Gorgo

I recently rewatched Gorgo, a 1961 US / UK / Irish kaiju co-production, a film I hadn’t seen in several years (at least five, maybe as many as ten).

The last couple of times I watched it I wasn’t paying close attention, just letting it play in the background as I did other stuff.  

Now, having actually paid attention to it again, I’m delighted it holds up as well as my memory told me it did.

I first encountered Gorgo in 1961 when my father took my younger brother and I to see it as the Fine Arts Theater in Asheville, NC.

The Fine Arts, one of only two movie theaters in Asheville (there may have been a 3rd that I didn’t know about due to the segregation laws of that era) specialized in more outre’ fare and typically got the monster and horror shows, as well as the Hercules movies and =ahem!= adult dramas.

It was a memorable trip for several reasons, not the least of which being my younger brother freaking out at the climax when he turned to grab Dad’s arm only to find Dad had gone to the rest room.

Not a great movie but certainly a good one, Gorgo in retrospect was somewhat groundbreaking and as such more deserving of attention.

The late film historian Bill Warren and I would often discuss old sci-fi movies.  Bill, of course, wrote the seminal reference work on 1950s sci-fi movies, Keep Watching The Skies (highly recommended; go order it right now).

He argued that the fifties sci-fi boom may have started in 1950* but it really ended in 1962 when the last of the films put into production in the 1950s finally came out.

I argued that the line was fuzzier, greyer, with some titles showing a clearly different mindset than others released the same year.

Such is the case with Gorgo.

Basically, 1950s sci-fi is about re-establishing the status quo.  Several end quite explicitly stating this (Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers for one) while others allude to the fact that the menace may return…someday.

But their point always was that by the end of the picture things returned to what passed for normal.

Even Forbidden Planet returns to normal by destroying Altair IV and the truly god-like Krell machines found there, thus preventing anyone else from using them.

But 1960s sci-fi had an entirely different flavor, and that flavor was that by the end of the movie things had changed irrevocably and forever.

There was no going back to the way things were, there was only the new normal -- however different and bizarre that normal might be.

Gorgo is a sixties sci-fi film.

Giant monster movies -- what we now refer to as kaiju due to Japan’s dominance of the genre -- started way back in the silent era (like almost everything else in cinema, Georges Melies got there first) with King Kong as the most prominent example before the atom age.

King Kong’s success on TV in the late 40s spurred Warner Bros. to make The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and that in turn spurred Toho to make Gojira (US title:  Godzilla, King Of The Monsters) and that inspired a giant monster race on both sides of the Pacific.

England, not wanting to feel left out of the fun, made The Giant Behemoth which is an okay but underwhelming example of the genre, noteworthy only for being stop motion animators Willis O’Brien’s last feature work (he worked on other films after that, but not as an animator).

By the late 1950s Godzilla’s popularity inspired the King brothers (US slot machine distributors) to make their own giant monster movie, and despite their unfamiliarity with the genre they made several smart decisions, the first of which was hiring Eugene Lourie.

Lourie had one of those fabulous “cast your fate to the wind” careers that included working as art director on Jean Renoir films in France.

Like so many others, as the Nazis rose in power, Lourie came to America where he continued doing art direction among other behind the camera film work.  His experience with special effects got him a gig direction The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and from there he directed a few TV episodes then The Colossus Of New York (not what we’d call a kaiju film today, but definitely one of the oddest sci-fi movies ever made) and The Giant Behemoth (itself essentially a remake of The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms).

When the King brothers approached him to direct Gorgo, he was reluctant, agreeing to make the film only they let him do something no other sci-fi film of the 1950s (or before!) had ever done:  Let the monsters win.

While Lourie later complained he felt the film fell short of what he intended, there’s no denying he was swinging for the outfield fence with this one.

The King brothers’ best idea was that they’d start with a 20-ft tall monster getting captured and brought to London, only for the protagonists to belatedly realize they’ve captured a baby and mama is gonna come looking for him.

It ends with Mama defeating everything humanity had to throw at it and returning to the sea with her child, the surviving humans watching them depart and realizing they can no longer consider themselves the absolute masters of all they survey.

That point gets lost in the feel-good moment of mother rescuing child, but it’s there, and it marks Gorgo as one of the first sci-fi films to embrace the concept that change was inevitable and inescapable.

Gorgo is an expertly crafted film, not perfect by a long shot, but satisfying all the way through.  Lourie’s talent as an art director contributed mightily to the film’s final dramatic effect, and the scenes of London panicking as Mama Gorgo comes looking for her child has an intensity lacking in most kaiju films.

As Bill Warren observed, there’s not a lot of originality here, but that’s okay because Lourie and the King brothers covered a number of details typically left out of movies like this, namely how the %#$@ are you going to get your kaiju back to civilization?

Sharp eyed observers will notice a lot of stock footage in this movie (with footage of the British and US navies being used interchangeably for the same ships and crews), but Lourie also disguised some of it well.  

The cost conscious King brothers filmed a lorry carrying a full size replica of Gorgo (doped up and trussed up with nets) through a deserted Piccadilly Circus by sneaking cameras in and doing a wholly unauthorized shoot early on a Sunday morning (explained away in the film as the police ordering people off the streets to reduce the danger of Gorgo escaping).

In a couple of scenes Lourie superimposes his actors over background plates shot for big budget WWII epics, creating a far larger sense of scale than the movie actually had.

The miniatures and the lighting of same are exceptionally well done and very convincing for the era.  Matte work to combine the Gorgos with humans is pretty seamless.

The Gorgo monster suit itself?  Ehhh…not quite so well done.  Call it adequate, certainly not an embarrassment, but far from the best example of the genre.

The movie certainly ended in a far different place than other kaiju of the era and ended up having a surprisingly long half-life as a comic book spin off by Steve Ditko that followed the adventures of Gorgo and his Mama.

There’s a lot that can be done with this kaiju combination, and it’s a shame that’s going to waste.

If ever there was a movie deserving of an upgraded remake, it’s Gorgo.

© Buzz Dixon

* When a particular epoch in pop culture starts / stops is always open to debate.  Since Bill wouldn’t consider short films or serials in Keep Watching The Skies he omits several serials released before 1950 that anticipated the sci-fi boom, in particular The Purple Monster Strikes, the first of Republic’s Martian invasion serials as well as the first cinematic sci-fi excursion to include all of the key elements of 1950s American sci-fi:  Paranoia, alien invasion, body possession.  (For those keeping score at home, the Republic Martian serials are The Purple Monster Strikes, Flying Disc Man From Mars, and Zombies Of The Stratosphere though one can argue King Of The Rocket Men, Retik, The Moon Menace, and Commando Cody, Sky Marshall Of The Universe are crossovers of one kind or another; the first three serials were unintentionally linked when cost conscious Republic decided to recycle costumes and props and rewrote dialog to refer to prior releases in order to cover their budgetary limits.)