Gorgo (1961)

 

 

Gorgo (1961)

“Every country should have its own Godzilla...”
-- Critic Mark Hodson

 

When I trained as an Art Teacher, one of the pieces of advice I was given was to restrict the kids from creating art with glitter. This seemed odd, because kids love glitter, but after an explanation, it made perfect sense.

 

Glitter is what’s called a “seductive material,” so cool in-of-itself that it undercuts any sense of self-challenge. With a blank page and a paint brush, one must discover what one wants to say, but with a blank page and glitter, well, the glitter does the talking you’re not obligated to say anything at all.

 

I have a great fondness of SF,F&H’s Kaijū sub-Genre (the word is from the Japanese term meaning "strange beast" and is now the label for Giant Monster Movies, especially those that reject the idea of even attempting realistic Dinosaurs or traditional Dragons), but even as I love it, I have to admit that most of the sub-Genre out-put proves it to be SF,F&H own version of glitter, it’s a seductive material.

 

Embracing the idea of Stomp Toyko (or New York, or wherever) is irresistible, but it’s the Stomping we love, and the Stomping does all the talking, and for more than a century now, Filmmakers have struggled mightily to deliver more than just the spectacle of the Stomp, and almost always the magnificent Stomping inhibits characterization, plot, and originality.

 

“King Kong” (1933), from the USA, was one of the true masterpieces of the Kaijū, and after its release, audiences screamed for more, but what did we get? “Son of Kong” (also 1933) and “Mighty Joe Young” (1949), both featuring largely the same Creative Team and FX Masters, evidence of improving technique, but, ultimately, they were no more than lesser and more sentimentalized remakes of the first film.

 

The second towering masterpiece of the sub-Genre also established the Japanese dominance of it, “Gojira” (1954, and known in the USA as “Godzilla”) which launched perhaps among the longest and most successful film franchises in history, so swamping the media landscape it spawned other franchises that both overlapped and competed with each other (the “Gojira” franchise even dragged in King Kong starting with “Kingu Kongu tai Gojira” (1962, known in the USA as “King Kong v Godzilla") but, over-time, the Filmmakers were failing desperately in their struggle for freshness which led to the franchise’s repeated collapse, though its irresistibility also raised it from the dead repeatedly (which also happened with “King Kong”).

 

This film, “Gorgo” is quite fine, a USA/UK co-Production that was part of the post-“Gojira”-cycle of Kaijū, but also related to an earlier USA-cycle that began with “Beast from 20,000 Fathoms” (1953) which was Directed by Eugène Lourié, same guy who made this film, and which the better known “Gojira” borrowed from pretty explicitly. “Gorgo” is often masterfully executed, had a strong emotional through-line, a solid cast, and has far more actual story than any dozen of its Kaijū fellows. As it is as good as it is, it is the prefect demonstration of how glitter is the enemy of art.

 

Its tag-line reads, “It’s Like Nothing You’ve Ever Seen Before,” but, really, you’d already seen it lots of times. It was riding on the coat tails of “Gojia” which was riding on the coat-tails of “The Beast from …” and it lifted multiple plot-points from “King Kong” but is closer still to the diminishing returns of the two “King Kong” follow-ups.

 

Director Lourié, deserves most of the credit for how good this minor film turned out to be. He was born while Russia was still ruled by the Czars and, as a teenager, made the dangerous career choice of beginning his film career as part of the crew of a post-Revolution anti-Communist film in 1919.

 

Forced to flee to France, he became an expert in most aspects of filmmaking, becoming prominent as an Art Director, Production Designer, Set Director, and Screenwriter. By the 1930s, he was a favored collaborator of that Nation’s greatest Directors: Max Ophüls, René Clair and especially Jean Renoir.

 

When Renoir moved to Hollywood, USA, Lourié followed, and he was given his first opportunity to Director with “The Beast from …” an early in the USA’s SF cinema revival. Unfortunately, that film’s success proved to be a trap for Lourié.

 

As he’d been mentored by Cinema’s greatest Artists, he expected great respect from Hollywood, but all Hollywood wanted from Lourié was by-the-book B-movies. He directed three more theatrically released features plus a little bit of TV, two of the films were textbook Kaijū and the odd-one out featured a somewhat-Giant Robot. “Gorgo” is the best of the lot but by the time it was released, Lourié was sick of the redundancies and quit Directing.

 

This proved a great career move; though sitting in the back seat now, he was still hugely in demand, maybe even more so, in all his well-established job titles plus a new one, FX.  In 1969, he was nominated for his only Oscar, for FX, for “Krakatoa, East of Java” but lost out to Robie Robertson’s work on “Marooned.”  Lourié retired in the early 1980s and during his last few professional years he proved a favorite Production Designer/Art Director among leading Actors who were Producing their passions projects, like Steve McQueen’s “An Enemy of the People” (1978) and Clint Eastwood’s “Bronco Billy” (1980).

 

Back to “Gorgo.”

 

As Kaijū’s are generally spectacle over substance, the available budget for these B-movies count for a lot. “King Kong” and the “The Beast from ...” both featured cutting-edge, but also expensive, Stop-Motion Animation, while the Japanese Kaijūs featured cheaper “Man in a Rubber-Suit” FX at least until the rise of CGI in the late 1990s. Toho Studios head FX guy, Eiji Tsuburaya Eiji did miracles on a shoe-string with the “Gojira” films, but generally the Rubber Suits were laughable looking (the Japanese version of King Kong is pretty poor).

 

Lourié’s two earlier Kaijūs had been blessed with Stop-Motion but with “Gorgo” was reduced to Rubber-Suit, though a much-better-than-average one. Lourié’s team relied heavily on Tsuburaya’s techniques, like subtly “undercranking” (advancing the film more slowly than it will be shown on screen), the fact the Kaijū was moving in slow-motion wasn’t obvious, but the manipulation of speed contributed to the illusion of massiveness.

 

Oddly, give this was a Rubber-Suit film, this wasn’t a low-budget movie, it was made for $2 million-dollar and in the early ‘60s that was not big-budget but certainly was comfortable. The reason for this was that was supposed to be low, but as pre-Production developed, the Producers became increasingly excited by the project. They secured top talent for Lourié, complied with his request to allow him to film in color (something he’d only done for TV projects), and canceled several other projects to secure the extra cash.

 

Lourié proved accomplished with the lesser technology, equal to Tsuburaya throughout and even more so in all-important sequences that inserted the Kaijū into location footage shot off the west coast of Ireland.

 

Now for the story.

 

A 65-foot-tall Kaijū, Gorgo of the title, is discovered and captured off a small island in the Irish Sea. The greedy but still kindly Salvage Ship Captain, Joe Ryan (Bill Travers), and even more cynical Circus Master, Andrew Dorkin (Martin Benson), conspire to profit off the Beast. They ship it to London (the sole guard watching over Gorgo’s transport is ordered, "If he so much as moves, start shootin'... and run like hell!"), then treat Kaijū in an exploitive and abusive manner. A cute Orphan kid, Sean (Vincent Winter, then-fourteen-years-old and already an Oscar winner) is semi-adopted by Jow and objects that it’s a "teddible bad thing ye're doin'" but no one listens to the kid.

 

Soon it’s realized that the Beast is a mere infant and this a warning that the adult would be much larger, but this warning is also ignored.

 

Soon, Gorgo’s pissed-off Monster Momma, Orga, who is 150-foot-tall, Stomps London to rescue her child. (Both Kaijūs were played by Mick Dillon in different costumes, but he was left uncredited). There’s much mayhem and like “Gojira” it explicitly played on the still-fresh memories of WWII’s devastation: London is left with more piles of rubble than during the Blitz, but this time we’re rooting for the destructive force because Orga wasn’t a Nazi and this is actually heart-warming Family-Values film with a little Apocalyptic devastation thrown in for good measure. The film has several spectacular set-pieces, including explicit homages to “King Kong,” “The Beast from…” and, of course, “Gojira.”

 

The last image is Gorgo and Orga strolling of into the ocean, the triumph of primitive virtue over despicable modernity.  As Orga is the only major female character, so this could also be interpreted as the triumph of Anarcho-Feminism over the Capitalist Patriarchy. I wonder if Ursula Le Guin grew up watching this movie just like I did?

 

Never intending to hide its “Gojira” roots, early drafts of the script were set in Japan, then France, before settling on Ireland and England. Critic Bill Warren wrote that southern Australia was also considered but the Producers decided that audiences "wouldn't care” without familiar landmarks to Stomp, yet another demonstration of the nature of seductive materials. In the final film Orga topples Big Ben, knocks down Tower Bridge, shatters the neon-signs of Piccadilly Circus, and several blocks of apartment buildings.

 

Though this is Lourié’s show all the way through, I can’t ignore FX guy Tom Howard, a two-time Oscar winner (three if you include “2001: A Space Odessey” (1968) which Director Stanely Kubrick took sole-credit for), Cinematographer Freddie Young, a three-time Oscar winner, and Art Director Elliot Scott, a three-time Oscar winner with an additional Nomination. Visually effective throughout, the location scenes filmed in Ireland are especially beautiful, even more so because of low-light and in color.

 

Color film goes back the silent era and was getting common in big-budget films by 1939. But low-light color photography was a challenge for low-budget films, and regarding Horror and other Thrillers, B&W photography was often preferred in even big-budget ones, at least until about 1965. The definitive triumph of color was post-1965 and proved a problem for a lot of low-budget Horror and other Thrillers at least until the rise of Digital Cinematography and Digital Editing somewhere around 2001, between those two dates, many excellent movies were marred by unconvincing night-scenes, especially those that were filmed on location.

 

Both “Gojira” and “Gorgo” were pre-1965 and both had many night scenes, though in “Gojira” there wasn’t all that much location footage. “Gojira” was unsurprisingly filmed in B&W and color wasn’t introduced to the franchise until “Kingu Kongu tai Gojira” when the franchise was becoming more playful and mostly sunlit.

 

The decision to make “Gorgo” a color film was perhaps the Productions boldest move and the results look great. It’s better-looking than many other films of the time that were three-times the budget.

 

Lourié’s story-telling style mimicked Documentaries, helpful in grounding the reality and then-favored in most English SF/Horror films, especially after the resounding success of “The Quatermass Xperiment” (1955). But “The Quatermass Xperiment” was very much a Police Procedural with an Alien Monster, not nearly as Fantastical and far less sentimental than this one, so Lourié’s style choice, not being more like “King Kong,” was not only smart, but surprising. Also, Lourié changes that tone towards the end, when the mayhem is fully unleashed. Again, the setting is nighttime, but now the night is illuminated by the glow of a city engulfed with flames. During those scenes, the deftly muted color pallet becomes vibrant, almost surreal, a great way to make the climax bigger.

 

There were important innovations related to this film. Regarding the beautiful color photography, it was the first film to use Eastman Fastcolor film stock. Regarding Howard’s FX, he invented new process called “Automotion” which was a “traveling matte and split screen devices combined with a special technique” making some of his FX superior to the Kaijū Master Tsuburaya. I’d argue that Automotion should’ve earned an Oscar nod because it was only slightly more primitive than Zoran Perisic’s later “Zoptic,” the biggest difference is that Perisic increased the images crispness by using front-, instead of rear-, projection, and that earned him he got an Oscar for the movie “Superman” (1976, but Persic’s win wasn’t the FX Oscar, but a Special Achievement for that one innovation, and such Oscars weren’t handed out until the 1970s).

 

 

The story was Lourié’s own, he was inspired by how his young daughter identified with the Kaijū in “The Beast from …” so wanted this Beast to be an innocent. The Screenplay was beautifully economical, not getting bogged down with an unconvincing Love-Story subplot or boring exposition like virtually every other SF film since the USA’s SF revival in 1950.

 

The credited Screenwriters were John Loring and Daniel Hyatt, but those were pseudonyms for Robert L. Richards and Daniel James; both victims of the Hollywood Blacklist. The film company, King Brother’s Studio, was founded by a trio of brothers, Frank, Herman, and Maurice Kozinsky, and they would eventually be exposed (and praised) for employing a large number of Blacklist victims, but it must be said that the brothers’ nobility was somewhat disreputable: the paranoias of the Red-Scare-era empowered the Kozinsky brothers to get a lot of Hollywood’s best talent and stingily underpay them. Their biggest Oscar success, “The Brave One” (1956), was secretly penned by legendary Dalton Trumbo after his stint in a Federal Penitentiary for “Contempt of Congress” (or more accurately, “contempt of the contemptible”). In a much later film, “Trumbo” (2015), honored Frank by having him being portrayed by a hilarious John Goodman.

 

Given that “Gorgo” featured a child-lead and such strong sentimentality it was obviously being pitched at a younger audience. The original “King Kong” and “Gojira” were not, they expected to draw mostly grown-ups, but almost everything later in both franchises were unapologetically kiddie-fare. The Producers expected a $6 million return on what was by-far their most ambitious project. Variety would soon report the brothers were “irate” when England, where half the film was set and where they intended to market the most heavily, slapped “Gorgo” with an X-rating.

 

At the time, English Film censorship was notoriously harsh and frequently silly. I grew up in the 1970s, and a wee-lad I watched scores of films on Saturday morning TV that had been X-rated in England barely a decade earlier.

 

“Gojira,” released in UK and USA as “Godzilla,” was heavily-cut, removing almost all political themes, the desperate plight of the now-homeless Japanese cast into an uncertain future, a child dying of radiation poisoning, and other harsh stuff like that. Even the sanitized version of "Gorjia" got stuck with a X in England and that country didn’t get to see the uncut version until 2005.

 

But “Gorgo” was far tamer the even the sanitized “Godzilla” so its X was even more unjustified. That rating effectively locked-out the film’s intended audience of children. Still, the King Brothers are believed to have managed to pull in their hoped-for $6 million, maybe even more. The numbers are uncertain because the only box-office figures available to me are USA-only, a respectable $4.5 million. Also, in England, the theater owners were notorious for skirting censorship laws.

 

More evidence of “Gorgo’s” success was Toho Studios reaction. They were so impressed that they stole a lot of its themes for their later “Monster Island's Decisive Battle: Gojira's Son” (1967, known in the USA as “Son of Godzilla”). It was even more explicitly mimicked in “Daikyojū Gapp” (also 1967, known in the USA as “Gappa: The Triphibian Monster”) from Toho competitor Nikkatsu Studios.

 

Despite its popularity, the Critical response was decidedly mixed, and the complaints were mostly about the core limitations of the Kaijū:

 

Arthur Steele of the Birmingham Evening Mail: "designed for juvenile adults."

 

Charles Stinson of the Los Angeles Times, “not unintelligent. But it is entirely routine … The color is true and rich, though, and the special effects fairly skillful. The British do things tidily."

 

The Kensington News and West London Times, "a sad waste, not of talent, but of opportunity. Some of the effects are very convincing, but these are offset by the general tone of the film. It is a satire on monsters. 'Gorgo' could have been a fine film. It could have preached motherly love, the vanity of humanity, mankind's true weakness or it could have been purely terrifying. Unfortunately, it doesn't do anything."

 

I actually think it did plenty and the very things the Critic said it didn’t. I'm thinking of how “Gorjia” became the basis of a R&R song by Blue Oyster Cult “Godzilla” (1977) which contained this memorable chorus:

 

“History shows again and again

How nature points up the folly of man”

 

But that describes “Gorgo” better than “Gorjia” whose metaphoric heart is about the fickleness of nature and Japan’s victimization at the hands of the West. The Japanese in “Gorjia” did nothing to deserve the Kaijū’s wrath any more than the deserved their too-frequent Earthquakes and Tsunamis and the Kaijū was released by an Atomic Bomb, therefore a personification of bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the Japanese really didn’t much admit they were responsible for starting WWII until the 1980s). In “Gorgo” the wounds on England were largely self-inflicted, as I said before, Monster Momma Orga’s wrath recalled the Blitz, but she wasn’t a personification of the Blitz, we were perversely rooting for her.

 

Though not as well known as “King Kong” or “Godzilla” it does have a significant legacy. I already mentioned the two Japanese rip-offs.

 

1961 – 1963 there was a “Gorgo” comic-book illustrated by the soon-to-be legendary Artist Steve Diko that is now a valued collector’s item.

 

In 2009 it got a sequel/parody, the short film “Waiting for Gorgo” which combines the Kaijū with Playwriter Sammuel Beckett’s dryly humorous Existentialism.

 

Finally, in 2012, clips from the film were used in a political campaign ad by former Governor of the State of Maine, Angus King, when he ran for the US Senate (he won).

"Gorgo" trailer:

Gorgo Trailer - YouTube

"Waiting for Gordo" trailer:

Waiting for Gorgo (Trailer) - YouTube

Political ad:

Godzilla and The Real Angus King - YouTube