Oct 021964
 
four reels

A hurricane washes a giant egg into a Japanese bay where a greedy entrepreneur grabs it, intending it to be the centerpiece for his new theme park.  Two fairy girls ask for the egg to be returned to their island as it belongs to their god, Mothra.  A newspaperman, his camera woman, and a professor try and help the fairies, but to no avail.  When Godzilla appears, the three appeal to the fairies to send Mothra to fight Godzilla.

The most exciting and fun-filled of the “Showa” Godzilla films (those made from ’54 to ’75) Godzilla vs. Mothra avoids the pitfalls of its predecessor, King Kong vs. Godzilla, by keeping away from juvenile slapstick and inserting a real sense of adventure and danger.  While the plot has its inexplicable moments (Why doesn’t Godzilla crush the egg once Mothra is no longer an issue?  Why are children on a school field trip while Godzilla is destroying the country?), the film has only one significant problem: Godzilla is fighting…well…a moth puppet and two grubs.  There’s really no way around that one.  I’d have thought that almost any other creature would have been an improvement as an opponent for the big green lizard, but subsequent Godzilla films demonstrated that there are a lot of monsters worse than a moth.

The human story doesn’t get in the way of the monster mayhem, with the businessmen getting their comeuppance without dragging the story to a halt as happens in so many of the series’ movies.  The special effects are a slight improvement over those of the three earlier films, and Godzilla himself wouldn’t look better for another twenty years.  But the real standout is the music.  Akira Ifukube’s score brings both a sense of wonder and epic grandeur to what is essentially a guy in a Halloween costume kicking at some marionettes.  The right music can transform a picture, and this is certainly the right music.

The American release does little to muck up the works.  The dubbing is reasonable (hey, it’s dubbing.  It’s not going to be brilliant), and little is cut.  The only moment I noticed was missing was a character being shot in the head (you still see the guy pulling the trigger, but then skip to the victim on the floor).  There’s an added scene of U.S. ships firing missiles at Godzilla that neither helps nor harms the picture.  The one oddity is the title, changed to Godzilla vs. The Thing.  The marketing campaign kept Godzilla’s adversary a secret, slapping a tentacled question mark on the posters.  I guess a big moth was a hard sell.  While the title is now generally Godzilla vs. Mothra even in the U.S., the dub has characters often referring to the big bug as “The Thing,” which comes off as rude.  Didn’t their mothers ever tell them to be polite to other people’s gods?

My rating is a bit high. Standing by itself, three reels is a better indicator of its quality, but everyone should see at least one of the fun, adventure-filled, rock’em sock’em Godzilla films, and this is the one.