“Dogora” Poster
Director: Ishiro Honda
Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Yoko Fujiyama, Hiroshi Koizumi, Nobuo Nakamura, Robert Dunham, Akiko Wakabayashi, Jun Tazaki, Seizaburo Kawazu
Running Time: 83 min.
By Z Ravas
While watching those classic Godzilla movies where hundreds of civilians are fleeing the city due to an imminent kaiju attack, did you ever think about how there are detectives down on those streets who still have cases their bosses expect them to solve, despite the King of the Monsters’ impending arrival? Well, you feel like this idea must have occurred to Godzilla director Ishirō Honda because he went and made a movie about it. Dogora is an unconventional kaiju film: the Criterion Channel’s description for the movie states that the A plot concerns the attack of a radiated cellular monster from space while the B plot focuses on an inspector’s (Yōsuke Natsuki) attempts to thwart a ring of diamond thieves. I’m going to suggest they’ve got that backwards, as the supposed B plot about cops ‘n crooks really plays like the A plot since it receives the lion’s share of screentime.
It feels like Ishirō Honda wanted to make a swingin’ gangster picture, in the vein of the Nikkatsu crime films that were popular at this time (films like Red Pier and Cruel Gun Story), but he was perhaps limited by the fact that Toho studios and audiences in general knew him best for his giant monster movies. His solution, then, was to combine these two flavors—the kaiju and the crime tale—into one movie. And it actually works, in part because the script goes about it logically: the space creature Dogora feeds off of carbon-based elements like diamonds and coal, so it’s somewhat natural for its activities on earth to intersect with diamond thieves. Aiding our intrepid inspector in stopping the thieves is an insurance agent played by American actor Robert Dunham, one of the very few Western performers in Japan at this time who could speak fluent Japanese and therefore did not need to be dubbed. (He would later play a memorable role as the toga-clad Emperor of Seatopia in Godzilla vs. Megalon).
Part of what makes Honda so suited to the crime genre is the way his Sixties films trade in a comic book-like iconography: when a character in a Honda movie is a gangster or a cop or a space alien, you know it the second you look at them. From the moment we see actress Akiko Wakabayashi waiting in the driver’s seat of a getaway car, she just radiates that sense of femme fatale danger. In contrast, our detectives are clean cut and well-dressed…but don’t underestimate them—they know Judo!
Granted, I can understand that anyone preparing to watch a movie called “Dogora” with that cover art might be disappointed that the story spends so much time with police inspectors and insurance agents, with relatively little in the way of kaiju action. Rest assured, when we do finally see Dogora for one sequence, the creature is quite the sight, with an ethereal, jellyfish-like quality to its floaty movements. This is the rare Toho effort where Honda and company opted not for a man-in-suit to bring their monster to life but optical effects and miniatures, and the special FX hold up over sixty years later: I can’t say there’s another creature in Toho’s entire repertoire that looks or moves quite like Dogora.
A warranted criticism of this movie is that it doesn’t actually give its titular monster much to do. Nevertheless, Toho studios had hit a creative groove by 1964, and Ishirō Honda put together a technically sharp movie utilizing a familiar crew—the film was shot by Honda’s frequent Director of Photography Hajime Koizumi (Godzilla vs. Mothra, Godzilla vs. King Kong, among many others) and scored by iconic Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube. If you’re a fan of this era of Japanese cinema and this brand of classic monster movie, I have to think Dogora will register as comfort food viewing, even if it might initially be a bummer to queue up a kaiju flick and find out it’s largely about diamond thieves. Still, you’ve got to admit there’s something to be said for a movie that can pack in intrigue, action, and a giant space jellyfish in a neat eighty minutes.
Z Ravas’ Rating: 7/10
