Original title: Kingu Kongu tai Gojira
After a break of seven years, Godzilla returned to the screen in glorious Tohoscope widescreen and vivid colour for a clash with the greatest of all screen monsters. The film was based, very loosely, on a treatment by King Kong‘s technical director Willis O’Brien to have been titled King Kong meets Frankenstein (later retitled Kong Kong vs Prometheus). No American studio was interested in the film but the idea came to the attention of Toho who were keen to make a King Kong film of their own and were also tempted to bring their own giant monster back to the screen too. They snapped up the idea and the resulting film, released in the States as King Kong vs Godzilla (it’s notable that in his earliest colour films, Godzilla was either not mentioned in the Japanese title or relegated to second fiddle as here), formed part of the company’s prestigious thirtieth anniversary year.
The resulting film was a huge worldwide hit and certainly in the UK it was one of the first Godzilla films that many younger viewers will have seen thanks to it having been shown on British television a couple of times in the 1970s. So while it has a lot of goodwill thanks to fond childhood memories, we can’t really escape the fact that, in truth, it’s really not that good – and sadly it was very much a sign of things to come…
It begins as a sort of remake of the original King Kong (1933) with an expedition being sent to Skull Island (never named as such here) in search of the legendary giant monster said to live there. In this case, the expedition is funded by the dreadful Mr Tako, head of Pacific Pharmaceuticals who has become disenchanted with the television shows that his company have been sponsoring and wants the monster to help boost flagging ratings. The monster is indeed Kong who takes on a giant octopus (a scene recreated in the American film Kong: Skull Island (2017)) before being drugged and strapped to a raft ready for his return to Japan. While all this is going on, Godzilla is disturbed from his hibernation in an iceberg (a nod towards the climax of Gojira no gyakushu/Gigantis the Fire Monster/Godzilla Raids Again (1955) in which Godzilla had been buried in ice) by an American nuclear submarine and is soon also making a bee line for Japan. Inevitably the pair meet in a series of skirmishes that culminate in them falling from a cliff – Kong is seen swimming home but of Godzilla, there’s no sign though a final defiant roar heard on the soundtrack suggests that it has in fact survived.
To get the obvious out of the way first – the oft-repeated myth that there were two endings filmed, one in which Godzilla wins the battle (for Japanese audiences) and one in which Kong endures (for the rest of the world) is just that, a myth. Kong was massively popular in Japan at the time, much more so than Godzilla and it was always intended that the climax be ambiguous. There were though differences between the Japanese and American releases of the film – the original Japanese cut was already more light-hearted than the first two films (particularly the battles between the two monsters which repeatedly show Kong ineffectively throwing rocks at a bemused Godzilla) but the US re-edit, created by producer John Beck who had brokered the deal for Toho to use O’Brien’s idea, plays up the comedy even more.
It’s a ridiculously entertaining film but not a patch on the first two in the series, forsaking the stark monochrome horrors for candy coloured knockabout action. There’s more slapstick than one might have expected, more annoying human characters (a trait that would continue through the subsequent films) and a notable shift in the film’s political and social concerns. For the most part, Kingu Kongu tai Gojira abandons the nuclear metaphor of the first film, though not entirely – Godzilla is after all freed from his slumbers by an American nuclear sub and the other antagonist, Kong, may hail from the South Seas but was spawned by an American film company. But this is all buried beneath the rock-flinging silliness and above all by Kong’s ludicrous appearance.
The effects are among the worst in any of the original Godzilla films and Kong’s suit is laughable. With his gangly arms, ungainly walk and goofy eyes he looks inebriated throughout and the suit itself is mangy and unconvincing. Godzilla fares rather better but the effects the monster rampage through are notably sub-par. The miniature tanks sent by the Japanese Self Defence Force to tackle Godzilla are particularly awful and although the giant octopus scene is a hoot, the effects are mismatched as a real octopus is intercut with close-ups of a model that looks like a very poor inflatable toy. Kong is simply too cartoonish throughout to be taken seriously as a credible threat.
But it would be churlish to be too hard on the film. No, it isn’t all that good but it’s certainly entertaining, never standing still for a minute and investing more time in the monsters than many of the subsequent films would. It confirmed to Toho that Godzilla was a star in his own right though sadly it laid the groundwork for later films in which stories, metaphors and even common sense would be thrown to the wind in favour of increasingly crowded monster fights, culminating in the eleven monster smackdown of Kaiju Soshingeki/Destroy All Monsters (1968).
Toho had another crack at a King Kong film with Kingu Kongu no Gyakushu/King Kong Escapes (1967), in which Kong is abducted by the villainous Dr Who (no relation) who is trying to perfect a robot replica of the monster, another trope that would recur in Toho’s monster films (see also Gojira tai Mekagojira (1974), Mekagojira no Gyakushu (1976), Gojira vs. Mekagojira (1993), Gojira X Mekagojira (2002) and Gojira tai Mosura tai Mekagojira: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003)) and in the States Godzilla vs Kong (2020) is united the two strands of Legendary and Warner Bros. “MonsterVerse”.
The EOFFTV Review 