Japanese Monster Movies DVD Set--Ishiro Honda

[George Kincaid]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/movie ... .html?_r=1

DVDs
Mothra Lives! Beware, New Kirk City!

DAVE KEHR
Published: August 12, 2009
EVEN if you don’t know the Japanese director Ishiro Honda, you almost certainly know some of his offspring. They tend to be large, mostly lizardlike creatures with attitude problems and a propensity for tromping destructively through downtown Tokyo: “Godzilla” (1954), “Rodan! The Flying Monster” (1956), “Varan the Unbelievable” (1958), “Mothra” (1961), “Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster” (1964) and so on and so on, through a series of sequels, crossovers and spinoffs that continued through Honda’s retirement in 1975, with “Terror of Mechagodzilla.”

Most of these movies were released in the United States in cut and dubbed versions, shown at Saturday matinees, drive-ins and on television (ceaselessly it seemed). At first these exotic imports stimulated awe and wonder in their young viewers. Later, as those viewers grew up and movie special effects became more expensive and sophisticated, the blatantly obvious spectacle of stuntmen dressed in big rubber suits rampaging through balsa-wood office blocks began to seem campy and quaint.

But Honda’s films, particularly when seen in their uncut, Japanese-language versions (increasingly available, thanks to home video), retain a charm and earnestness that few digital age monster movies — exemplified by the disastrous 1998 remake of “Godzilla” — can approach. The persuasiveness of the special effects, creatively engineered in the great majority of Honda’s films by the technician Eiji Tsuburaya was always beside the point in these pictures, which were more like marvelous puppet shows. The strings often showed, literally and figuratively, but such was the affectionate, after-school spirit of the enterprise.

Each of Honda’s giant monsters (known as kaiju in Japan) possessed a distinct personality. They ranged from the adorably clumsy, childlike Godzilla (who would eventually grow up to be a responsible parent and defender of the Japanese nation) to the slimier, more serpentlike Ghidrah, a bad-boy juvenile delinquent whose destructive behavior often had to be reined in by good-guy monsters acting in tandem.

But these films weren’t only innocent allegories of childhood and adolescence. Born out of the nuclear anxiety that followed World War II, Honda’s early movies explicitly link their monsters to atomic testing, as do several American pictures of the same period. But unlike, say, the purely malevolent mutants of Hollywood’s “It Came From Beneath the Sea” (1955) or “Them!” (1954), the kaiju are ambivalent figures, sometimes blindly destructive, sometimes friendly, effective allies. In Japan, where the American occupation ended only in 1951, these lumbering beasts seem also to reflect the complex, contradictory attitudes about the United States, the annihilating conqueror now become an inescapable partner in political rebirth and economic development.

A new three-disc set from Sony, “Icons of Sci-Fi: Toho Collection,” demonstrates the wide range of attitudes found in Honda’s films. The set contains both the original Japanese and the cut-and-dubbed American versions of three films: “The H-Man” (1958), “Battle in Outer Space” (1959) and “Mothra” (1961). Of these only “Mothra” can be strictly classified as a kaiju eiga (monster movie); the other two find Honda working in different genres, but bending their structures to fit his themes.

Like the original “Godzilla,” both “The H-Man” and “Mothra” trace their origins to the widely reported news in 1954 that a Japanese fishing boat ventured too close to an atomic test site, and several crew members came down with radiation sickness. In “The H-Man” radiation sickness becomes a sort of communicable disease, spreading like a plague through the Tokyo sewers. The first victim is a burglar who melts away in the rain while trying to make a getaway.

Instead of a science fiction adventure “The H-Man” takes the form of a police thriller, not unlike “Stray Dog,” a 1949 film on which Honda had worked as an assistant to the director, his old friend and colleague, Akira Kurosawa. The police investigation leads to a Western-style nightclub, where the vanished suspect’s girlfriend is a torch singer, chanting ballads in throaty English.

The police are skeptical until other gangsters start going up in blue flames. Only when Japanese scientists order a complete destruction of the American club and its surrounding neighborhood (the sewers are set on fire, using Mitsubishi gasoline!) is the threat temporarily abated.

The more optimistic science-fiction epic “Battle in Outer Space” imagines all the nations of Earth — but mainly, Japan and the United States — getting together to fight a sinister alien race that has established a base on the Moon. A body-snatching theme (one of the allied spacemen falls under alien mind control) points toward familiar cold war brainwashing obsessions: these all-purpose aliens seem to be Soviet Russia and Communist China combined, and they are up to no discernable good.

The aliens first annihilate New York and the Golden Gate Bridge before heading on to the real value target, Tokyo, where the Japanese Self-Defense Forces use ground-based heat rays to shoot saucers out of the sky. (American advisors look on admiringly.) The sequence powerfully suggests Pearl Harbor therapeutically turned inside out, with heroic ground gunners battling enemy aircraft. For Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects director, this was not new territory: one of his earliest assignments was the wartime propaganda film “The War at Sea from Hawaii to Malay” (1942) in which he used his now familiar miniatures to recreate the Pearl Harbor attack.

By the time of “Mothra” relations have worsened to the point where America appears under the (faintly medical) pseudonym “Rolisica,” a nation of greedy businessmen represented by a show-business entrepreneur (clearly modeled on Robert Armstrong’s character in “King Kong”) who kidnaps a pair of “secret fairies” from an island being used for bomb tests. The fairies — tiny identical twins — are drafted as the stars of a campy jungle revue staged in a Tokyo theater.

They use their reedy voices to summon forth the mythical protector of their native island, a giant silk worm who promptly swims to Japan and spins a cocoon in Tokyo Tower. When Mothra emerges, his first priority is to flap his giant wings over to Rolisica, where he levels the capital, New Kirk City.

With its fluorescent colors and exotic design “Mothra” is probably Honda’s most profoundly folkloric film, drawing on traditions of Japanese nature gods to imagine a force superior to American economic and military strength. But Honda is no reactionary Japanese militarist.

“Mothra,” like many of Honda’s films, ends with a simple and sincere moral precept, directed toward the audience: “May all the world’s peoples live together in peace and harmony!” the repatriated fairies proclaim. And if they don’t, there’s always a giant lizard handy to knock them back into line. (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, $24.96, not rated)

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