Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956) is a vastly silly name for a movie that is only half-silly. Raymond Burr stars as an American journalist who happens to stop in Japan just after the United States test fires the first hydrogen bomb. Ships begin to disappear near one of the Japanese islands, survivors are burned and don’t survive very long – and then one night, a big something comes ashore and knocks over some residences.
Burr lends a certain gravitas to the movie as he calmly reports on the monster so large that it brings its own storm systems with it. The next night the monster is known to be in Tokyo Bay, and preparations are made to defend the city. However, despite the best efforts, a terrible rampage begins and only random chance spares a few.
And this is where we might best understand the movie, for we see not only soldiers, but women with children suffer and die from the fury that is Godzilla. Even those who survive the initial attack may be dead before the next night: many register positive for lethal doses of radiation. This is the serious core of the movie, as this incomprehensible monster destroys all in its path, virtually salts the earth behind it, making land, the most precious resource in Japan, unusable in its wake. This is what nuclear weapons will do, it says, making even those who come afterwards into monsters – if they’re not monsters already. So would be the bomb-droppers, who by creating and using the most powerful and indiscriminate destructive man-made power in history, not only ruin those in the moment of its dropping, ruin many others with nothing more than casual malice – blighting the virtuous simple workers, the good-hearted women, all who’s greatest sin was being too close.
Eventually, a Japanese scientist reveals and uses a new weapon, as horrible in its own way as the hydrogen bomb (think of instant-piranha), but he does not reveal the secret – and deliberately kills himself as Godzilla dies, thus ensuring no one will be able to discover this horrid weapon through him. Through this sacrifice, he becomes the role model, the martyr to peace, and by contrast the message that the powers we now command will lead to our destruction if we use them for war.
Crude, by turns serious and almost factory-like, it can be interesting if you can stand the rough spots.
OK, all that said, Wikipedia notes this is actually an example of Americanization:
The film is a heavily re-edited American adaptation, commonly referred to as an “Americanization”,[1][2][3][4][5][6][7] of the Japanese film Godzilla, originally produced by Toho in 1954, which had previously been shown subtitled in the United States in Japanese community theaters only, and was not known in Europe.
For this version of Godzilla, some of the original Japanese dialogue was dubbed into English and some of the political, social, and anti-nuclear themes and overtones were removed completely, resulting in 16 minutes of footage cut from the original Japanese version and replaced with new footage shot exclusively for the film’s North American release, featuring Canadian actor Raymond Burr playing the lead role of American journalist Steve Martin, from whose perspective the film is told, mainly through flashbacks and narration. The new footage featured Burr interacting with Japanese-American actors and look-alikes to make it seem like he was part of the original Japanese production.
To tell the truth, it’s not done too badly. In some ways, those scenes with Burr are better than those without. It might be interesting to see the original and compare it to this.
