For about two thirds of its page count, Rick Wallach’s In Search of Godzilla: Myth, Stagecraft and Politics in Ishiro Honda’s Masterpiece fares as a surprisingly pensive study on one of the landmarks of Japanese cinema. I must confess I opened this book—which is now available from McFarland & Company—with a degree of skepticism. What could be said about the original 1954 Godzilla film that hasn’t been sufficiently tackled after decades of books, essays, audio commentaries, and magazine issues? (There’s no shortage today of material describing the picture’s making or director Honda’s intent to personify war and nuclear proliferation via a monster.) Still, I clung to hope: that, at the very least, I’d leaf through a readable assemblage of previously printed data. Hence my surprise when In Search of Godzilla began with thoughtful discourse—and my dismay with the text’s eventual devolution into unpersuasive ramblings.
On the surface, Wallach is an unorthodox and—in my view—welcome author on his chosen subject. In contrast to earlier Godzilla writers (Steve Ryfle, Ed Godziszewski, David Kalat, etc.), he admits to not holding the franchise that Honda’s film begat dear to his heart. Despite admiring the ‘54 classic—as well as Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla (2016) and Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One (2023), both of which receive appendix chapters in his book—Wallach acknowledges lukewarm feelings for intervening entries and their “knockdown-dragout matches between Godzilla and other monsters.” I highlight this for a reason: a study by someone with pockets of interest in a franchise they’re not overly fond of might offer a fresh perspective and new (or at least less-discussed) information.
And in many sections, In Search of Godzilla delivers. Besides saluting now-familiar stories about the movie’s production, Wallach devotes page space to historical anecdotes that paint a broader picture of the age in which Godzilla was made. He calls attention, for example, to a 1947 hoax wherein American GIs stationed in Japan took inspiration from Orson Welles’s The War of the Worlds radio drama and aired a phony broadcast about a sea serpent emerging from Tokyo Bay and attacking U.S. troops. In another fine section, the author recounts how, in 1952, a Japanese research vessel, the Kaiyo Maru No. 5, was obliterated by the oceanic volcano Myojin-sho. Wallach doesn’t outright claim the moviemakers were influenced by this tragedy, but he compellingly suggests they might’ve been due to the timing and specific imagery in the film. (Early in Godzilla’s story, ships are set aflame amid glowing patches of water, and a headline in a newspaper montage inquires if an “undersea volcano” is responsible.)
Wallach also submits cogent observations about the film’s dramatis personae. After discussing how the postwar American Occupation of Japan—which ended two years before Godzilla—attempted to institutionalize liberal ideas in the island nation, the author interprets generational gaps in thinking between the human characters. He sees, for instance, lingering nationalism in a paleontologist who lists his country as a reason for keeping Godzilla alive. (“[H]e makes clear his nationalism wasn’t killed off by the war. ‘No scientist in the world has ever seen anything like [Godzilla],’ he protests, describing it as ‘a priceless specimen found only in Japan.’”) In the younger characters, by contrast, Wallach discovers a generation influenced by the Occupation’s western values: the hero and heroine violate the feudal tradition of arranged marriage to be with the person of their choosing.
No discourse on Godzilla (1954) is complete without mention of how it first came to U.S. cinemas, and Wallach appropriately makes room for the movie’s redacted American version, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! This cut, which spliced new scenes featuring actor Raymond Burr into the story, is granted a thoughtful comparison to—funny enough—Japanese filmgoing traditions. When Occidental movies first reached the Land of the Rising Sun in the late 1800s, they often played in the company of benshi: live performers who stood near the screen to explain scenes and translate dialogue. Wallach’s book stimulates thought by comparing the role of the benshi to that of the protagonist in King of the Monsters! Burr’s character, a foreign correspondent, diegetically carries out his Japanese forerunners’ responsibilities: narrating events and spelling out details, this time for an American audience. In that (rather amusing) sense, Godzilla, King of the Monsters! embodies an old Japanese entertainment custom that wasn’t even present in its Japanese counterpart.
As indicated, there is much good within In Search of Godzilla. (The Stagecraft of the title refers to an interesting if not always accurate chapter comparing sequences and even movements of the monster to Japanese theater.) Unfortunately, even some of these worthy sections contain problematic passages. Wallach attempts early on to compare Godzilla to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. While a beginning detail—that Honda worked on a film authored by Moby Dick’s Japanese translator—is a fine place to start, a later conclusion—that the director “likely” took influence from Melville because a puppet used to depict Godzilla seems, in one shot, to have a crooked jaw (something the whale in Moby Dick is plainly stated to have)—proves flimsy. Worse yet is later on, when Wallach devotes a speculative chapter to Godzilla’s ecology. I understand—and in fact share—the fascination with animals both past and present, but writing that attempts to explain nature’s construction of Godzilla is the sort of detritus expected of fourth-rate convention panels. The beast’s atomic breath, we’re advised to consider, began as a means of self-defense and crippling prey—because a lack of webbed fingers (apparently) makes him a poor swimmer. And his dorsal fins, says Wallach, might’ve evolved as a “sexual attractant” to impress female Godzillas….
Sadly, the book bounces back only somewhat with its appendix chapters on Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One. The author makes a few decent comparisons to earlier observations (recalling the 1954 monster’s apparent shapeshifting—caused by the staff toggling between shots of different props—to make a connection to the constantly evolving beast in Shin; mentioning that Minus One, a period piece, takes place in the same year as the earlier mentioned radio hoax), though both essays stop rather than end. My impression remains that they’d been added primarily to inflate the word count.
In Search of Godzilla is in significant need of editing. Although Wallach is a capable wordsmith with an impressive vocabulary (I paused to look up “askance,” “fin de siècle,” etc.), his text is littered with typos. (The name of Japan’s Showa emperor is misspelled “Hirahito”; one sentence begins, “Aws [sic] Takashi Shimura’s face…”; another features a period in place of a comma: “The name of his boat, the Glory Maru. was also the name of the first ship sunk…”) Of further hindrance are numerous factual errors. Three times it’s claimed that Godzilla composer Akira Ifukube was the son of a Shinto priest—a mistake that furthermore negates Wallach’s attempt to draw a religion-based connection between Ifukube and director Honda, whose father was a Buddhist monk. (Ifukube’s father, incidentally, was an imperial soldier and, later on, a policeman and bureaucrat.) The author repeats the disproven myth that Honda directed a sequence in Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990). And while he dedicates a decent chapter to comparing Honda to Kurosawa, he flubs in claiming that Kurosawa worked as an assistant on Honda’s later films, when in fact the reverse was true. (In Wallach’s defense, this was probably a Freudian slip.)
At the end of the day, In Search of Godzilla: Myth, Stagecraft and Politics in Ishiro Honda’s Masterpiece is one of those books with enough strong parts to leave me wishing I could give it a wholehearted recommendation. Individual sections are rife with data and arguments that, to my memory, aren’t widespread in studies about the ‘54 movie—thereby rendering said parts valuable to casual consumers and well-read enthusiasts alike. However, the weaker sections deflate under the pressure of unconvincing arguments and diatribes that drone on past their welcome. Perhaps this text would’ve fared better, as a friend of mine suggested, in essay form. But as a book, Rick Wallach’s Godzilla tome is a genuine mixed bag, featuring doses of genuine interest and crippled by nonsense.
