgy urban sensibility. Honda’s own masterpiece would display an even greater capacity for understanding the details of Japan during the ‘50s and it remains a fascinating document of post-atomic anxiety. Down the years it has been read as political allegory, as a dig at the Americans and/or the Chinese, as the return of the repressed. Mostly, though, people just think of Honda’s Godzilla as a cheap-ass rubber dinosaur movie.
You can see how it happened. The film would inspire the kaiju-eiga or Japanese monster picture, hardly the classiest genre. Toho Studios who produced Godzilla would churn-out 28 sequels to the 1954 original. Far more damaging was a cut for the American drive-in effluent market with clumsy bolt-on scenes starring Raymond Burr as a reporter.
There are moments in this restored version of Honda’s Godzilla (Gojira) that remind you it’s just a monster/disaster movie – the dishy doctor with the eye-patch, the yokels on a remote island, the boffin who explains things by pointing a stick at a board. And yes, it really is just a rubber dinosaur suit. But what a rubber dinosaur.
As Godzilla charges repeatedly at downtown Tokyo, Honda conveys the destruction with an deft use of film grammar – a flick of the tail here, bang goes the neighbourhood there. Panic sweeps a nation. Radiation sickness spreads. The army mobilises. Yet beneath the chaos lurks an elegant melodrama and a taut thriller.
Go see it and teach Roland Emmerich a lesson.