It's easy and reflexive to dismiss King of the Monsters as total hackwork, both because it was born of such easygoing xenophobia, and because the original Godzilla is so damn close to perfection. But that's absolutely not fair. Virtually every single Godzilla film over the next half-century to receive U.S. theatrical distribution received at least some measure of massaging that subtly but distinctly changed the plot, pacing, or focus; King of the Monsters is neither the most extreme nor by any means the most damaging. In fact, Morse's treatment of the film is surprisingly sophisticated and effective, and while there's an easy argument to be made that he should never have been given the assignment in the first place, it's hard to imagine him having done a much better job, creating one of the few American-market Godzilla pictures that works almost entirely on its own cinematic merits.
And that really is the way it needs to be treated, for it's quite a different movie. It opens on the tracking shot of a devastated Tokyo that occurs deep into Godzilla, setting itself up as a flashback related by Martin after he's already experienced the brunt of the monster's attack; it arguably means that King of the Monsters ends up working better as a thriller than the original film did, given that it makes the stakes far clearer, far earlier. But we needn't keep chasing that rabbit.
Martin is in Japan to visit his scientist friend from college, Dr. Serizawa (Hirata Akihiko), but upon landing he gets involved in a police investigation; seems that his plane was traveling directly over the site of a marine disaster, in which an unknown force caused a ship to sink. This immediately gets Martin's reporter senses tingling, and with Serizawa temporarily indisposed anyway, he has a perfect chance to attach himself to the doctor's fiancée Emiko (Kōchi Momoko) and her father, the great scientist Yamane (Shimura Takashi), also investigating the occurrence. Along for the ride is a security officer, Tomo (Frank Iwanaga), who tends to serve as translator far more than he ever provides security.
Broadly, this plays out like a clarified, detail-light variation on Godzilla: the order of events is muddied up a bit, the attack on Tokyo is significantly shorter, and it takes less time to get the final mission to kill the monster up and running. All of which makes sense, given that King of the Monsters adds a good 20 minutes of footage and still has a running time that ends up more than fifteen minutes shorter. It's far less dramatic and obsessed with the imagery of death and destruction that make Godzilla so unnerving, regardless of the way it foregrounds the desolation of Tokyo, and depicting in almost its full length the prayer song that is one of the most moving scenes in the original (less moving when the words aren't translated, it turns out).
The biggest shift, of course, is that all of the material pertaining to post-nuclear trauma and Japan's search for identity following WWII is quite out; even if it would have been "interesting" to an American audience, producer Joseph Levine quite rightfully wondered how Americans just 11 years removed from the war where we beat the Japanese would feel about a film where nuclear bombs - and that nuclear bomb in particular - were so vocally criticised. All this means, inevitably, that King of the Monsters lacks any real depth or humanity, an issue compounded by the limitations in working the main character into conversations with anybody else. And this issue is itself made worse by how increasingly clear it is that Steve Martin isn't really filling any function, or justifying his presence.
Even so, it's quite impressive how much work Morse put into incorporating Burr into the original film in a way that flowed and made sense, relying heavily on the backs of extra's heads dressed to look like Kōchi and Hirata and Takarada Akira in the original. The results are a little stiff - plenty of conversations where it's conspicuous how we're not seeing the faces of people talking - but Morse squeezed every damn drop out of footage he had to work with, in addition to leaving much of the film in Japanese, sot that Martin has to rely on translations to understand what's happening. It's often set, with justification, that the distinction between translated scenes and dubbed scenes is almost entirely arbitrary, but I'm still glad that the translator was there. For one thing, it makes it a lot easier to believe that Martin would just stand doing nothing at the side of a room. For another, it adds to the sense of authenticity, and even gives the film a veneer of "stranger in a strange land" tension, with Martin arriving in a place where he doesn't understand anything right at the most dangerous time he could have ever gone there. For yet another, the dubbing isn't great - the woman voicing Emiko sounds 10 years too old compared to Kōchi's face and voice, and while the man doing Yamane is "fine", it's hugely distracting to see the wrong voice coming out of the mouth of someone as recognisable to even the casual fan of Japanese cinema as Shimura.
The film still largely relies on Ifukube Akira's terrific score, used in different places and with different emphasis, but still beautiful to hear; it still boasts outstanding suits and dubious puppetry. The handful of quintessentially Japanese moments (the sequence on the sea floor, readying to kill Godzilla; a horizontal wipe that got left in, perhaps by mistake) mix oddly with the overall American-ness of the pacing and storytelling, but not without adding some interesting measure of culture contrast. There are some things I miss - the beautiful character moment where Shimura wryly fixes his tie is a painful loss, especially - but the core of it is still there. This is still a great '50s horror movie about the Great Big Unknown Thing that can swoop down at any second and kill you dead, and if translating it to the language of a matinee thriller means that it lacks the profound resonance of the original version, the fact remains that even thus compromised, King of the Monsters is still one of the strongest giant creature features scene in the United States in the 1950s. It moves well, it's got some terrific effects work, and there's a real sense of loss and danger absent from almost all other monster movies - what's not to love? No reason to use it as replacement viewing for Godzilla, you understand, but this is not a film without its own value, even if it's mostly reduced by this point to the status of rewarding curiosity.
Again, not much disagreement here, though I will say I'm a little bit fonder than you seem to be of Steve Martin as a character and perhaps a little less forgiving of the effect he has on the plot; the way his presence dilutes the significance of Emiko's decision to betray Serizawa's secret is especially annoying to me. Still, Burr does pretty well with the role, and though it's true he serves no real function to the narrative itself, the gradual shift in attitude we see him experience over the course of the movie, starting out as almost dismissive of the situation at hand and ending with a much fuller understanding of just how huge the nightmare he's stumbled into really is and just how important it is that it be stopped, plays out surprisingly well. He also gets one of the dubbed script's best lines, wherein he refers to the casualties of Godzilla's attack as "human wreckage".
ReplyDeleteAll things told, I think "King of the Monsters" remains a worthwhile film in its own right even today. Not a patch on the original when compared side-by-side, perhaps, but enough of that power has been retained (there is simply no getting around just how genuinely scary Godzilla looks when cast in the film's distinctively sharp black-and-white palette and moody lighting, and Ifukube's score is as indispensable in selling the movie's emotions here as it was originally), and enough of a distinct flavor has been added by Morse's edits, that it still remains an outstanding example of its era's particular breed of Monster Movie.
Alright, I'll bite.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to disagree with you on the "needless re-edits" tag. Sure, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, nothing needed to be done to make Gojira any better (or, if it did, KOTM didn't really do any of that, though I do like the flashback storytelling a bit more). But, from a marketing perspective, it was genius. The next film in the Godzilla series basically put the franchise on hiatus in Japan for 7 years, so the fact that Godzilla is now the decades-spanning juggernaut of a franchise that we all know and love owes itself to the wild success that King of the Monsters had in America (and, bizarrely, in Japan, when it was shipped back to that country and put in theaters in its edited form, Raymond Burr and all). KOTM's success paved the way for other successful Toho foreign releases (like the wildly popular Rodan, which I'm eagerly awaiting your review of), and allowed Godzilla to finally roar back to life in 1962. Gojira may have been the better film of the two, but KOTM was by far the more popular, and Godzilla owes its longevity to Burr and Morse, warts and all.