After following 1954’s Godzilla with 1955’s Godzilla Raids Again, the giant radioactive lizard’s corporate owners were content to let the creature remain frozen in ice for several years. But in 1962, the Toho Company celebrated its 30th anniversary. And that was reason enough to revive one of their most popular characters.
Meanwhile, King Kong animator Willis O’Brien came up with an idea for a story in which Kong would return to fight a giant Frankenstein’s monster. This concept ended up being sold by a producer O’Brien had been working with to Toho, who substituted Godzilla for the monster. The inevitable and obvious result: King Kong vs. Godzilla.
Ishiro Honda, director of the original Godzilla, was brought back to make the new movie. Honda, apparently unimpressed with the concept, has been quoted, “When you think of King Kong just plain fighting Godzilla, it is stupid.” Certainly there’s little of his original nuclear-threat allegory in King Kong vs. Godzilla.
Toho apparently pushed for more humor in the film at every turn, and Godzilla’s redesigned to be friendlier to children. Surprisingly, though, the movie ends up watchable, as Honda and scriptwriter Shinichi Sekizawa turn it into a satire of advertising stunts—by extension, a satire of itself.
The story’s ramshackle, but effective. After a giant monster’s discovered on an island some distance south of Japan, a pharmaceutical company desperate to stage a PR coup sends workers to retrieve the beast, who turns out to be the great ape King Kong (performed here by Shoichi Hirose in an ape suit). Meanwhile, Godzilla (performed by Haruo Nakajima) emerges from his hibernation north of the country. The stage is set for a clash of titans.
The movie’s surprisingly fun. The big exception comes when the pharma company characters travel to Kong’s island; the islanders are played by actors in skin-darkening makeup, and the film slows down to give us old-fashioned gags about primitive natives. Eventually, though, King Kong shows up, and the movie gets back on track.
Honda creates a film with three different tones. The sequences with Godzilla are suspenseful, with characters threatened by his rampage and scenes of considerable property damage. Contrariwise, the Kong scenes, especially in the first half, evoke the feel of 1930s genre films with Japanese “explorers” and broad comedy gags. And then between these two are scenes of the pharmaceutical company, effectively sending up 1960s office culture and the public relations hustle. The mix works, creating a nice sense of variety that keeps a watcher engaged until the giant monsters come face-to-face.
The movie works well visually. It’s in color and widescreen, a first for both Godzilla and Kong, and scenes set in contemporary Japan are eye-catching, with mod sets and highly-saturated hues. The giant monsters are less engaging to the eye. In particular, King Kong was such a distinctive stop-motion creation that presenting him via a man in a suit inevitably feels off, and this particular redesign is especially poor.
Then again, there’s a story that two of the actors in a 21st-century Godzilla movie watched this one as part of their preparation. When one of them started giggling at the models, the other said not to laugh: “It would have been cheaper and easier for Tsubaraya to have gone to a construction site and filmed ordinary trucks lugging dirt than to have built a sprawling miniature set like this. Realism is not the point. It's about style—it’s about mood. There’s integrity in the way Tsubaraya and his people worked.”
It’s a good point. The use of models, even when not strictly necessary, build a coherent visual world. If Alfred Hitchcock’s atrocious process photography can be accepted, why not the narratively-efficient special effects of the Godzilla movies?
Because, some would say, Hitchcock explores themes and dimensions of humanity beyond what you get here. And yet this movie’s not lacking for thematic concerns. It’s got a satiric angle that makes it a metafiction, sending up itself. A minor character wonders who’s stronger, King Kong or Godzilla, and somebody reprimands her: “That’s stupid. It’s not a wrestling match.” The movie’s self-aware; it knows it’s an entertainment that verges on a cash-grab.
It’s hard not to read bitterness into this self-awareness. Honda made a science-fiction movie with integrity about the dangers of nuclear war. That statement about American nuclear policy is here warped by American-style capitalism, with an American cinematic icon defeating Honda’s own creation. Yet the film doesn’t feel sour; it’s too knowing, too tongue-in-cheek. It doesn’t much feel like the Godzilla movies before it, and is only marginally more like the ones that’d follow.
And more movies would follow, a dozen in the next 13 years. The film was a hit, still one of the most popular Godzilla films. It helped set up a new tone for Godzilla, more kid-friendly, with the horror sanded off. And that may be the finest satirical touch: the success of this movie, released in Japan just a few months before Dr. No in the UK, made Godzilla the first modern movie franchise.
Before this film there had been a movie, a sequel, and seven years of silence. After this one would come a steady beat of Godzilla films, and tie-ins that would pit the giant lizard against everyone from Charles Barkley to J. Jonah Jameson. King Kong vs. Godzilla didn’t do much for King Kong, the nominal winner of the movie’s big battle, but for the other party it paved the way to one of the great film careers of all time.