“Look at how gangsta I hold the gun, honey.”

Baby Bond.

When James Bond was American. When the most outlandish gadget was a walking-cane with a gun in it. But when the villains still talked instead of shooting.

It’s the first ever James Bond adapted to film from Ian Fleming’s 1953 book, Casino Royale; a black and white TV presentation from CBS, under a series called CLIMAX! Aired in October 1954, CASINO ROYALE is a stodgy one-hour play in three acts, finding “card sense Jimmy Bond” up against a Soviet spy called Le Chiffre, aiming to bankrupt him at the casino tables so that the Soviets will disown him.

Barry Nelson is James Bond, an arrogant American with none of the suave or heroism of the Bonds who would come after him and make the role desirous. Peter Lorre is Le Chiffre, who is inordinately bullied for his ogre looks by the heroes. Michael Pate is British intelligence Clarence (not Felix) Leiter, who uses a tub of Brylcreem daily on his hair. (So the roles are basically reversed – in official Bond canon, Bond is British and Leiter is American.)

Linda Christian is an ex-lover of Bond, who is now Le Chiffre’s woman, and undercover French Intelligence. And there’s Gene Roth, the old sheriff from EARTH VS THE SPIDER, before he put on the weight and the old sheriff demeanor – here, as Le Chiffre’s bodyguard. And the music is by Jerry Goldsmith (PLANET OF THE APES, PAPILLON, CHINATOWN, LOGAN’S RUN, THE OMEN…)!

The dramatic elements are not bad, and the acting is reasonable; the film falls down in its action scenes, which are directed and blocked like schoolboy choreography. But hey, the fight scenes didn’t get much better with Sean Connery – have you seen the final fight scene in FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE with Rosa Klebb?

And if we thought the convention of the villain holding the hero at gunpoint and then talking his ass off started with DR NO, well, no. Here, Le Chiffre holds Bond and the woman at gunpoint, mansplaining his reasons on why he didn’t kill her earlier. They’re stupid, made up reasons of course – as the Screen Rant guy tells us – “so that the movie can happen.” Le Chiffre gets SO complacent that he actually sits down and lowers the gun while he keeps talking for zero reason! Then after threatening to shoot Bond for the 47^th time, he KNOCKS BOND OUT. Then he wakes Bond so that he can threaten to shoot him again while talking instead. When he tells his men that Bond is “ready for the bathtub” I thought they were going to waterboard him or torture him with dunking – next scene: Bond is sitting comfortably in the tub and Le Chiffre is waving some pliers around. Eventually Le Chiffre gets around to doing something to Bond’s toes in the tub (they can’t show graphic violence due to the censors, and even Bond can’t react too outrageously, as that would be censored, so we have to be content with offscreen toe torture and Bond wailing like a pedicurist just tickled him too hard.

Watch for academic reasons only. With this Bond, nobody does it worser.

END

Influencing every superhero movie ever made.

The Jedi of Japan.

Seven samurai against forty bandits. The bandits never stood a chance…

Ultimate majesty. Ultimate tragedy. How does one describe the greatest Akira Kurosawa film, one of the most touching, savage and layered stories about sacrifice, courage and redemption, released in 1954 and still standing as one of the greatest films of all time?

SEVEN SAMURAI. (Well, that was easier than I thought!)

In 16^th Century Japan, seven ronin (freelance Samurai, unattached to any royal house or clan) are recruited to defend a peasant village terrorized by bandits for their annual crop.

It is a strange thing viewing SEVEN SAMURAI through the lens of modernity, after being indoctrinated with Hollywood screenwriting rules, modern moviemaking techniques and, not least, John Sturges’s brilliant 1960 Western remake THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (western in genre, western in hemisphere). Though I’ve viewed SAMURAI innumerable times as an adult, I, like the rest of you round-eyes, was exposed to MAGNIFICENT SEVEN first, since childhood, so we are prone to compare the characters in SAMURAI to their analogs in MAGNIFICENT, rather than the other way round…

Takashi Shimura (who had released another film that year which also attained immortality – the original and best GOJIRA) is wise samurai leader Kambei, clearly the Yul of this magnificent seven. His McQueen here is a mashup of two warriors, Daisuke Kato as Shichiroji (a former right hand man) and Yoshio Inabe as Gorobei (recruited for his display of tactics); there is the Coburn knife-thrower (Seiji Miyaguchi as Kyuzo), and the down-on-his-luck Bronson chopping wood (Minoru Chiaki as Heihachi). The Horst novice who yearns to be on the team and is denied until his persistence wins out, is a mashup of young Katsushiro (Isao Kimura) and a veteran drifter named Kikuchiyo (the breathtaking Toshiro Mifune).

Influencing Iron Man.

Toshiro Mifune. His name is synonymous with the Way of the Samurai. This film would not be his first in wielding a katana, but it would rocket him to such fame as a cinema swordsman that it would become strange to see him grace a movie screen without that trusted samurai weapon. What an incredible, unique energy he brings to the role of Kikuchiyo! If it were not for Mifune, SAMURAI would be just another great film, not the towering work of art that it is. Mifune imbues the film with the imperfect humanity it requires; he is the everyman thrust onto a super-man pedestal; he brings all the left turns and laughs required to punctuate the spiraling tension, and surprises us with many gems of profundity. The other samurai stand tall, their superhuman auras glutting the screen, but as Kurosawa has noted, six sober samurai would have been boring, “they needed a character that was more off-the-wall.”

Truly the Brando of Japan, Mifune’s Kikuchiyo is a raw nerve: boundless joy, volcanic anger, quizzical neck scratches, perturbed expressions, gales of laughter; inserting himself into the troupe as they travel to the troubled village, unwanted at first by the solemn Kambei, his bombastic revelry eventually winning over the six. After seeing Mifune in later majestic roles, his fierce mien that of a hunting hawk, we forget how insanely funny he makes Kikuchiyo – he’s the class clown, the goofball, with his very own comical bassoon theme, keeping the villagers laughing around him – until he needs to be the iron man.

Many films make the claim, “greatest of all time,” but how many can boast Toshiro Mifune’s glistening man-butt? Kikuchiyo infiltrates the bandits’ lair and steals an armor breastplate, and spends the rest of the movie wearing only that torso armor and a slim breechclout (like a sumo wrestler’s), so if the camera isn’t angled to see that thin material going right up his butt crack, he’s basically naked for Shinto.

There’s that one movie in an actor’s repertoire that rocks you backward and makes you wonder how you never discovered him earlier; makes you want to watch everything he’s ever done. That’s SEVEN SAMURAI for me, with Toshiro. For this ferocious performance, we discover Mifune studied lions in the wild to inform Kikuchiyo. (Is that why he spent so much time not wearing pants?)

After Kyuzo returns from a stealth mission, youngest recruit Katsushiro stands before him enamored, eyes aglow with awe and respect for Kyozo’s skill, effusing, “I think you are… very great!” In this hyperbolic world, these subtitles read as less than salutary, but Katsushiro’s manner tells us he is giving Kyuzo the highest of accolades, while unable to contain himself nor properly express how formidably this hero moves him.

That’s me with Toshiro.

Influencing Gangnam Style.

The samurai accept the job of defending the village, for nothing but meals and beds. They teach the villagers self-defense, they build new walls, trenches, traps for the bandits… Why? Why did they do this for nothing? Was it honor? Was it altruism? Was it desperation? The world has turned so far since those long-ago times and since those majestic Men, and we wonder whether writer-director Kurosawa and his co-writers (Shinobu Hashimoto and Hideo Oguni) were trying to capture more nuanced reasons than the simple altruistic avenger story SAMURAI seems on its surface.

Of course they were.

When Kikuchiyo discovers samurai armor hidden by the villagers, it sets off a cataclysm of doubt and betrayal and duplicity – we discover that in that 16^th century dark age, ronin were not as respected as history makes them out to be; Kikuchiyo rages how the farmers pretended innocence, yet had encountered samurai before – and had obviously killed many and kept their blades and armor! What makes Kikuchiyo even madder is that the samurai were responsible for the wars that destroyed the farmers’ livelihoods – and he froths at the mouth that the samurai deserved to be murdered (viewers say “Whaaa–?”). Wise Kambei recognizes immediately, “You were a farmer’s son…”

Kikuchiyo loathed his farmer’s life so thoroughly that he carried around a scroll that supposedly proved he was of a royal bloodline. Of course, the other samurai can see through this ruse – but soon Kikuchiyo proves that his blood doesn’t have to be royal to be noble: he screams how he hates the villagers (“Damn these fools!”), screams as a family and their child stays behind in their home outside the protective boundary – and then rushes headlong without hesitation into their burning home to save them when the bandits attack.

Influencing rap battles.

Filmed in black and white, SAMURAI is a technical masterpiece (Kurosawa pioneered filmic techniques, multi-camera shooting, efficient editing), an artistic milestone (the tragic hero’s journey encapsulated in a battle for a village), a runaway financial success (Japan’s highest-grossing movie), and a cultural juggernaut (its impact in films is felt to this day, as innumerable storytelling tropes were popularized with this film and copycatted through the decades, the most popular trope being the assemblage of a team of experts; if LETHAL WEAPON and DIE HARD influenced 80’s action movie trends, SAMURAI influenced ALL action movie trends; even someone as culturally influential as George Lucas has cited the movie as part-inspiration for STAR WARS – now you see where he got the idea for his ascetic swordsmen).

Accept no substitutes: view the full 203-minute version with Japanese dialogue and subtitles. As always, dubbed versions are not just laughable but idiotic, and make all of us Movie Maniacs who tout this movie’s brilliance seem like buttheads for recommending it.

If there is anything to criticize in SAMURAI, it might be the lack of character development for the villain. Whereas the samurai are painted as thoughtful, tactical, virtuous, humble, with a desire for balance, there’s only the barest motivation for the villain, a faceless leader who only appears twice with a few basic action lines. He’s a cardboard cutout. John Sturges would rectify this shortcoming in MAGNIFICENT SEVEN when Calvera (a saucy Eli Wallach – an actual star, adding heft to the role, therefore making the heroes look better) rationalizes why he must steal – to feed 40 men, horses, ammunition, winter…

Influencing Hammer pants.

The bandits here are faceless attackers; the study is on the farmers and samurai who beat them back. Until the bandits use their new-fangled weapon of mass destruction – a gun.

The battle scenes in SAMURAI are to die for – probably literally, as the villagers and bandits clash in frenetic, seemingly un-choreographed havoc. I love the way the samurai run into battle: that straight, flat run, where they don’t bounce up and down or flap their arms, but come at you in a sturdy straight line like an arrow, while one hand rests on their sheathed katana, or – worst nightmare – wielding their unsheathed katana! That dead run looks so cool, so terrifying in its willfulness and fatal utility.

Kurosawa lamented he was forced to film in rain, but it lends a thrall of doom to the already breath-hammering action. In those days of practical effects, with all those people running around with katanas, bamboo spears and pitchforks, even though they were props, how many people actually got injured with all those long, pointy objects flailing about?

Young Katsushiro would discover the farmers were hiding away their women and children for fear of the samurai. His redemption would come in the form of female: Shino (Keiko Tsushima), a farmer’s daughter. He may have joined the samurai looking for glamour and excitement, but he would find his destiny lay along another lay—I mean, path.

For many of the samurai, their redemption IS to give their life, in the struggle to make the world a place that would not require their killing expertise.

Influencing that BRADY BUNCH episode, “Marcia Marcia Marcia.”

This is why tears will flow for SEVEN SAMURAI. Not because it’s one of the very first avenger films (long before men wore iron suits and threw vibranium shields) but because SAMURAI exemplifies the axiom, “Live by the sword, die by the sword,” and layers that truism with wrenching humanity.

Katsushiro, in renouncing the sword for sex, does not meet his end, for he is now a creator of life, not a taker of it. The older warriors, these mercenaries, were no doubt asked to perform deeds throughout their lives they were never proud of. Yet they lived day to day, piling regret upon regret in their violent lives. When Kambei tells his lieutenant Shichiroji, “In the end we lost this battle too. The victory belongs to the farmers, not to us,” he knows that even after this win, he is still cursed to wander the Earth, rootless, loveless, a hired killer. In a sense, it is a lament that he too did not die a noble death alongside his compatriots, defending something purer than his own stained soul.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the circle is now complete.

END

Suddenly Moral Ambiguity.

An assassination attempt on the president of the United States – by Ol’ Blue Eyes!

In a bucolic American town named SUDDENLY, three men posing as FBI take a residential family hostage, using the family’s house as a vantage point to assassinate the president.

Frank Sinatra (FROM HERE TO ETERNITY, 1953) is John Baron, the crazy-eyed leader of the three assassins, so rail-thin, his pants are not only too high, they hang about him like pantaloons; his tie is too short and his hat is so rakishly tilted, it gravitationally affected Mercury’s orbit for two months.

Big Sterling Hayden (General “Precious Bodily Fluids” in DR STRANGELOVE, 1964) is Sheriff Tod Shaw, young and imposing, cultivating the town widow Ellen (Nancy Gates) by asking her out to church!

Ellen’s house is overrun by the assassins, as it overlooks the station where the president will disembark. Her loudmouth son “Pidge” and old paw live with her.

This black-and-whiter is a case study in dated moviemaking versus timely message. Made in 1954, the production values, special effects and social mores are all so quaint it makes us vomit in our mouths (theatrical acting, gunshot wounds nonexistent, asking her out to church!), yet the themes and arguments are as impactful today as they were half a century ago.

Though there are small pockets of badly directed action (by Lewis Allen), SUDDENLY is a dialogue-driven movie (written by Richard Sale) with a throbbing social conscience. Strangely, it embraces a nuance that is altogether extinct today: it is actually anti-war and pro-gun!

So though we notice all the glaring annoyances at first (like the terribly looped voices, all the law enforcement with big-balled basso throats, melodramatic acting and pointy bras), by paying attention to the dialogue, we peel away another layer to this seemingly simplistic thriller.

The story itself is predictable – after all, in an American movie no one ever kills the American president (unless it’s Lincoln). Likewise, even though assassin Baron keeps threatening that all-American kid, we know not one hair is going to be harmed on his purty li’l head – but within this predictable story, the arguments presented over war, guns, violence and heroism are surprising. Ellen’s husband died in “the war” so she is pathologically averse to Pidge following his example; she hates Pidge playing with guns. Meanwhile, her paw tries to school her about “dyin’ for your country” and her sheriff beau (Hayden) buys a toy gun for Pidge and tells her, “Guns aren’t necessarily bad – it depends on who uses ’em.”

Baron is an ex-military man, more than once boasting, “I killed 27 people – got a silver star for it” – in other words, though killing people in civilian life might be called murder, killing people in war is called heroism. Baron is constantly rationalizing that killing isn’t bad if done for the right reasons. The fact he is targeting the president is irrelevant. Baron’s character is disconnected from political ideology, to keep his motivations pure mercenary: “Don’t give me that political jazz – it’s not my racket!” So sayeth Ol’ Blue Eyes. SUDDENLY is a treatise on guns and war as instruments of morality. Though released during the Eisenhower administration, movie never mentions who the president is, because presidential policy is not the point of the tale. (Baron even spits an allusion to what would become one of The Who’s signature lines, “Tonight at five o’clock I kill the President. One second after five there’s a new President. What changes? Nothing!” In other words, “Meet the new boss / Same as the old boss!” – The Who, Won’t Get Fooled Again.)

Baron boasts about “control of life and death,” how having a gun “made you kinda God; without the gun I’m nothing, and I never had anything before I got one. First time I got one in my hands and killed a man, I got some self-respect… If I didn’t have a gun, you wouldn’t even spit on me, but because of the gun, you’ll remember me as long as you live!” He’s got a point. Mass murderers (whether they be postal workers, school shooters, army grunts or generals) always get the best press.

The koo-koo message is: war is BAD because it legitimizes murder and sends back some citizens with the humanity trained outa them, but guns are GOOD, because – as Wayne LaPierre would crow in ignorance decades later – the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

Unlike today’s vernacular where military service is tantamount to godhood, SUDDENLY gives equal weight to both sides of the argument, simply posing the questions and letting its audience decide: is Ellen’s husband a hero or a chump for “dying for his country”? Is Sheriff a hero just for being in the war? Is Baron a chump for “killing more jerries than any five officers put together”? Sheriff came back to be a sheriff; Baron came back to be a hired killer and Chairman of the Board.

For a ruthless, emotionless killer, Baron sure talks a lot about his emotions. Sheriff even says to Ellen, “We gotta keep this guy talkin’, cos that’s his weakness.” (Baron was a James Bond Villain even before there was such a thing…) Coincidentally, one of his thugs is cartoon voiceover extraordinaire, Paul Frees.

Many dumb plot points hold the film back from becoming a masterpiece, or even a compelling piece of cinema:

• Secret Service so incompetent they don’t scope out the one house that overlooks the railroad station. (It’s like a precursor to the Dealey Plaza book depository fiasco!)
• TV Repairguy is his own universe of redneck backwoods: “What is this? A stickup?” Baron, amused: “Yeah, a stickup!” Repairguy: “You’ll never get away with it!” Did he really just say that? Is this where that pointless line was invented?
• Baron lets Repairguy fix the TV one inch away from his leg while he’s looking through the scope of the assassination rifle, five minutes before downbeat.
• Professional killers Baron and his henchman are fooled by a cap pistol and a real pistol in the hands of the loudmouth kid.
• The climax of stopping the gunman is staged like a community theater rehearsal with lots of tripping and grabbing and a strange absence of soundtrack. It would be comical if it weren’t so cringeworthy. And Ellen, who hates guns, is the one person who has the opportunity to pick up the gun and let Swoonatra have it! Oh, irony, thou overacting mistress!
• We know it’s gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight – as Ellen eventually accepts Sheriff’s invitation to Church! (Disgusting! Send the kids out of the room!)

Before this movie’s release, three sitting United States presidents had been assassinated by gunmen: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James A. Garfield (1881), and William McKinley (1901). Nine years after this movie, in November 1963, John F. Kennedy would be assassinated by CIA gunmen.

Influenced by this movie? Or just koo-koo coincidence?…

END

Tampering in Godz domain…

Giant monster terrorizes Tokyo. From the depths of hell it came, roaring, spitting fire, destroying civilization; black of heart and devoid of empathy. And it probably had a really small brain too. It was called – The United States of America…

People think they know Godzilla. Even you think you know Godzilla. No, you don’t. That goes for me as well. I’ve seen those culty Toho Company crap-fests with the guys in the rubber suits smashing toy planes, and as a youth I was exposed to GODZILLA: KING OF THE MONSTERS! (the barbaric American re-edit of the original Toho film, the only version available in English-speaking countries until the mid-80s). So I approached the original Toho GODZILLA/GOJIRA (1954) with the same tongue-in-ass-cheek flippancy I brought to all those B-movie monster mashes that salted our youthful Sunday afternoons.

And I wept.

I wept because this somber parable of nuclear abuse, this pioneer of monster moviedom, has undergone such a misunderstood legacy on the strength of its inferior successors.

Written by Ishiro Honda, Shigeru Kayama and Takeo Murata, and directed by Honda, the opening scene of GODZILLA shows a Japanese fishing boat being overwhelmed by a flash of light – and something big. This vignette mirrors the fate of the real life Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon), a fishing boat that waded unknowingly into the umbra of an American hydrogen bomb test (termed Castle Bravo) at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in March 1954. In its opening frames, the movie hooks into sociological context. As the film progresses, the hooks would only sink deeper.

Following this tragedy, reports flood in of a large “monster” destroying nearly 20 ships. Sightings of the creature near Odo Island lead paleontologist Dr. Yamane (Takashi Shimura, SEVEN SAMURAI) to investigate with his Geiger counter and Emiko (Momoko Kôchi), his window dressing daughter who can’t act.

From Odo Island tradition, Yamane proposes calling the mysterious creature “Gojira.” (David Kalat, in his stellar commentary on the Criterion DVD release, gives an excellent explanation on how the phonetics were translated to Godzilla, and how both words are linguistically correct – and how even some elitist “Gojira” purists are actually mispronouncing that word! The emphasis should be on the “Go” not the “ji,” smartypantses! Kalat’s commentary is enormous as the beast itself – lucid, informative, educative, humorous. For movie-philes, I cannot recommend the commentary enough!)

Meanwhile, the military is trying to kill this “monster of the century” with depth charges. Of course, this was before the military knew Godzilla couldn’t be killed by anything. Matter of fact, like all the muttonhead Godzilla movies in its wake, even after they discover Godzilla can’t be killed, they continue to fire at him anyway. Because they’re the military. And that’s all that those blockheads know how to do. Take away their firepower and they’re a cult who likes marching in time and showering together.

Dr. Yamane gives a conference on the Godzilla scourge, in a supposedly scientific slide presentation that is completely fatuous; showing old-school drawings of fat brontosaurs and fat tyrannosaurs, and lecturing, “2 million years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth–” wait, what?! (After decades of translations and edits, this particularly noticeable mistake has never been corrected. People are just idiots.) Then he shows his photo of the monster, as it peers above a ridge on Odo Island – the first actual sighting of the Godzilla puppet. And it’s a drawing of a tyrannosaur.

He says the creature is “from the Jurassic, and was probably hiding away in a deep sea cave, until H-bomb testing drove it from its abode.” He corroborates this claim with a trilobite found in the creature’s onshore footprint (even though trilobites were from a far earlier epoch). How about that? The name “Jurassic” being used as a Power Phrase long before Crichton and Spielberg co-opted, trademarked and abused it!

That being said… there’s something fishy swimming around Toho … and I’m going to take the time to tease out the threads. As Neil deGrasse Tyson might say in COSMOS 2014, “Come with me…”

”Look man, if you don’t get this next take,
we’re gonna hafta call in Gorgo, ok?”

While the politicians want to repress the information about the big lizard so as not to “strain diplomatic relations,” the public cries out for freedom of information, “the truth is the truth!” To be clear, America/United States is never mentioned throughout the movie, but we all know who they’re talking about whenever they say, “nuclear (wink wink) power.”

“Gojira” is a composite of the words for whale and gorilla, which is ironic, considering the Godzilla creature is not only a whale of an 800-pound gorilla, but also the elephant in the room. Godzilla didn’t just represent Nuclear Power – specifically, American Abuse of that power. No one wanted to talk about it after Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), but with this 1954 movie, Japan poked its fingers into America’s chest and said, “Raaahhraagh!”

GODZILLA also showcases the age-old struggle between Science and Military. And unlike many movies where scientists are relegated to doddering idiots and military men elevated to biggus dickus, here both science and military are given equal shrift, with the lean towards Science (after all, the scientist is the most respected actor in the movie, not some dork), which is why Godzilla’s death bodes such tragedy.

Dr. Yamane: “Why don’t they try to study its resistance to radiation? All they’re trying to do is kill it!” (also a theme in GODZILLA 2000). When the military approach him on how to destroy the creature, Yamane tells them, with a mix of admiration and futility, “Godzilla was baptized in the fires of the H-bomb. What could kill it now?”

GODZILLA does something all of its inferior sequels try to do and fail: develop powerful human characters and interrelationships.

There is the legendary Takashi Shimura, whose magnificently tragic performance as Dr. Yamane overshadows everything like a planet blocking out the sun. His gravitas infuses the film with a bedrock of empathy that no roaring rubber could compromise. His daughter Emiko is in love with a young man, Ogata (Akira Takanada). Yet she is tacitly betrothed to the reclusive scientist, the eye-patched Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata).

The love triangle will not play out like a turgid DAYS OF OUR LIVES episode, but would provide a subtle background to the decisions the characters make.

Serizawa has developed a secret weapon that can kill Godzilla. He calls it [wait for the orchestra stabs] the Oxygen Destroyer! [dun dun daaaah!] A completely specious plot element that is only “scientific” because Serizawa is wearing a lab coat when he’s saying it with a straight face. A device that “removes all the oxygen from water,” turning his fish into skeletons. Uh… if you remove the oxygen from H2O, you’ll be left with molecules of H (hydrogen), and as a gas or liquid, hydrogen doesn’t dissolve flesh. I think you’re thinking of hydrochloric acid, dude…

Serizawa hesitates to make his discovery public – even though Godzilla has killed so many – not because he has any love for the creature (he is not coming at it from a conservationist angle like Yamane), but because, “What if the discovery is used for some awful purpose?” He created it for pure science, yet knows it can extinguish humanity – just like the H-bomb. Message coming in, America! “If used even once, politicians won’t stand by idly – they’ll inevitably turn it into a weapon. A-bombs against A-bombs, H-bombs against H-bombs… something I can’t allow.” So fanatical for using it for peace, Serizawa stoically proclaims, “I’d gladly give my life for it and destroy the formula should anyone force me to use it!”

When Ogata and Emiko beseech him to use it just this once to stop this menace, Serizawa also has an answer to that: “As long as I’m alive, who can say I wouldn’t be coerced into using it again?” And he’s not saying “alive” lightly…

a fright on the town

”Heey, wocka wocka, I just swam in from the North Pole – and boy, is my tail tired!”

Over an ominous, odd-signature soundtrack (by Akira Ifukube), Godzilla at last rises from the sea in full grandeur, 165 feet tall, humanoid posture, triple-spiked backbone, scraped flesh, slashing reptilian tail, gargling flames, on a mission to tear up Tokyo.

During this eerie night sequence, in the flickering of searchlights, fires and rockets, at last we see the debilitating effects of the H-bomb. Godzilla as metaphor – and as reality. With skin scarred and charred, the creature is probably in searing pain; he cannot vocalize, can only lash out. As metaphor, he is one country’s irresponsibility decimating another. As reality, he lashes out at what created him – mankind. Well, maybe. (see above: Godzilla: Victim of H-Bomb – or not?)

Crowds watch in terror from afar (including Yamane, Emiko and Ogata), as Godzilla destroys a train, decimates factories with his massive feet, and melts high-tension towers with his fiery breath. (When he blows fire, his spikes light up – a cartooning process.)

The process shots and double-exposures (showing the beast in the same frame as scurrying people) look very authentic, and are definitely styled after Harryhausen’s THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (one of the inspirations for this film). And its roar is GIGANTIC! (Created by stroking contrabass strings with a glove and slowing down the audio. Over the years, Godzilla’s roar would deteriorate to that of a hawk-like screee, then to an unbearable puling fishwife.)

Under the pretense of wanton destruction, there is yet more sociological meat. I’m no Japanese historian, so I wouldn’t know what’s being destroyed, but Godzilla historian David Kalat informs us that Godzilla destroys every element of modern society, from recognizable Japanese landmarks to the hallmarks of civilization: government buildings, electricity, transport, media – basically “blowing humanity back to the dark ages” (which is what Bryan Cranston cries out in GODZILLA 2014). As destructive as, say… a hydrogen bomb (cough–America)?

And Yamane, watching all from a hillside, is beset on all sides by people screaming for Godzilla’s death. “How do we kill the bastard?” “Damn beast!” How can he advocate to keep Godzilla alive amidst this destruction? And on his face, we read that letdown expression, like his prize pooch is pooing on everyone at the Governor’s Ball!

The despair on Yamane’s face will sober us – followed immediately by toy tanks… shooting shooting pow pow pow it’s playtime! The toy tanks are ineffectual, so they send in toy planes, where we see every string pulling them and “launching” their missiles. The sublime, the ridiculous.

Serizawa accedes to using his Oxygen Destroyer. At a price that is devastating. Oh, he succeeds in killing the creature, but – as he predicted – he must also take his own life and destroy all his records, so that no one can use his invention for war.

It’s a searing climax that brings all the elements of the love triangle, the beast, the science, the destruction together and shakes them into a milkshake as thick as guilt.

As the weapon is deployed and Godzilla rises to the surface and screams in agony for the last time, we wonder why we weep. Because it’s a happy ending, right? The humans won against the monster, right? … right?

We weep for Godzilla because he is blameless. He is the lion at the zoo that kills someone for poking their hand into the cage. Why must the lion die for doing what he does in nature? He is KING KONG, an innocent animal who pays for the venality of man’s disruption of nature. It wasn’t “beauty killed the beast” Carl Denham, you twit – it was beast (Man) that killed beauty (Nature).

It is the nature of nuclear power to destroy humankind, not because it is actively malignant, but because Man cannot control it. Simple as that. Nuclear power vis a vis Godzilla did not draw first blood.

We weep with Yamane for the science lost, for the nature disrupted. We weep with the young boy who called it “bastard!” We weep for Serizawa’s sacrifice, and the fact that he knew Emiko was in love with another man (Serizawa wishes them happiness just before he cuts into his suit underwater); the audience weeps, the people onboard the boat weep. And the people weeping the loudest – the marketers! You killed off this sequel-licious property in the first movie? Are you insane, Honda?

The eyes are the windows to the soulless…

Y’know, you Japanese hipsters are taking this baggy-pants craze too far…

Godzilla’s production values were a product of their times, and for its time, GODZILLA is a monumental product. The movie pioneered matte paintings, shooting through glass, double exposures; pioneered portraying heroic suicide/sacrifice, and yes, it even pioneered a plausible, workable “monster movie” model (pun intended) that was affordable and effective. And all other aspects are stellar: the stone cold sober performances (especially from Akihiko Hirata and Takashi Shimura, whose anguish will bring tears to your eyes); fantastic staging, even the ominous, urgent soundtrack. And the guys in the actual Godzilla suit (Katsumi Tezua, Haruo Nakajima and Jiro Suzuki) do not drag the production down, because everything else is holding it up mightily. The monster headpiece is actually creepy and otherworldly. Rather than the cookie-monster doe eyes of his successors-in-suits, this first Godzilla has dead shark eyes. It’s kinda terrifying now. Imagine its impact in 1954!

If only the franchise had moved with the times, into the chroma-key age (with STAR WARS and SUPERMAN) and then into the computer graphic age, it would not have that goofy legacy overhanging its plastic headpiece. Which is why GODZILLA 2014 is actually a “good” movie in the series; not great, just good, because at last it brings Godzilla production values up to par with modern times, yet still unfortunately neglects a compelling story.

As a choral backing sings us out, Yamane laments/preaches: “I believe that Godzilla was the last of its species. If nuclear testing continues, someday, somewhere in the world, another Godzilla may appear…”

Godzilla the monster was the manifestation of untamed, unmanageable power; blowback for harnessing that power and arrogantly thinking to control it. The elements that created that unmanageable power are still existent, in the form of militarized countries, who have only grown more hubristic with the passage of time, over how well they are reigning in that power. Little do these brave chickenhawks know, they are powerless stewards of something which will eventually rise up and kill them. And I, for one, cannot wait for that day…

Godzilla still lives!

END

Anty Heroes.

Giant ants – irradiated by atomic bomb testing – overrun the Californian desert, and big white Californian men are there to save the day.

In 1954, atomic power and its “radiation” was the driving device behind 10,000 shitty B-movies. THEM! is one of them. What sets it apart is that director Gordon Douglas and the cast are taking it as seriously as ants in their pants.

James Whitmore (back in the day when he was a leading man and not just a That Guy) is Sgt. Ben Peterson, who spends the first 20 minutes of the movie trying to find out what wrecked buildings and killed people on his desert beat – and didn’t steal anything except sugar. These opening sequences are quite eerie, where we never see “the monsters” but are on the trail of their havoc. (An alarming distraction is the police uniforms being so darn spiffy – in this black and white movie, we can clearly discern they have a dark blue base, with robin’s-egg blue highlights on pockets, epaulettes, stripes down sides of trousers and – BOW TIES! Really, I want to dress my band like this for our next corporate gig.)

Maybe the seeds of Mr. Whitmore’s B-status were being sown right here, as no matter the excellent somber job he is doing as the cop who takes charge of an investigation higher than his pay grade, the filmmakers nonetheless bring in pre-Fabio heartthrob James Arness because he’s got squarer shoulders and a bigger cock. He’s FBI agent Whitey Whiteguy, who does a mean Peter Graves impersonation, enough to get him into the pants of the Chick With The Pointy Bra (Joan Weldon). Joan is a doctor who–snigger, okay, let’s just move on…

Edmund Gwenn (Kris Kringle in MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, 1947) is the scientist who knows everything because we need the explanations. He’s also the “conscience” – or the Whitey Guilt, depending on how you look at it. He utters the premonition: “We may be witness to a biblical prophecy come true, and there will be destruction and darkness come upon creation and the beasts shall reign over the earth.” Relax, Richard Crenna! He also melodramatically delivers the movie’s message in the final line, “When man entered the atomic age, he opened the door onto a new world. What we eventually find in that new world nobody can predict.” Did he switch from 3rd person to 1st person because the conceit was just too much to bear?

Unfortunately, THEM! cannot retain its ominous tension, as the giant ants have to eventually be revealed – and the filmic technology of the day cannot support the visuals. The 10-foot ant puppets are on dollies that smoothly slide them across the ground, while puppeteers madly waggle the ants’ heads, legs and antennae and try not to get shot by the jumpy army doofuses. The visuals degenerate to goofiness, but the concept of the ant queen birthing more monsters in her lair was obviously so powerful, none other than James Cameron copied it in ALIENS – and with flame-throwers to wipe out the nest, as Whitmore does here.

Fess Parker (the same year he was Davy Crockett for Disney and a decade before he would become DANIEL BOONE for a generation) is a young pilot with the honor of the stupidest dialogue. He agitatedly describes seeing “flying saucers” (a word which I detest for its ignorance, which is vindicated right here) and, so he tells us, “they were shaped like ants!” So why are you calling them SAUCERS, idiot?! In what universe is an ant shaped even remotely like a saucer?

Movie seems to go into ANTi-climactic overtime after a nest of ants is killed, and Santa Claus messes with everyone’s Zen thing, telling them they still have to find the queen and burn her royal thorax. This plot point is wrapped into a rescue mission for two young boys, and it’s every bit as badly-staged and bombastic and Go-USA as any 1950’s movie that makes the army look like they’re the answer to everything. Because when you want something done with maximum fuss and minimum efficiency – call the United States Military!

When The Army rolls through town, it’s like the cavalry has arrived: everyone drops what they’re doing and sensually watches the jeeps and trucks laden with manly men tear through the streets – the white ladies in the diner being served by white waitresses, the white cops and white citizens watching a TV in a store window serving white people, the white people milling in the city streets near the white stores, the one black guy in town shining shoes…

They even give all the principals spiffy army-issue clobber to wear! Whitmore does his serious act right to the end, until an ant puppet’s mandibles chomp those fatigues in half – with him in them! They even had some army issue for Joan Weldon, in the size Unnaturally Thin; she gets to ride in a jeep with her bra pointing the way, knowing she’ll never have to actually do anything with a waist that slim and sexually enticing. And James Arness (a year before starting his 2-decade run as Marshall Dillon in GUNSMOKE) ambling about like a THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, and firing his army-issue machine gun like a 10-year-old playing soldier.

END

Mop toppery mockery.

Get a haircut, son!

A legendary band, The Beatles, in a crap film, A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, that resonates as legendary because The Beatles are in it.

In this first of the two Beatles films (the other being HELP! 1965), real life rock band The Beatles play a band called The Beatles, who travel from Liverpool to London for a television gig, along the way quipping maniacly like The Beatles in that Liverpudlian accent made so popular by The Beatles, and trying to escape hordes of screaming girlies because even back in 1964, they were as big as, uh, The Beatles.

Rock band movies always seem to suffer this dichotomy: though The Beatles’ naturalistic ad-libbed dialogue is quite funny at times, the story is non-existent; and though the songs are immortal, the acting is almost as bad as KISS MEETS THE PHANTOM OF THE PARK.

Starring Ringo Starr as The Goofy One, George Harrison as The Quiet One and John Lennon and Paul McCartney as the band’s principal songwriters, you know, the Lennon and McCartney of songwriting.

When Ringo asks, “What’s a pretty girl like you doing in a place like this?” we wonder, Was it an old line even back then – or was Ringo the first man to discover how that line never ever works?

I’m Happy Just to Dance with You is performed cabaret-style by a TV band that The Beatles send up, just before they rehearse the song in rock. And many other Beatles songs are orchestrated, which means that long before their songs were re-arranged and whored off as elevator muzak, it already was!

Some old guy (Wilfrid Brambell) plays Paul’s cantankerous grandfather who keeps getting into trouble. It’s like the producers thought, Let’s see, we’ve only got the biggest band in the world starring in our film – how can we make it more interesting? TV writer Alun Owen screenplays, and the man who would be the ruination of the modern SUPERMAN series, Richard Lester, directs. The best thing the filmmakers could do was to let The Beatles roll out their natural chemistry and tongue-in-cheek mockery, which they were thankfully allowed to do; lightning in a time capsule for the ages.

The main attraction of course is seeing The Beatles performing their songs, which is what this “movie” is structured around. Beatles fans will love A HARD DAY’S NIGHT while Beatles non-fans (all three of them) will wonder what all the fuss was about.

END

The ultimate respect and tribute to Native Americans:
paint white people red.

Corn-y Apache.

APACHE: yet another grandiose insult to the Native American people, pretending in its own racist way to be a tribute.

To watch the original trailer for APACHE, one would think it is about Apache Massai (Burt Lancaster) waging war on the White Eyes against their snide peace treaties to the Native Americans. It fails to mention how White Eyes are the writers of this slanted tale and that Massai eventually falls under the spell of the FANTASTICALLY FAIR AND HONEST White Eyes’ terms. The insult goes unnoticed, because the audience for this travesty is… White Eyes; descendants of Europeans who call themselves “Americans.” No actual Apaches were expected to watch the movie or protest its craven mendacity, and the insult is touted as tribute. By who? The White Eyes, of course.

Nowadays, most modern Americans are aware of the inhuman mistreatment of Native Americans during the European invasion, but back in this movie’s heyday, the majority of bigoted unsophisticates truly believed that this swill was an honorable representation of a noble race. How do I know this without taking any surveys or living through that era? Because this dungheap of a movie EXISTS.

Poffy Two Bears (and White Man Wig)

There is such a thing as “willing suspension of disbelief” and it is splashed around the movie milieu like mud on pigs – because it needs to be. If it weren’t for this imperative facility, we would never buy the innumerable stupidities the fun-makers throw at us: sound in space, life after death, pets smarter than people, faster-than-light travel, teens investigating pitch-black basements without flashlights…. But director Robert Aldrich‘s APACHE seems intent on trying to subvert that suspension from all angles.

To cast the uber-red-white-n-blue cowboy Burt Lancaster, splotchily body-painted as Apache Massai, egregiously pushes the “suspension of disbelief” envelope way past “racist” and “ignorant” and somewhere into the region of parallel universe. Furthering the surrealism, petite-featured Jean Peters is his blue-eyed Apache Woman (both of them sporting chic Valley Girl Headbands to hold their deplorable jet-black, synthetic-hair wigs in place); both abjectly avoiding any semblance of Apache mannerism or speech inflection (except, of course, for that precious “educated savage” idiosyncrasy of referring to themselves in the third person). To cap it all, Lancaster’s every phrase and action that of a theatrical acting student performing Native-American-Warrior-by-way-of-Julliard, rather than that of battle-worn, open-sky-raised Apache. Let’s not even mention the Central Casting “Generic Indian” extras, who were all Mexican, Spanish and White (“Yeh, Doris – just throw some breechclouts, beads and feathers on ’em, will ya.”). A viewer from an alien culture would never be able to apprehend why the marauding Europeans would want to massacre indigenous American peoples who looked and spoke and behaved and were culturally exactly like them!

As Mario Van Peebles notes in his incendiary BAADASSSSS! (2005), “…and any white actor could play us – get yourself a feather or a turban – who said that was okay?…”

Even Massai’s motivation was so milky-white, you could healthily breast-feed your baby with it. Under the racial cleansing of the Native American peoples in the late 1800s, Massai’s aspirations were not to “challenge” the Amerikan Military over rightful claim to The Land, but rather, to assimilate into the white community by GROWING CORN alongside his oppressors and raising kids in that enslaved environment. Certain Native American groups were farmers, through their own volition – but Massai implies that in his travels, he encountered a Cherokee group whose truce with their resident Whites was brought about by “learning” how to sow corn. In essence, if you sycophant yourself and husband the land, the White Eyes will “let you live.”

And the White Slant of the movie portrays sowing a meager, rock-strewn plot of land with a Playboy model the noblest thing an Apache could do; a far cry from the existential battle against the United States military for the soul of The Land. In the most unrealistic turn of an altogether unrealistic movie, as Massai battles inept soldiers trying to gun him down in the final scene, all animosity is quelled when the soldiers realize that he has staked roots in this here land of theirs by growing corn and siring a child – and they leave him be!

And I thought Disney Corp was the most dangerous of all insidious liars.

How could anyone believe the canard that the Amerikan Military would grant respect to a people they were inculcated to believe were alien – soul-less, god-less, without rights, and deserving of death at His Most Righ-chuss Hand – and that it was their moral right to massacre them?

Simply put: even though he had cowed to the Amerikan Way, the military would not have left Massai to live in peace in his newly created outer ‘burb of White-Man-Ville. The Amerikan Military was not out to “convert” Native Americans; it was a much simpler plan – GENOCIDE. Massai would have been expediently killed, his cornfield torched, his postpartum wife raped and his newborn disposed of in a manner unfit to describe to children.

At this juncture in its spotty history, Amerika is quite self-aware of its many atrocities towards the numerous indigenous tribes of nomads whom they couldn’t tell apart through ignorance. We know that the fledgling Amerikan government did not honor one single treaty that it signed with any Native American; we know of Custer’s men using the heads of Native American children as soccer balls; we know the military encampments were inculcated to regard these noble peoples as “devils in human shape.” Being subjected to this honeycoated fiasco portraying one “proud warrior” learning to live peaceably amongst his subjugators by ignominiously succumbing to White Culture, should put Native Americans on the warpath. (Even the oversimplified title, APACHE – a term applied to a number of Southwestern Athapascan Native American groups – is as inelegant as titling a film WHITE MAN, be it about a Canadian, European or Australian.)

The audience is cajoled into believing that the filmmakers’ sympathies lie with the Native Americans, as the “star” is (supposedly) portraying an Apache. But why isn’t the star an actual Apache? Or any tribe of NATIVE AMERICAN? (We even meet a young Charles Bronson playing a Native American – someone infinitely more visually correct for the leading role, but not as big a star as Lancaster.) Lancaster is cast for the venal purpose of selling tickets and advertising with a known commodity. And his laughably inauthentic “Indian” has nothing to do with paying tribute to a noble race, but has everything to do with generating revenue.

If it weren’t for the sidetrack of CORN-GROWING LIKE A GOOD REDSKIN NIGGER, maybe this movie’s subtext might have shone through – that the Native Americans were always fighting for the two causes which Amerikans hold most dear as their skygod-given rights – their homeland and their freedom.

Stick that in your peace pipe and smoke it!

END