King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962) Review

“King Kong vs Godzilla” Japanese Theatrical Poster

Director: Ishiro Honda
Cast: Tadao Takashima, Kenji Sahara, Yu Fujiki, Ichiro Arishima, Mie Hama, Shoichi Hirose, Haruo Nakajima, Jun Tazaki, Akiko Wakabayashi, Akihiko Hirata
Running Time: 97 min.

By Ian Whittle

The great animator Willis O’Brien remains immortal for his legendary creation King Kong, introduced in 1933 in RKO’s mega-hit film. But that didn’t translate into lots of steady work. O’Brien walked off the rushed “serio-comic phantasy” sequel The Son of Kong (1933), and only sporadically found substantial film gigs after that. He won an Honorary Oscar for Mighty Joe Young (1949), and by the late 50s was competing with his own disciple Ray Harryhausen. The latter found a lucrative partnership with producer Charles H Schneer at Columbia, whilst O’Brien and his colleague Pete Peterson did quickie work for low budget faire The Black Scorpion (1957) and The Giant Behemoth (1959). I can’t imagine what O’Brien thought when in 1960 he was hired as a consultant on the remake of his 1925 classic The Lost World, only to find the producers forgoe stop-motion animation in favour of sticking fins on lizards and alligators and have them fight on camera.

Not having been seen since his debut in 1933, King Kong had enjoyed a lucrative reissue in 1952 that prompted crazes for giant monster movies in both American and Japan. O’Brien began shopping around a proposed film treatment called King Kong vs. Frankenstein, in which the giant gorilla would fight a giant artificial monster. Sounds like a license to print money if you ask me, but the prohibitive combination of the time and money required to produce the animation, in addition to the high fees to license Kong from RKO, saw little interest. Producer John Beck bought the project and ended up selling it to Japanese studio Toho. Next thing you know, O’Brien and Frankenstein were out. Replacing them were veteran Japanese SPFX genius Tsuburaya Eiji and HIS legendary creation Godzilla…

O’Brien apparently broke down in tears upon finding out about this.

There are two distinct genres of film competing for attention in King Kong vs Godzilla. On the one hand, Godzilla (Nakajima Haruo) is in a conventional monster movie. A UN submarine, peopled seemingly with Caucasian non-actors trying and failing to pass off as American, crashes into an iceberg in the middle of the Bering Sea, which somehow contains Godzilla despite the fact that the last time we saw him, in 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again, he was buried alive in an avalanche on a small island. After destroying a Soviet base, Godzilla naturally heads for Japan to cause more havoc.

King Kong (Hirose Shoichi) is meanwhile stuck in a “salaryman comedy”; a particular Japanese strain of comedy involving the trials and tribulations of white-collar life. With his Pacific Pharmaceutical Company suffering in the TV ratings department, the very Groucho Marxish Mr Tako (Arishima Ichiro) learns of an island that produces a narcotic red berry in abundance…oh, and just might have a giant monster too. Tako dispatches the very Abbott-and-Costelloish Sakurai (Takashima Tadao) and Furue (Fujiki Yu) to the island, where they win over the natives with Japanese pop-music and cigarettes (yes, even to the children!).  The natives by the way look oddly like Japanese actors in boot polish trying and failing to pass off as black people. When the village is attacked by a giant octopus (played by a real octopus that ended up becoming Tsuburaya’s dinner), all seems lost until Kong comes to the rescue. Luckily for the PPC boys, Kong is very much in his Homer Simpsonish phase, and knocks himself out getting drunk on the red berry juice. Transported to Japan via raft, Kong is detained from entering due to a government order (some realism in a giant monster movie finally!) but manages to escape and head for Japan to…stagger around drunkenly mostly but ends up causing havoc anyway! It’s only a matter of time before Godzilla and Kong’s paths will cross…

The outright bizarre nature of this film does seem rather anti-climatic for such a clash of the titans, but the combination of popular monsters and comedy did result in the highest ticket sales of Godzilla’s original series by far. If you go in knowing this is sometimes going to be deliberately funny as opposed unintentionally so, it definitely helps. And it’s pretty damn funny at times, especially with Mr Tako’s increasingly jittery reactions to Godzilla stealing Kong’s thunder. It’s kind of a shame when the film moves further into being about the Japanese army’s fruitless efforts to stop the behemoths, which as usual do nothing. I do sympathise with the poor generals managing to keep Godzilla out of Tokyo with an electric barrier (which contradicts his 1954 debut, but to be fair, that was a different Godzilla), only to find Kong can instead absorb the electricity (hmm, a holdover from the Frankenstein treatment perhaps?) and use it as a weapon. Ironically, although Kong is technically the film’s hero, he does more damage to Tokyo than Godzilla. Sadly, it seems 1962 Tokyo was a bit short in the skyscraper department, so Kong ends up standing on the Diet building, which is the same height as him! And spare a thought for Sakurai’s unfortunate sister (future Bond girl Hama Mie) who gets chased off a train by Godzilla in the countryside, only to board a train in Tokyo and get picked up (literally) by Kong. Given Toho’s Kong is substantially bigger than his RKO counterpart, the effect gives the impression that Hama is really quite big in order to be seen in his palm!

Ifukube Akira’s score is especially interesting, as he seems to be fighting against the comical film. Besides his unusual native songs, repeated throughout the movie, he introduces the distinctive “Terror of Godzilla” theme that would accompany the monster in many of his subsequent films, until it began in 1975 to become supplanted by a more conventionally heroic theme previously used for the Japanese Defence Force in the original movie. Kong’s theme is downright eerie, a strange whirring dirge that suggests an outer space invader more than a giant gorilla. Ifukube’s battle theme for the two monsters would turn up years later in 1991’s Godzilla vs King Ghidorah, and I especially love his rousing march “Plan to Transport King Kong”, which is incredibly exhilarating. The reason I am drawing attention to Ifukube’s score will become apparent when I review the American version, because if you’ve seen King Kong vs Godzilla, chances are that you’ve not heard its music…

Where King Kong vs Godzilla falls down, surprisingly, is its SPFX, which come off as very rushed and haphazard. Travelling mattes fail to sync up, superimposed elements seem weirdly yellow or blue in relation to the rest of the image, and the toy tanks are frequently shot from angles that suggest a kid’s playroom. The previous Godzilla films had worked out to blend everything together as seamlessly as possible, and indeed so did the immediate sequels, so I’m not sure what happened here. Godzilla’s new costume has a distinctively effective crocodile-like profile but tends to look rather duck-like when facing the camera, and I’m not very keen on his oversized thighs. But he is a triumph when compared to what happened to Kong…and boy, what the hell happened? I’ve seen many assorted gorilla suits in movies over the years in all manner of quickie horror flicks (Charles Gemora in Murders in the Rue Morgue, Emil Van Horn in The Ape Man, George Barrows’ suit but not Barrows in Konga) and as silly as they look, they do at least have a crude believability. Toho’s Kong, seemingly cobbled together in haste when Kong’s allotted budget had to go more towards his licensing fees then his suit, has a ratty carnival look to it, with a slightly disquieting Jack Nicholsonish grin and dead, shark-like eyes.

Occasionally longer arms are used to hide the actor’s shape, but that just makes him look like Stretch Armstrong. It’s a good job this is a comedy, as seeing the great monster look so shoddy would be rather depressing in a more serious film. Scattered about the film are weird oddities such as glove puppets to simulate reactions in the monster’s heads, very jerky stop motion animation for the octopus tentacle grabbing a native and Godzilla flying-kicking Kong, and what looks like action figures of the monster being jostled together as though this were a kid’s home movie. Nakajima’s portrayal of Godzilla is more humanish than before, especially with his weird tic of clapping his hands together accompanied by what sounds like coconut shells being struck, but definitely give the great beast an infectious swagger. Hirose is less effective as Kong, occasionally given to forgetting his ape crawl and just walking upright but makes a good fighting partner for Nakajima in the final battle, which definitely has WWF vibes.

The huge success of this film would revive Godzilla’s career and confirm him as a top-rank superstar. And since Toho owned him outright, he would soon rack up many movie appearances. Kong only had one more Toho film left, 1967’s King Kong Escapes, and then he would find himself in the clutches of the wily Dino De Laurentiis for his bizarre Hollywood comeback. Consequently, King Kong vs Godzilla is easier to take as a Godzilla film as there are many films in his career, but the rarity of Kong films results in the misses hitting harder. And as entertaining as King Kong vs Godzilla is, poor Kong definitely is appearance wise at rock bottom.

And for those of you annoyed that this film cost us a giant Frankenstein monster, don’t worry. Toho hadn’t forgotten that idea. But that’s another story…

Ian Whittle’s Rating: 7/10