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Kurosawa would analyze it the following year with I Live in Fear, Ishiro Honda here already has the shape of atom-age trauma in a stout primordial dragon. Nature itself has been contaminated in the wake of the war, one freighter after another is swallowed by a blinding blast from the depths. ("The ocean just blew up," cries a survivor.) Its name is first uttered by a village elder and derided as a folkloric relic, but this is a vision of ancient and modern shocks and the beast roused by nuclear blasts materializes like Poe's Sphinx on "the naked face of the hill." In the ensuing chaos, pleas for study from the paleontologist (Takashi Shimura) and a triangle involving his daughter (Momoko Kochi), a seafaring officer (Akira Takarada) and the eye-patched scientist (Akihiko Hirata) with the glowing aquarium in his lab. The wrathful spectacle between King Kong and Kiss Me Deadly, sirens and searchlights herald the creature stomping right through a gigantic electrified fence and munching on Tokyo trains. (Professional to very end, a broadcaster describes the devastation like Pliny the Younger facing the erupting Vesuvius.) "The most extraordinary story of the century" stems from the open wounds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Honda evokes them wryly in the lead-up to the rampage ("The shelters again? That stinks!") and mournfully in the aftermath (radioactive children, broken families, tentative peace hymns). Haunted memories, collective exorcism. Before the pop wresting bouts of later sequels, a scaly specter amid burning maquettes. Only the Oxygen Destroyer can follow the hydrogen bomb, it ends with poetic absurdity (a disintegrated skeleton glimpsed from a diving helmet) and a prophecy of more monsters. "May we live without destruction..." (cp. Imamura's Black Rain) Cinematography by Masao Tamai. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |