Gamera / Gamera, the Giant Monster / Giant Monster Gamera / Daikaiju Gamera (1965) -*****

     Daiei Film Company Ltd. had it rough in the immediate postwar years, despite having been one of the three super-studios into which the Imperial government reorganized the Japanese cinema industry in 1942. Their back catalog was useless under the film-censorship rules established by the American occupation, consisting as it did mainly of wartime propaganda pictures (which were now unacceptable for obvious reasons) and jidaigeki period dramas, which the occupiers viewed with suspicion as potential delivery systems for old-fashioned values incompatible with the defanged liberal-democratic Japan that they wanted to build from the ashes. And since those were the kinds of product that Daiei’s creative talent mostly knew how to make, the studio was somewhat handicapped going forward as well. Size has its benefits, though, and Daiei weathered the hard times as well as any other firm in the business. Things got a little easier in the 50’s, when movies about samurai were no longer politically radioactive, and the company even scored a few major international hits with films like Rashomon and Gate of Hell. Daiei pioneered the use of color cinematography within the Japanese movie industry, too, which would further encourage a Western observer of the time to consider them a class act.

     There was always another, seedier side to Daiei, though— it’s just that nobody outside of Japan got to see it until the mid-1960’s. Some of the company’s 50’s jidaigeki were also kaidan ghost stories, and among those, only The Tale of Ugetsu got any exposure overseas. Nor would foreign audiences see the handful of sci-fi oddities made during Daiei’s glory years until long after their domestic releases. Even the studio’s two long-running series of action-oriented samurai films, which might have been more palatable to Western fans of their prestige productions, stayed mostly out of sight abroad. As a consequence, Daiei has developed two separate foreign fanbases, with only the most minimal overlap or even mutual awareness. Who, after all, wouldn’t require frequent reminders before it sank in that the studio behind Fires on the Plain was also responsible for Gamera?

     It’s appropriate, really, that Gamera was the film to introduce the outside world to Daiei’s disreputable face at last, because it’s difficult to imagine a movie more starkly unlike the studio’s better-behaved productions. It exhibits a bewildering combination of sturdy professionalism and downright idiocy that is difficult to find anywhere else. It’s a film of constantly warring mood and subject matter, of grand ambition undone by shoddy execution, of superficial derivativeness belied by profound (albeit profoundly misguided) originality. It exhibits an almost psychotic disregard for logic, despite taking itself altogether seriously, without the slightest trace of irony. Most of all, this movie is just plain weird, setting the standard for what would become the most consistently goofy franchise in all of Asian monster cinema.

     Gamera begins by teasing a much more blatant and unimaginative ripoff of its most illustrious predecessors than is actually in the cards. Like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, it opens with scientific doings above the Artic circle that give way to both an atomic explosion and the awakening of a prehistoric monster. And once that primordial menace arises, we’ll get plenty of imagery lifted directly from Godzilla: King of the Monsters. But the object of this movie’s polar research has nothing to do with the nuclear detonation, or indeed with any other enterprise that earlier monster films might lead us to expect. Instead, Dr. Hidaka (Eiji Funakoshi, from Blind Beast and Gamera vs. Guiron) has come to interview the chief of a recently contacted Eskimo tribe (Yoshio Yoshida, of Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster and The Swamp) about his pet theory that Atlantis was home to a species of gargantuan turtle. Because obviously you’d need to visit Baffin Bay or Greenland or some such place in order to investigate that. The A-bomb, meanwhile, is being carried in the belly of one of four swept-wing jet bombers (their country of origin is very pointedly not given, but the planes have a distinctly Soviet look to them) which have picked this moment to infiltrate American airspace. The Russian-looking bombers are engaged by a pair of American interceptors (they look like a cross between the F-106 Delta Dart— the most high-tech fighter in the U.S. inventory in 1965— and the Swedish Saab Draken fighter-bomber… very strange), and one of them gets shot down over the ice. Its payload explodes upon impact, and again just like in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the heat from the firestorm thaws out a titanic reptile— which the Eskimo chieftain identifies as “Gamera, the Devil’s emissary” in very much the same spirit as the Odo Islanders ID-ing Godzilla for the scientists visiting their neck of the woods in the latter monster’s debut film.

     This is where we first experience the strange whimsy that set the Gamera series apart from its more famous rival, at least until Godzilla himself took a turn for the strangely whimsical in the 1970’s. Whereas Toho’s star kaiju is a fairly straightforward 50’s-era representation of a theropod dinosaur (albeit rather heavily customized and much larger than any animal in the history of life on Earth), Gamera is a startlingly bizarre creature, in ways that could perhaps have been foreseen by those who saw Warning from Space, Daiei’s extremely screwy riff on The Day the Earth Stood Still, during the preceding decade. Characters in the film consistently refer to the monster as a turtle 60 meters (198 feet) tall, and that’s not a bad shorthand description. But it leaves out certain fairly important details: his bipedalism, the walrus-like tusks that project upward from his lower jaw, the lizard-like (as opposed to turtle-like) appearance of his head, and of course his super-powers. Not only does Gamera breathe fire (as a competitor to Godzilla, he’d pretty much have to), but we shall see later on that he is also able to fly by withdrawing all of his appendages into his shell; the sockets of his limbs inexplicably become rocket engines, and he lifts off, his body spinning like a frisbee. (I’ve never quite been able to figure that part out.) Clearly, this is more than just an outsized turtle.

     Anyway, Gamera proceeds to wreck the ship that brought Hidaka to the Arctic, leaving only him, his assistant, Kyoko (Harumi Kiritachi), and a newspaper photographer named Aoyagi (Junichiro Yamashiko) alive. By the time the trio have been rescued and put on a plane to New York, the world has astonishingly forgotten all about the unprovoked attempt by parties unknown to sucker-punch the USA with nuclear weapons, and tuned its jitters antennae to the big Atlantian turtle instead. Hidaka himself puts an end to that, though, by telling a reporter for the TV news that he’s certain Gamera will have died of radiation poisoning by now, however vigorous he might have seemed while sending the Chidori Maru to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Then a new subject for lurid speculation arises in the form of a huge, fiery UFO that gets spotted in various places all over the world. Remember, however, what I said before about Gamera’s most un-turtle-like powers of flight, and consider how quickly and completely he vanished from the scene after sinking Hidaka’s ship. While the scientist and his companions are en route from New York to Tokyo, that UFO is sighted over Hokkaido, and soon thereafter, Gamera puts in an appearance on the northern coast to wreck— that’s right— a lighthouse. (Every self-respecting giant monster simply must destroy at least one of those.)

     It is at this point that Gamera takes permanent leave of whatever senses it had. You see, Mr. Sakurai the lighthouse-keeper (Yoshiro Kitahara, from The Snow Woman and The Snake Girl and the Silver-Haired Witch), has in addition to his twenty-ish daughter, Nobuyo (Michiko Sugata), a son about half the girl’s age by the name of Toshio (or Kenny, if you’re watching an English-language dub that we’ll talk about later; either way, he’s played by Yoshiro Uchida). Toshio is a lonely kid, partly because his mother died some years ago, and partly because his father keeps getting relocated from one hazardous stretch of coastline to another. His sole companion, and the object of most of his affections, is his pet turtle, Chibi. (The aforementioned English dub calls the animal “Tippy,” which is an almost equally plausible transliteration of its name.) Indeed, Toshio is downright obsessed with turtles in general— which probably seems fairly benign to you as obsessions go, but that’s not how any of the adults in his life see it. On the night when Gamera arrives in Hokkaido, Dad had gone so far as to force Toshio to release Chibi into the wild. And because Gamera is a turtle as well, more or less, Toshio becomes convinced that the monster is in fact Chibi wondrously grown to colossal size and power. This impression is permanently cemented when Gamera, for no discernable reason whatsoever, saves Toshio from falling to his death from the top of the collapsing lighthouse. (You know— the lighthouse that Gamera himself just knocked over.) All throughout the rest of the film, no matter how much death and destruction the monster wreaks, Toshio will protest to anyone and everyone within earshot that “Gamera’s a good turtle! He’s good and gentle!” We’ll be hearing that a lot from him, too, because Sakurai’s brother is Kyoko’s dad, and the whole family goes to live with him until they can find someplace to resettle permanently. From now on, Dr. Hidaka won’t be able to go anywhere without Toshio tagging along behind him, bleating about Gamera’s goodness and gentleness.

     Gamera next demonstrates those qualities by destroying a geothermal power plant. In doing so, he establishes not only his imperviousness to heat, electricity, and artillery, but also the strangest aspect of his physiology, when he hunkers down in the burning ruins of the plant to inhale the roaring flames for nourishment. The only reason he doesn’t establish his invulnerability to American-made nuclear missiles, too, is because Hidaka and his colleague, Dr. Murase (Jun Hamamura, of Princess from the Moon and Kappa), remember that he’s already shrugged off one nuke in time to put a stop to the futile bombardment. The measures tried against Gamera become increasingly unconventional from here on out, culminating in the desperate rejiggering of the Z Plan— some hush-hush joint project of the American and Soviet aerospace industries— into a last-ditch anti-turtle device. Director Noriaki Yuasa and screenwriter Nisan Takahashi take great pains to keep the Z Plan’s true nature under wraps until the climax, however, for the completely sensible reason that you’ll believe it even less after you see it.

     You remember what I said, back at the beginning of the review, about Daiei having been the first Japanese movie studio to embrace color cinematography? Well, it wasn’t just the glossy, expensive movies that got that treatment in the 50’s. Even Warning from Space was shot in full color! It’s odd, then, that Gamera was filmed in black and white, not only a decade later but also in the context of a bid to compete with Toho’s monster movies, which had gone all-color, all the time, in 1959. The most likely explanation is that Gamera was made halfway by accident, in an emergency gambit to recoup the expenditures already laid out for a failed project called The Great Horde-Monster Nezura. That film would have seen Tokyo overrun by swarms of giant (but not, you know, giant) rats, but its abortive production merely saw one of Daiei’s biggest soundstages overrun by rat fleas. The Great Horde-Monster Nezura was conceived as a cheap quickie on the American model for creature features, and Gamera inherited approximately that level of production value. It’s possible to spin that as a good thing, at least some of the time, insofar as the monochrome film stock lends the movie a bit of the brooding appearance that characterized the first two Godzilla installments. But because Gamera is in every other respect the furthest thing in the world from brooding, the somber visual vibe heightens the silliness of the proceedings far beyond anything to be seen in, say, The Mysterians or Frankenstein Conquers the World. When Yuasa shows us Gamera trampling the flaming wreckage of power plants, cities, and so forth, the intended point of reference might be Godzilla’s obliteration of Tokyo, but I promise you the only thing you’ll be thinking about is how the poor bastard inside the monster suit has no idea what to do with his arms. And while we’re on the subject of inappropriate monster-suit acting, no unstoppable global menace should ever propel itself across the landscape in a manner that so cries out to be described as “ambling.”

     It isn’t just the cinematography, however, implying a level of gravity that the movie is simply not at all interested in reaching. If you watch Gamera with the original Japanese dialogue, the most striking thing is the total commitment that the entire cast (even little Yoshiro Uchida!) bring to their performances, ludicrous lines and preposterous situations notwithstanding. They don’t actually manage to sell those lines or situations, of course; nobody could. But when Dr. Murase expounds upon the role of fire-eating turtles in the writings of Plato, Jun Hamamura treats that shit like he means it. When Sakurai and his daughter react to Toshio’s turtle fixation as if they’d caught him cooking meth in his bedroom, Yoshiro Kitahara and Michiko Sugata act like they mean it, too. And let no one gainsay Uchida’s conviction that Gamera is good, gentle, and a friend to all children!

     The bond between Toshio and the monster is Gamera’s real innovation, and its most lasting contribution to the kaiju eiga genre as a whole. It was of great importance to Noriaki Yuasa, too, for he poured into that aspect of the film all his lingering discontent with the adults in his life leftover from the war years, and from his own time as a juvenile actor. On a level that I’m not sure any filmmaker ever had before, Yuasa instinctively grasped the affection that movie-loving children could lavish on a sufficiently charismatic monster, and he made that the mainspring of this film, even though the theme clashes cacophonously with the surface-level story. Only when Gamera became truly good (if still hardly gentle) in 1967’s Gamera vs. Gaos would the dissonance resolve itself. Yuasa’s vision of Gamera as the ultimate big brother for lonely and misunderstood children also put Nisan Takahashi in a curious bind, because it meant that no ending could rightly be considered happy unless the rampaging, city-smashing, soldier-squishing, nightclub-incinerating monster survived. Whatever super-weapon laid Gamera low, it had to be non-lethal. I suppose that would have been a smart business move, anyway, if Daiei’s leadership had any conscious intention of taking on Godzilla on a sustained basis, but it’s still weird in context.

     But let’s say you’re not watching Gamera with the original Japanese dialogue. In that case, English-speakers have three choices. First, chronologically speaking, there’s Gammera the Invincible, the version of the film that American International Pictures released to US theaters in 1966. More than a mere dub, Gammera the Invincible differs enough from its source that I felt compelled to treat it as a whole separate movie. Then, at the opposite end of the timescale, there’s Gamera, the Giant Monster, the respectful and respectable dub produced for home video by Neptune Media at the tail end of the VHS era. It’s a fairly accurate approximation of the Japanese original, and thus doesn’t warrant any special discussion. And finally, right in the middle, is the Sandy Frank dub from 1985. From the standpoint of pure entertainment, Sandy’s dub is the one you really want. Mind you, it’s fuck-awful. It’s extravagantly fuck-awful, in fact. But it’s fuck-awful not only in ways that feel like the movie finding its true level at last, but also in ways that dovetail with the English-language scenes that were present in the film from the start. Oh yes— Yuasa’s version played all the scenes set in North America in English, and Frank understandably saw no reason to tamper with those sequences in his dub. (Or at any rate, it was understandable from a certain, very mercenary, point of view, since leaving that dialogue in place would save a couple bucks on re-recording costs.) But the English-speaking “actors” that Daiei hired, man… The lieutenant colonel at the Air Force base is especially amazing. The combination of his voice, his lines, and his delivery is so absurd that it could almost be called “Dadaist.” What Frank’s dub accomplishes is to put everyone in the film on the same page as that guy, and while true cinephiles will justly be horrified, trashfilm aficionados old enough to remember when no-fucks-given dubs were the industry standard will clap like trained seals to hear this outlandish crap.

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