Before Godzilla: Mighty Joe Young (1949), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, Them!

The giant monster film largely entered a period of slumber during World War II, with only the Fleischer Brothers’ Superman short “The Arctic Giant” providing a notable example of the form. The short sees a giant dinosaur-like creature thawed out of ice, whereupon it goes on a rampage that ends when Superman subdues the beast. In terms of feature films, it wasn’t until 1949 that a new giant monster emerged on screen, courtesy of the team that codified the genre in the first place. Spurred by financially successful re-releases of King Kong during the intervening sixteen years, the key creative staff of that film reunited for one final giant ape flick: Mighty Joe Young. 

 

 

At first glance, the story of Mighty Joe Young’s is much the same as King Kong’s: an oversized gorilla from an “exotic” land forms an attachment to a white woman and is taken to New York City to be exploited, at which point it goes on a rampage. In practice, the film is quite different, right down to the foundations. Rather than the Lovecraftian depiction of foreign lands as a source of ruin, Mighty Joe Young embraces a more mainstream colonialist view of non-white societies. The protagonist Jill (Lora Lee Michel as a child and Terry Moore as an adult) is a woman raised on a ranch in what was British colonial territory and is now part of Tanzania. Her affection for the film’s giant gorilla is very much reciprocated, though not in a romantic sense; she buys “Joe” as a tiny baby from some passing tribesmen, and he becomes her friend and protector as they grow to adulthood, with Joe reaching a relatively measly twelve feet compared to the much larger Kong. Robert Armstrong once again plays the entrepreneur and showman (here named Max) who “discovers” the gorilla and pressures a hesitant Jill to bring Joe to New York City as a club exhibit, but this version of the character has a thorough change of heart along the way. Indeed, once Joe rebels and goes on a rampage in the club due to homesickness and mistreatment by patrons, all of the human protagonists risk everything to smuggle him to safety once the authorities order him to be put down. Joe is portrayed as a noble figure throughout, who attacks only out of self-defense or protectiveness of Jill, and even risks his life saving children from a burning orphanage during the climax. (It is this act that causes the authorities to drop their kill order.)

 

Many of the flaws of King Kong remain: the underlying racial politics and cultural assumptions are only improved in that black people aren’t portrayed as comprehensively malevolent. Nonetheless, the film’s departures from its predecessor are striking, particularly the way that the story depicts Joe as a completely sympathetic figure from the off, going even further in the direction that Son of Kong gestured at. And those paying attention to the stop-motion effects would have been rewarded with the sight of how much apparent progress had been made in the technique of bringing a giant gorilla to life. The film’s set pieces are uniformly less expansive and striking than King Kong’s, but the actual animation of Joe is far more nuanced in expression and characterization than his spiritual ancestors. 

 

Indeed, watching the original Mighty Joe Young for the first time for this blog, I was struck by just how different the stop-motion animation felt from the previous Kong films under credited effects supervisor Willis O’Brien. Joe’s animation feels much more characteristic of one of the assistants who stepped up to handle most of the animation while O’Brien was preoccupied by technical challenges, a certain newcomer to the animation crew named Ray Harryhausen.

 

Like O’Brien before him and Eiji Tsuburaya alongside him, Ray Harryhausen would become one of the most famous and respected special effects wizards in the film industry. His stop-motion work would grace the likes of 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts (famous for its sword-fighting skeletons), 1981’s Clash of the Titans (famous for its humanoid Kraken, Medusa, and more), and many other beloved science fiction and fantasy films. Despite a cult following and an eventual ‘90s remake beloved by those who grew up with it, Mighty Joe Young was not a success at the time. Its commercial failure ensured that there would be no more Kong variants from the team of Cooper/Schoedsack, Ruth Ray, and O’Brien. Instead, it would be Harryhausen who finally kick-started the giant monster film in a new direction.

 

The new direction in question would be provided by the broad shift in horror and science fiction films that took place in the dawn of the 1950s. In the aftermath of World War II, the Cold War between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their various proxy states was on. With the atomic bombings of Japan fresh in international memory and the threat of atomic warfare hanging over the globe, genre films began to engage more frequently in the question of what consequences would arise from humanity’s continued technological march. When it came to Hollywood, the supernatural and fantastical horrors exemplified by the 1930s-40s Universal Monsters films had waned in popularity, while films featuring alien invaders, technological threats, and science fiction trappings were on the rise.

 

Eugène Lourié’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is very blunt about its contemporary influence. The beast of the title is a Rhedosaurus - a quadrupedal carnivorous dinosaur of a type that never existed, though it makes for a swell movie monster - and it is woken from its slumber in the Arctic Circle by an American nuclear test. The United States unleashes this terror within the universe of the film, just as they unleashed the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the decade before. However, nuclear energy becomes the solution to the irradiated Rhedosaurus’ rampage as well as the cause. The Rhedosaurus’ path south leads it to New York City, where with the help of the US military, the scientist protagonists use a radioactive isotope to kill the beast. The film’s attitude reveals a fascinating ambiguity toward the development and harnessing of nuclear power: the unforeseen, destructive consequences might be disastrous, but ultimately it’s better for the USA to possess nuclear materials than not in the face of unknown threats.

 

Unlike Mighty Joe Young, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms was a success upon its release in 1953, and it’s not hard to see why. Ray Harryhausen and his team’s stop-motion work on the Rhedosaurus is as impressive as you’d hope. The reptilian beast doesn’t evince much of an inner life compared to the Kongs and Joe Youngs before it, but it more than compensates with a sense of animalistic rage and defiance, as well as an almost serpentine sense of movement through its surroundings. The Rhedosaurus’ extended attack on New York City is particularly fantastic, utilizing creative camerawork including low angles and forced perspective to create a sense of immediacy to the beast’s presence. The inky darkness in the deserted streets during the military’s nighttime confrontation with the beast lends the scenes an eerie feeling almost out of a zombie film, which is compounded by the unsettling revelation that the monster’s blood is radioactive and spreads a plague to those who come into contact with it.

 

The Beast’s influence on the film landscape became evident very quickly in terms of the giant monster films that followed in its wake, many of which featured a similar atomic origin for their monsters. Indeed, one particular person took inspiration from the film without having seen it: Japanese producer Tanaka Tomoyuki. 

 

Tanaka was an employee of Toho Studios, the largest film production company in Japan. In 1954, he went overseas to Indonesia to negotiate a potential high-profile co-production with the working title In the Shadow of Glory. Unfortunately for Tanaka, the Indonesian government declined to issue the participating actors’ visas and thereby shut down the production outright, possibly due to lingering tensions from the whole “invaded and committed horrific war crimes” business the Japanese army had gotten up to there in World War II. This left Tanaka facing the unenviable prospect of explaining to his superior and mentor at Toho, Mori Iwao, that the studio would be short one major blockbuster for the year. The story goes that Tanaka was flying back to Tokyo and mulling over potential replacement films when he looked out of his window at the ocean and pondered a story involving something emerging from the dark depths below. 

 

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms hadn’t been released in Japan yet, but the film’s financial success was known to Tanaka, and its plot provided an ideal venue for addressing the other inspiration he had in mind: a recent incident where a Japanese fishing vessel had strayed into the radius of an American hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll and been exposed to the fallout, only for their plight to be belittled and downplayed by an American government anxious to maintain their public image. Mori liked Tanaka’s proposal and shared his interest in exploring the dangers of the atom bomb via a monster movie. Whether or not the two producers were aware of the nuclear aspect of The Beast’s plot, there would be ample opportunity to put a unique spin on a monster with an atomic origin, from a Japanese perspective. Mori and Tanaka put together a proposal rather amusingly titled The Monster from 20,000 Miles Under the Sea (ha), which was later changed to G-Project.

 

Before we examine the results of Mori’s and Tanaka’s endeavor, it’s worth examining the other major 1954 film to follow in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms’ oversized footsteps: Gordon Douglas’ Them!.

 

The first fifteen minutes of Them! make up one of the best stretches of American filmmaking I’ve ever come across. The sequence follows two New Mexico police officers as they find, in order: a silent, traumatized little girl (Sandy Descher) wandering the desert road; the deserted trailer home that she came from, giant gashes torn into its metal frame, robbed of its food and sugar supplies but not its money; and a general store in much the same condition. As night falls, one of the officers takes the girl away to find medical care. The other stays behind to investigate the store. Not long after, a strange noise that I can only describe as a high-pitch mechanical squeaking emanates from outside. The remaining cop steps outside and sees something. He fires his gun as the sound grows louder, then screams as the unseen thing making the noise gets him. Fade to black.

 

The opening sequence expertly uses the vast, empty expanse of desert and the lonely sound of the wind to establish a stark atmosphere, one in which the human characters already feel small and out of their element. The damage to the trailer and general store clearly weren’t made by normal human hands, and the bizarre nature of the robberies feels outside the realm of rational human logic. Descher’s silence and blank stare further emphasize the uneasy feeling that whatever’s going on, regular people weren’t meant to experience it. Even before the audience clocks that there’s probably some kind of inhuman presence involved, a pervading sense of wrongness is present and correct. Add in the perfectly dark escalation of menace at the end, and the opening act of Them! is an absolute masterclass in tension and atmosphere-building that any serious student of film should examine. 

 

The somber, uneasy tone continues throughout, as the culprits are revealed to be giant ants irradiated by the Trinity atomic bomb test at nearby Alamogordo. The ants are played by props and models rather than stop-motion, and even though they look a little goofy, that makes them no less ominous a presence thanks to the conviction of Gordon Douglas’s direction. Them! effectively turns into a procedural as the surviving cop and a group of scientists race to stop the ants from spreading out of the desert and around the globe - the revelation that the queen ants can fly, accompanied by a fantastic scene where one bursts out of its hiding place on a cargo ship to attack the crew, raises the stakes nicely. In practice, the ants don’t make it farther than Los Angeles, where the main characters embark on a search-and-destroy mission against a nest deep in the city’s sewers.

 

There are a few notable aspects Them! has in common with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms beyond the basic genre and a mastery of shadowy, film noir-ish cinematography. Both films feature heroic scientists among the main ensemble characters at a time when positive portrayals of scientists and science in general weren’t something to take for granted. For instance, 1951’s The Thing from Another World, one of the earliest and most acclaimed of the fifties alien invasion films, depicts scientists as amoral opportunists who would gladly condemn humanity to destruction in the name of research. 

 

A distrust of scientists would go on to be a typical attitude displayed in fifties sci-fi films produced in the west, if not always to such an extreme: an unfortunate if predictable conflation on one hand of the nuclear fear of scientists’ tinkering with nature, and on the other of intellectualism and “mechanical” thinking as a source of Communist infiltration of western society. The only safeguard against such insidious forces is inevitably the down-to-Earth practicality and decisiveness of traditional American heroism, such as that displayed by Carl Denham and his expedition team in King Kong. Or, more pertinent to fifties monster movies, the fists-first behavior exhibited by the military heroes in many of them. (Never mind the military’s own role in the development of the atomic bomb, it would seem.) The apparent dichotomy of grounded, immediate human feeling versus cold intellectualism in fifties b-movies is perhaps best exemplified by 1956’s It Conquered the World. Its infamous ending monologue, beginning with “He learned almost too late that man is a feeling creature…”, is delivered by Peter Graves’s Good Scientist in reference to his villainous colleague who attempted to sell out humanity to an alien invader; the speech would become a meme once the film was featured on the movie-mocking show Mystery Science Theater 3000 in the early nineties.

 

In comparison with the likes of The Thing from Another World, both The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them! portray their scientist characters in a positive light. And the two films share at least one welcome similarity with The Thing from Another World, namely that their female leads are depicted as proactive, competent professionals who actively contribute to the plot rather than stand on the sidelines as a damsel in distress - also not something to take for granted in fifties b-movies.

But ultimately, both movies have the American military on hand to weaponize the scientists’ discoveries regarding the monsters (albeit after some persuasion, in the case of Beast). The climax of Them! sees the army torch the giant ant nest in Los Angeles with flamethrowers, preventing the queen ants from flying away to lay more eggs. Even though nuclear weapons may have summoned the monsters in both films, Beast and Them! present the argument that any consequences from using them can and will be nullified as long as the United States keeps its cool and deploys effective force to do it.

We’ll see what a country that experienced the consequences of nuclear weapons first-hand had to say to that. Next Time: Gojira/Godzilla