Origintal Release Titles: Mosura tai Gojira / Godzilla vs. The Thing
Year: 1964   Company: Toho Co. Ltd.   Runtime: 89′   Director: Ishiro Honda
Writers: Shinichi Sekizawa   Cinematography: Hajime Koizumi   Music: Akira Ifukube
SPFX Director: Eiji Tsuburaya   Assistant SPFX Director: Teruyoshi Nakano
Cast: Akira Takarada, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Yu Fujiki, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito,
Yoshifumi Tajima, Kenji Sahara, Ikio Sawamura   Godzilla: Haruo Nakajima
Order this film on DVD (Japanese and English versions) from Amazon.com

In the wake of a powerful typhoon a gigantic egg is found drifting off the coast of Japan.  Seen as a bad omen by some, the egg is soon taken over by an enterprising young billionaire and his sidekick, a greedy talent agent, who intend to make it the centerpiece of an amusement park.  There’s just one catch – the owner of the egg is none other than the god-monster Mothra, and she wants it back!

Enter reporter Sakai (Takarada) who, along with his photographer girlfriend Junko (Hoshi) and the helpful Professor Miura (Koizumi), takes up the cause of Mothra and her envoy, a pair of twin foot-tall princesses (the Ito sisters).  Before anything can be done about the egg another disaster strikes – buried in the muck left behind by the typhoon is Godzilla, who emerges from his temporary prison to lay siege to the Japanese countryside.  Sakai and his friends must travel to the nuke-blasted Infant Island, home of Mothra and her peaceful followers, in hopes of convincing the only good monster in the neighborhood to help save Japan and its people from the unstoppable onslaught of Godzilla.

After the lukewarm reception of their dull, black and white production of Godzilla Raids Again, Toho Company went on a brief hiatus from new Godzilla adventures and instead focused on a variety of other tokusatsu concepts, some involving monsters and some not.  By the time they revisited their budding franchise in 1962 Toho had become a special effects powerhouse, their product now easily discernible from their contemporaries’ by its dazzling color and ‘Scope production values.  What’s more, the company now had a whole host of monsters at their disposal – not just Godzilla and Angilas, but Rodan, Varan and, most popular of all, Mothra.

Mothra’s self-titled 1961 debut had been a smash for Toho Company, earning millions more than even the original Godzilla and soundly trouncing its first sequel at the box office.  The company’s 1962 blockbuster King Kong vs. Godzilla had pitted the Toho creation against a popular, but expensive, foreigner.  When the time came for Godzilla’s fourth film outing Toho wisely chose to put him up against an in-house creature, one that had already proven successful in a solo production all its own.  Mothra’s debut as a franchise player would lead to a decades-long relationship with the King of the Monsters in which the pair would co-star in no fewer than nine films.

The juxtaposition of the two monsters here remains a potent one nearly fifty years out, thanks in large part to the starkly contrasting ideas they represent.  Godzilla would make the unlikely transition to hero later the same year, but is still deadly serious stuff in Mothra vs. Godzilla.  The towering embodiment of the horrors unleashed by the nuclear age, the beast here possesses a palpable menace not seen since the first film.  At one point he takes on the unexpected but thematically appropriate role of executioner, dispensing cosmic justice when the billionaire Torahata (Kenji Sahara) commits mortal sin to defend his fortune from a man he wronged.

Mothra exists as a rejection of Godzilla’s nuclear threat, as hope for life in a world now capable of destroying itself multiple times over.  A creature of beauty hailing from an island decimated by nuclear testing, Mothra is the antithesis of the standard atomic monster – a representative of life and rebirth as opposed to the harbinger of death and destruction.  Director Ishiro Honda and screenwriter Shinichi Sekizawa utilize Mothra not only as an indictment of unchecked nuclear proliferation but as a symbol of resilience during a cold war.  She would return as a monster mediator in the same year’s Ghidrah: the Three Headed Monster, effectively chastising world leaders (represented by Godzilla and Rodan) for being unable to resolve their differences in favor of a greater good.

Effects director Eiji Tsuburaya and his team (a handful of talented genre artisans including Teruyoshi Nakano, Akira Watanabe and Sadamasa Arikawa) craft the most engrossing scenes of monster combat of their age for Mothra vs. Godzilla, scenes bolstered by clever scripting on the part of Shinichi Sekizawa and the keen emotional awareness of director Ishiro Honda.  The first confrontation between the eponymous creatures is a literal fight to the death, with an aged adult Mothra battling to protect her unborn offspring to her dying breath.  Her legacy – giant twin caterpillars – is the world’s only chance of survival, a younger generation to take on the problems of the old.   The final battle is expertly timed on all the production fronts.  The baby Mothras earn audience sympathies as the weak against the strong while the plight of a class of grade school students caught in the crossfire ratchets up the suspense.

As was routine for Toho Company tokusatsu efforts of the time, the special effects production here is second to none.  Tsuburarya and company’s puppetry skills had improved considerably since 1961′s Mothra, where the mock-up of the adult monster was just too stiff to be believable.  Here the adult Mothra is granted a superior range of motion, from its bobbling head to its six anxiously twitching legs, creating an illusion of life far more convincing than even the 1992 re-imagining Godzilla vs. Mothra could muster.  In contrast with the bumbling Godzilla, who seems to destroy more by accident than on purpose (tripping into Nagoya Castle, getting his tail stuck in Nagoya Tower), Mothra appears elegant, intelligent, and more than worthy as an adversary.

Godzilla himself gets my favorite overhaul of the entire series, his tows being reduced from four to three and his face given a solemn expression that some have compared (fairly, I confess) to that of Droopy the Dog.  His brief rampage through Nagoya is by no means as epic as his first tour through Tokyo a decade prior, but the monster is granted impressive scale thanks to the clever optical photography of Yukio Manoda and Yoshiyuki Tokumasa.  Much of Godzilla’s screen time is devoted to the foiling of military’s plans to control him, including one operation in which the beast is covered in metal nets and electrocuted (a nod to 20 Million Years to Earth, perhaps*).  Another in which Godzilla is bombarded from the air looks to have been honestly dangerous, as one of the fiery explosions sets the head of the suit ablaze!

As responsible for the epic feel of the special effects as the technicians behind them is Akira Ifukube, who composed one of the finest film scores of his career for Mothra vs. Godzilla – his third series outing.  The now famous Godzilla theme, a modification of that composed for the earlier King Kong vs. Godzilla, has all the bombast we associate with its present variation, but also a soulful and dirge-like quality that lends it a decidedly ominous edge.  Mothra is accompanied by themes both exhilarating and tragic, a combination that suits her place in the film perfectly.  Best of all are the vocal pieces composed for the Ito twins (better known as the pop musical act The Peanuts), lyrical and haunting melodies superior even to those composed by Yuji Koseki for 1961′s Mothra.

Mothra vs. Godzilla received surprisingly good treatment when released in America in September of 1964, and was the first Godzilla film ever to be seen here in a version closely approximating that of the original Japanese.  Distributor American International Pictures changed the title to the intentionally ambiguous Godzilla vs. The Thing, then sensationalized the manufactured ambiguity in the memorable ad campaign (“What is it?  How much terror can you stand?”).  Complete aside from a few incidental moments and fairly dubbed by Titra Studios, Godzilla vs. The Thing is most notable for its inclusion of the Frontier Missile sequence – an effects scene in which Godzilla is bombarded by the U.S. Navy with a newly-developed weapon.  The scene was produced in Japan by the film’s original effects crew exclusively for American International Pictures, and is enough to make their cut of the film worth owning.

There really aren’t enough positive things I can say about Mothra vs. Godzilla, the only film in the franchise that I feel has ever improved upon the original.  Just the cast list is enough to set a classic tokusatsu fan’s mouth to watering – Akira Takarada (Godzilla, The Last War), Yuriko Hoshi (Ghidrah: The Three Headed Monster), Hiroshi Koizumi (Dogora the Space Monster, Godzilla Raids Again), Kenji Sahara (Rodan, King Kong vs. Godzilla), Jun Tazaki (War of the Gargantuas), Yoshifumi Tajima (Godzilla’s Revenge) and so on.  If you need more than that then perhaps you’re on the wrong site.

* It wouldn’t be surprising – the original Godzilla took a good deal of inspiration from The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, while the conclusion of Godzilla vs. Monster Zero plays much the same as that of Earth vs. The Flying Saucers.