Last year, we celebrated 70 years of the first Godzilla film, and next year, we'll celebrate 70 years of its American recut, Godzilla! King of the Monsters. But this year was the 70th anniversary of something that, I would argue, is even more interesting: the opening of the Hawaiian run of the original Godzilla. The newspaper clippings I'm going to present below are the very first English-language reviews of the film, and the version of it that critics were watching was uncut, un-Raymond-Burred, and English-subtitled.
I'm going to do my best to cover some of Hawai'i's rich theater heritage in this post, but for a wider exploration of the subject, you absolutely must read Lowell Angell's Theaters of Hawai'i.
Part I: Hawaii Times
On October 3rd, the first rumblings began... a tiny ad on the second page of the paper indicated that something unusual was on its way. In recent years, Hawaii Times had reviewed contemporary American sci-fi and horror movies: Creature from the Black Lagoon, Invaders from Mars, etc, but the Japanese films that were being shown at the three theaters covered by the paper's film department (the Kokusai/International, the Toyo, and the Nippon) were markedly different. Mother dramas were overwhelmingly popular, as were musical comedies starring the likes of Hibari Misora and Chiemi Eri, and if there was any hint of genre fare, it was in the form of kaidan films; many starring Takako Irie, all jidaigeki. This was the first modern Japanese monster movie, set in modern times, and it must have come as a shock.
On opening night,
Hawaii Times previewed the film. In both the preview and the review from a few days later, the face of the film is Takashi Shimura, the only member of the cast who Hawaiian audiences would have been familiar with.
HT's film reviewer, James T. Hamada, conjectures that the film's cast of young unknowns may have contributed to the theater being fairly empty during the premiere. (If I may interject, Hamada had seen Akihiko Hirata three months earlier in
Itsuko and Her Mother, and Hamada's review marks the first time Hirata's name appeared in an English-language publication.)
Us Godzilla fans tend to have great respect for Raymond Burr for reprising his Steve Martin role in Godzilla 1985 because he genuinely cared for Godzilla, despite warnings that it would be bad for his image, and I don't think it would be too much of a reach to say we could probably feel the same way about Takashi Shimura. I don't know Shimura's personal feelings about being in the movie, but without a recognizable actor like him, Godzilla's initial appeal in the West may have been even lower.
Hamada's review of the film appeared in the October 6th edition, in a much longer column than was usually given to film reviews. It is fascinating. Hamada had some qualms about the movie's realism in practical terms, but praised its special effects right off the bat.
The most interesting thing to me here is that Hamada seems to understand that the film intends to present Godzilla as one of a species, and accordingly he uses the word "godzilla" without capitalization and as a plural, the way one would say "dogs" or "cats". Hamada comes away from the movie with the idea that "a godzilla" is something like a made-up species of dinosaur. The takeaway: Godzilla is not a character yet. Godzilla is just a big animal.
As someone who has not infrequently been the only person seeing a movie, when Hamada says "70 or 80 persons" attended the screening, that sounds like a fair amount to me. But the Kokusai could seat 1,200 people. Announced in 1939 and opening officially in 1941 with design by Hego Fuchino, it was one of many theaters in Honolulu, sitting in the 'A'ala Park district right next door to the Toyo, which also showed Japanese films, including some produced by Toho. After and during the war the theater was often referred to as the "International", the English translation of its name.
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| photo courtesy of Edna Kijinami, from the flickr account of Chie Gondo |
The Kokusai, at its opening, was owned by Sanji Abe, president of Kokusai Kogyō. In September of 1942, Abe was arrested and placed into an internment camp for allegedly owning a Japanese flag. He was transferred between three different internment camps until being paroled in 1944 and released from parole in February of 1945. He would return to promoting and importing Japanese films after the war.
Part II: Honolulu Star-Advertiser
I include this as it does fit the scope of this article, but I should note that the balloon was not a strictly Hawaiian story. The above clipping was actually taken from the October 19th, 1954 edition of The Plain Speaker, published in Hazleton, Pennsylvania; Honolulu Star-Bulletin re-ran it in December of that year. You will notice that the publication date is several weeks before even the first limited-release screenings of Godzilla within Japan. This means that Americans were aware of Godzilla from the very, very beginning. Photos of the balloon must have made their way from Tokyo to American newspaper offices within days.
As for Honolulu Star-Advertiser's coverage of the film itself, it was fairly extensive. William W. Davenport writes about the film after having seen a showing at the Kokusai, the same theater featured above. This clipping is from the October 7th, 1955 edition.
Although this article feels more sensational than Hamada's, several takeaways can be made. Davenport, for whatever reason, does not seem to be aware of the Romanized spelling "Godzilla" and uses "Gojira" throughout his review. He baldly spoils the film's ending but refuses to describe the Oxygen Destroyer in detail. We also learn that an advertising short film played after
Godzilla: a "musical documentary on the soft drink industry" produced by your friend and mine
Bireley's. I have to say, I can't really tell what the critic makes of the film itself, but he seems impressed with Godzilla as a monster.
Part III: Hawaii Tribune-Herald
The first Hawaii Tribune-Herald mention of the film is used on Wikipedia to claim that the earliest English usage of the name "Godzilla" occurred on November 20th, 1955, which, as we have seen from the Hawaii Times material above, is not true at all.
Not to get personal or anything, but when I read "Walked home afterward under comforting stars, never so big and brilliant. Hua caught up with me presently. 'I saw Godzilla, too,' he said." I wanted to cry. Imagine walking home under the beautiful night sky in Hawai'i with your friend after being one of the first people to watch Godzilla outside of Japan.
This second mention is vanishingly small, only an ad, but it introduces us to our next theater. I want to mention the Mooheau Theater because it only existed for a scant six years after showing Godzilla and was then destroyed in a tsunami. As this ad is from November 5th, either the writer of the above review saw the film in another theater, or was recollecting his experience after the film had left local theaters. The author would not have seen it at the Kokusai as this paper was published in Hilo, not Honolulu.
Because the theater was destroyed such a long time ago, most information I have about it is anecdotal. It apparently existed as far back as the late 1910s, and it seems that it began showing Filipino and Japanese imports sometime around the 1940s. One Lawrence Akutagawa writes in a Google Groups post (that I'm really not even sure should be public) that the Mooheau catered to "more formal Japanese dance" and was, like the Kokusai, situated on a street with several other theaters.
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| Wreckage of Mooheau Street, credit to Craig Miyamoto |
Part IV: Further Historical Context
Most theaters during this time were single-screen. Movies rotated in and out of Hawaii's theaters relatively quickly, since, basically, if you can't show a bunch of movies at the same time, you have to show a bunch of movies in rapid succession instead. From my own research, I found that some films would become massively popular (such as Hideo Ōba's Always in My Heart, which was evidently a smash success) and be held over or return for several repeat runs, but this was fairly rare during the 1953-1955 years that my research focused on. It's frustrating that we can't get a clear picture of attendance for Godzilla during its original run, and anything I come up with would be total conjecture, but if we assume that attendance was low at the Kokusai and probably much lower at the Mooheau (Hilo circa 1950 had some 200,000+ less people living there than Honolulu), allowing for a week-long run in both theaters would give us numbers perhaps in the low- to mid-thousands.
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| I unfortunately couldn't drag up any interior photos of either the Kokusai or the Mooheau, but this is the Waikiki Theater, which sat 1,353 people, and so would have been a roughly similar size to the Kokusai. |
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| The interior of Honolulu's Toyo theater. From State Historic Preservation Office. |
Another solution to not having multiple screens within one theater was to just have a lot of theaters. It may seem odd to us today to think of a street with several movie theaters on it, sometimes right next door to each other, but again, we have to consider that these theaters were single-screen and often specific film companies would have vested interest in them - so one theater would specialize in Daiei films and rarely show anything else, or another theater would frequently host traditional dance performances along with movies, et cetera.
(I am, out of necessity, focusing on theaters that showed Japanese films mostly or exclusively, but I don't want to make it sound like these were the only theaters in Hawai'i; due to its incredibly diverse population, theaters showed imported films in a multitude of languages, as well as your usual run-of-the-mill American oaters and sweeping melodramas.)
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| Another early Japanese theater, the Honolulu-za, ca. late 1930s-early 1940s. From Hawai'i State Archives. |
One last thing to consider is that the concept of a movie having English subtitles was, at least in this specific time and place, fairly new. From context it seems like the bulk of the audience for imported Japanese features during the early- to mid-1950s were people who could actually understand Japanese - unlike today, when it's easy for anybody who doesn't speak a lick of the language to see subtitled features in a theater. The following is an article from mid-1954 concerning the recent introduction of English subtitles to the Japanese features playing at the Nippon Theater, and it takes possibly the most logical tack towards subtitles that I've ever heard: if you don't need 'em, don't read 'em.
Therefore, despite what may seem like a very small and limited run, Godzilla arrived at a time where the odds were actually more in its favor in terms of reaching a larger audience than they may have been just a few years prior, when it would not have been subtitled.
Conclusions
I know this was a boring one. Thanks for reading. I have to go to bed now.
No, really. The popular opinion of the Godzilla series in America has historically been a matter of clueless Westerners poking fun at the sweaty guys in rubber suits bonking each other around while ineffectual miniature planes on visible wires fly overhead. We have held that opinion because what of Godzilla that has reached our shores has largely been an adulterated form of the original work: ever since Godzilla, King of the Monsters! we've been fed recuts and bad dubs, pan-and-scans and late-nite TV reruns. We are of course in the kaiju renaissance now: "tokusatsu" is a word in the dictionary, Minus One won an Oscar, Eiji Tsuburaya has been inducted into the Special Effects Hall of Fame, there is a vague sense within academia that Japanese monster movies may be worth looking at closely.
But I want us to remember that there has always been an undercurrent of admiration for these films. From the very earliest days, there have been people appreciating Godzilla films. I want us to know that before the SNL skits and the MST3k episodes there were people like James T. Hamada who saw that something respectable was being done - that the effects were, in fact, good. I want us to think about walking home under the stars in the late autumn cool, talking to our friends about the giant lizard we just saw level Tokyo, the paleontologist and his empathy for the creature, the star-crossed lovers, the scientist fighting with his own conscience, and what it all meant.
