Of all the non-Godzilla kaiju movies from the Toho’s Showa era run, The War of the Gargantuas (called Frankenstein’s Monsters: Sanda vs. Gaira in Japan) is one that really stuck with certain members of the audience on both sides of the world—it was used as a reference point by Quentin Tarantino in Kill Bill Vol. 2,is a favourite of directors like Guillermo Del Toro, and, no joke, inspired Brad Pitt to become an actor. Part of what makes it unique among the Ishiro Honda/Eiji Tsuburaya collaborations of the sixties stems from the unusual circumstances of its development: it’s a bizarre pseudo-sequel to Frankenstein Conquers The World (Japanese title Frankenstein vs. Baragon), a film produced a year earlier that had its origins in the same international deal that led to King Kong vs. Godzilla. Originally, King Kong animator Willis O’Brien had been pitching a King Kong vs. Frankenstein concept around Hollywood before a producer unscrupulously sold it Toho without O’Brien’s involvement, with the idea morphing into separate King Kong vs. Godzilla and Frankenstein vs. Godzilla scripts, the latter being rewritten to remove the Big G (the whole thing would remain a Japan/US co-production, with producer Henry G. Saperstein from UPA heavily involved in both Frankenstein and Gargantuas.) Frankenstein Conquers the World feels like a sort of prototype, giving Honda and Tsuburaya a chance to test out something new for their giant monster movies: a monster played by an actor without a full suit, giving him a wider range of emotion and more opportunity for the audience to sympathize. That, alongside the smaller scale of the monster action, was something that appealed to both directors, and would continue in its follow-up to an even greater effect, creating a conflict between monster brothers with diametrically opposed natures, a traditional narrative that nonetheless is highly engaging when presented in the form of a kaiju rumble.
In order to better contextualize Gargantuas, I watched Frankenstein Conquers The World beforehand, and it certainly opens with one of the wildest premises for a giant monster movie: the still-beating heart of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster is smuggled out of Nazi Germany by their Japanese allies and taken to Hiroshima right before the A-Bomb was dropped. Fifteen years later, the radiation has apparently allowed the heart to regenerate into a malformed humanoid who has been skulking about Japan while constantly growing. The monster is discovered by a trio of scientists, including one American (played by Nick Adams, who was also in Invasion of Astro-Monster, as well as previous blog subject Die, Monster, Die!), who seek to discover the regenerative properties of his cells, but as he keeps getting bigger they find it increasingly difficult to keep him and the general public safe from each other. The script by Takeshi Kimura (writer of Rodan, Matango, and Destroy All Monsters, among others) has interesting ideas, but also has difficulty finding the moral centre of the story—although the scientists argue that Frankenstein (even though they refer to the doctor as Frankenstein, they ALSO call the monster Frankenstein, so you’re just going to have to learn to live with it) is human, their approach to helping him vacillates pretty wildly throughout the movie, so we never really know how much we should feel for monster, quite unlike the classic Universal movies this is lightly riffing on (another weird ethical point is the way the older Japanese scientist who hoped to use Frankenstein’s cells to create an army of invincible soldiers talks about as if he was doing something benevolent.) As well, all the stuff with the burrowing monster Baragon, who would later become a bit player in the Godzilla films, feels pretty arbitrary, adding a needless additional conflict just to give this plot a second half—if this were a more lighthearted movie, that might not be a problem, but Frankenstein Conquers the World takes itself very seriously. Still, the things they do with their suitless monster—the way he gets to be more acrobatic during the climactic battle and even wields makeshift weapons—is something different from the norm, so while it’s not one of Honda’s best monster films, it has plenty of unique points.
All that said, I don’t really know if watching that movie makes The War of the Gargantuas less confusing, or even more confusing. In the Japanese version (and the Toho-produced English dub that Criterion put out), the two monsters are referred to as “Frankensteins”, and references to “Frankenstein’s death on Mt. Fuji” seem to be talking about the climax of the previous movie, but no other direct references are made, and flashbacks seem to be altered to show the monster of this movie rather than the original Franknstein. We still follow a trio of scientists, and while they have similar personalities they also have different names, and two are played by new actors (regular Ishiro Honda player Kenji Sahara is one, with the American lead now played by West Side Story star and future Twin Peaks actor Russ Tamblyn, who was apparently a nightmare to work with), with the female lead (Kumi Mizuno, who was also in Matango) the only one returning from the previous film. Trying to reconcile the plots of these two movies is a bit mindboggling! Personally, I think it’s probably better to think of Gargantuas as more of a sort of spiritual sequel to Frankenstein, taking some of the ideas of that film and going in a different direction with them—specifically, the idea of a monster with regenerating cells.
In fact, the movie readily implies a context where monsters are somewhat of a semi-regular occurrence in this world, opening as it does with a boat being attacked by a giant octopus (likely playing off the alternative ending of Frankenstein, where he is dragged into the water by an out-of-nowhere killer calamari), only for it to be tossed aside by another monster who proceeds to sink the boat itself. Once the authorities decide to take the lone survivor’s story of a monster attack seriously (and the JSDF is actually pretty on the ball in this movie compared to many other giant monster movies), all the reporters in Japan decide that it is probably the Frankenstein that our lead scientists were raising, which they strongly deny, as they know he would never attack humans…and also, they still think he’s dead. The movie is paced rather interestingly, with the first half focused entirely on the human population dealing with this new monster threat, while the scientists argue and look for evidence that this monster isn’t theirs, even after they learn that it has identical DNA. It’s not quite a mystery, given that most people saw the movie poster, but when the second Frankenstein does finally show up, it changes things quite drastically.
The two monsters the title implies are Sanda (AKA the Brown Gargantua) and Gaira (AKA the Green Gargantua, AKA Johnny “Big Fingers” Lorenzo)—Sanda was the friendly monster the scientists raised, who had run away to live by himself in the mountains (with yeti-like footprints visible in a very obvious but also quite charming matte painting), while Gaira is a beast that developed from loose tissue that fell into the ocean and adapted to an amphibious life. The different environments also created monsters with very different dispositions: while Sanda is shown to be as benign as they say (he even injures himself while saving the lady scientist from falling off a cliff, a real Save the Cat moment), Gaira’s dalliance in the deep sea has turned him into a vicious, insatiable predator. Unlike other Toho monsters who periodically rise from the ocean like a hurricane simply following its course, Gaira is something that appears regularly with malignant purpose (why then people still felt the need to host their seaside parties at night knowing it was still lurking is…well, maybe not so ridiculous-sounding these days), and coupled with an appearance that resembles a algae-encrusted ape cadaver, makes it one of scariest kaiju from the Showa era.
As with the Frankensteinin of the previous movie, having mostly unencumbered actors with visible eyes gives them the freedom to characterize the monsters, which is of even more importance in this one. Original Godzilla actor Haruo Nakajima as Gaira leaps and runs with a feral energy; Yu Sekida as Sanda plays up his peacemaker nature with gestures and his expressive eyes. At first, Sanda comes to Gaira’s aid when he is being pulverized by the military’s Maser cannons (those monster lasers would show up in the Godzilla movies after this, including some straight stock footage reuse), obviously knowing that this being was a lot like him. Things take a turn when he returns to Gaira resting, and then finds the evidence of his man-eating activities, and in one of the all-time great kaiju movie moments, proceeds to pull a tree out of the ground, slowly approaches the unsuspecting Gaira (who even looks at him, but apparently can’t fathom his fellow Frankenstein turning on him) and then bashes him repeatedly, beginning the titular Gargantua War. There’s so much unexpected subtlety from the suit actors in those moments, and it really gives these hairy titans palpable personalities and motivation.
Also because of the portrayal of the monsters, the fights between them have the quality of a vicious brawl, full of grappling and biting and headbutting spontaneity that the full-body rubber suits just aren’t capable of—I imagine that the personal anger that exudes these one-on-one maulings is what Tarantino was trying to tap into in his movie. Despite the violence, though, the movie still continues to make Sanda into the bigger man/Frankenstein, as even during the final battle you see him stop and try to calm his clone brother down, only to get smashed again and be forced into direct conflict. Kimura’s script here has a more coherent vision of a sympathetic monster, and when the lady scientist is being driven away in an ambulance and is told that there is no way for them to save Sanda, there is a sense of genuine tragedy. This is probably one of the last of the Toho monster movies that was allowed to be treated with any sort of seriousness, and it uses that freedom to create something with a surprising amount of pathos for the monsters.
In the end, a convenient underwater volcanic eruption spares the humans from having to destroy the Gargantuas themselves (and also solves the issue brought up earlier in the movie where blowing the monsters apart could potentially allow for the creation of innumerable other monsters), and parallels the original non-octopus based ending of Frankenstein Conquers the World. The final lines of both movies sum up the mood: in Frankenstein, it is said that while Frankenstein could have survived his plunge into the bowels of the Earth, he was probably better off dead; in Gargantuas, we are told more definitively that there was no way either Gargantua could have survived, with nature itself thoroughly erasing this case of scientific overreach. Far more than another case of science gone wrong, though, it’s a downbeat ending for a creature that meant well, but whose origins and physiology prevented it from living a peaceful existence.
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