The film – being called Godzilla: The Japanese Original for this release – will debut April 12th at the 5th TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood followed by a national release beginning at New York’s Film Forum, April 18th-24th.
Godzilla was originally released here in 1956 as Godzilla: King of the Monsters, an atrociously cut, dubbed and re-edited version that inserted American actor Raymond Burr into the action; only an hour was used of the original’s 98 minute running time. Burr does not appear in the original, uncut version, which has an all-Japanese cast including Kurosawa regular Takashi Shimura, who the very same year appeared as leader of the Seven Samurai.
As directed by Ishirô Honda, with special effects by the legendary Eiji Tsuburaya, Godzilla: The Japanese Original is much darker in tone than the dumbed- down U.S. release version, which entirely eliminated the original’s underlying theme:in the Japanese version, the monster is clearly a metaphor for the nuclear menace and the film itself a cry for world peace and disarmament. The American version also cut out all of the original’s astonishing Strangelove-like black humor.
The original Godzilla holds up as one of the greatest science fiction/monster films ever made, boasting still-impressive special effects, as the radiation-breathing prehistoric monster, awakened after millennia by Hydrogen Bomb testing – and impervious to repeated shelling by the Japanese army – wreaks destruction on Tokyo.
