The 1950s were the golden age for Western giant monster cinema. Peak years like 1957 gave us The Black Scorpion, Beginning of the End, The Amazing Colossal Man, The Deadly Mantis, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Cyclops, The Giant Claw, The Monster that Challenged the World, and Kronos. But, like all great things, the cycle came to an end. The market for giant monster movies in the West had all but disappeared by the early 1960s, kept partly alive by Japanese imports from studios like Toho and Daiei. Nevertheless, 1961 delivered a last hurrah of sorts for Western giant monsters, with Gorgo perhaps the most spectacular of them all. It’s a very entertaining picture, but one that comes so close to greatness that its flaws are all the more frustrating.
The film opens with a volcanic eruption near Nara Island off the coast of Ireland, releasing an enormous reptilian creature. Two marine salvagers, Joe (Bill Travers) and Sam (William Sylvester), eagerly capture the monster and accept a $30,000 offer to put it in a circus in London’s Battersea Park. Advertised as “Gorgo,” the poor creature languishes in confinement as crowds gawk in amusement. But the monster is not alone. Its mother soon makes her way up the Thames, wreaking havoc to rescue her offspring.
Gorgo was the third dinosaur picture from director Eugene Lourie, the others being The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Behemoth, the Sea Monster. The Beast’s huge success greatly impacted Lourie’s career, bringing further science fiction projects to the former art director – most of which were dinosaur-based. Indeed, British studio Eros Films openly called for Lourie to essentially copy The Beast when making Behemoth. Gorgo was brought to Lourie by the King Brothers, a pair of former slot machine businessmen turned film producers who were already well-versed in the monster genre – having prepared Toho’s Rodan for stateside release in late 1957 to phenomenal success.
Financing for Gorgo was originally to come from Japan, with an early story by Lourie and regular collaborator Daniel Hyatt entitled Kuru Island. Its basic structure was that of the finished film, though far less action-oriented. In an interview for Fantastic Films #16, Lourie said, “I wanted the creature to confront human beings...but there were no scenes of the military shooting at it and not being able to destroy it.” There were to be no scenes of wanton destruction, either. But, as Lourie explained, “the King Brothers butchered the idea entirely.”
When plans for Japan fell through, the King Brothers considered Paris a suitable location for monster carnage. However, Lourie noted that the sea was nowhere near, and the creature would walk knee-high in the Seine. With an offer from a British studio, the film was eventually shot in England and Ireland.
Gorgo was one of several US-European co-productions that made up this last Western giant monster hurrah. Also in production were the marvelous Reptilicus (US-Denmark) and the not-so-marvelous Konga (US-Britain) – both involving American International Pictures. However, Gorgo more obviously sits alongside Toho’s Godzilla series thanks to its visual similarities – and because Japan was one of its original settings. While stop-motion animation was used for both The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Behemoth, the Sea Monster, Gorgo’s special effects mirrored those of Toho’s monster epics: creature costumes and detailed miniature sets, including recreations of Tower Bridge and the Houses of Parliament. And although Gorgo’s special effects are padded with conspicuous military stock footage (including a shot of fighter jets taken from Rodan), Mama Gorgo’s London rampage is spectacularly staged – calling to mind the similarly impressive work of Eiji Tsuburaya for Toho. There is indeed a great catharsis when Mama Gorgo convincingly pulverizes Westminster.
Narratively and thematically, Gorgo echoes another Toho picture, 1961’s Mothra. Both films see greedy businessmen kidnapping people/creatures for profit, only for their monster protectors to come to their rescue. Moreover, they both end with their monsters returning home unscathed, a dramatic development from Lourie’s prior dinosaur films, which ended in the creatures’ deaths. In fact, it was a comment from his own daughter – upset with how the poor old Rhedosaurus had died in The Beast – that led Lourie to keep Mama and Baby Gorgo alive. But these similarities also reveal the flaw that ultimately keeps Gorgo from true greatness: its unlikeable leads. Whereas the businessmen in Mothra – led by Jerry Ito’s Clark Nelson – are plainly the villains, those in Gorgo are the ostensible heroes.
The only real voice in the film looking out for the monsters is Sean (Vincent Winter), an orphan boy from Nara Island who cares for Gorgo, but his pleas have little effect on leads Joe and Sam. Indeed, neither man gives a thought to Gorgo’s well-being. Sam feebly worries about further loss of life when a crewman dies trying to confine the baby Gorgo, and Joe manages a sarcastic, “so I was wrong” later on, but neither remark constitutes a serious recognition of wrongdoing. This is especially frustrating because Mama Gorgo’s rampage features scenes of catastrophic loss of life. Images of packed tube stations filled with people trying to escape, only to be crushed as the monster passes overhead, emphasize the cost of their arrogance.
Lourie and Hyatt’s original Kuru Island story was supposedly much more reverent in its depiction of nature. But when the Japan deal fell through, the King Brothers wanted some “quick changes” to the script, which Lourie felt couldn’t be accommodated. The producers got their way, and additional writers were brought on board. Along with location changes, Sam and Joe became greedy adventurers. Of all the twists and turns in Gorgo’s journey from inception to screen, this may have been the most unfortunate.
Of course, the film makes the audience care for Baby and Mama Gorgo, even if the leads don’t. The terrific monster costumes and their effective sound design compellingly capture our sympathy. Lourie still clearly wants us to care for his monsters, not least because of his daughter’s influential sympathies for the Rhedosaurus in The Beast. Furthermore, much of the film’s publicity during its production emphasized Sean’s admiration for Gorgo and the monsters’ ability to tug at the heartstrings. For example, in a January 1960 interview with Erskine Johnson, Maurice King (of the King Brothers) said they made Gorgo “a monster with heart” specifically because of their mother’s insistence that they make pictures “with heart.” Indeed, in an interview with Tom Weaver, Lourie believed the King Brothers were drawn to the project because of their attachment to their own mother.
On one hand, it may be tempting to read Joe and Sam’s relative indifference as the point, that their impenetrable arrogance highlights the plight of Gorgo. After all, their attitude does feed into our engagement with the monsters, but the film’s climax contradicts such an approach. The film’s end sees a ubiquitous newscaster spouting overt thematic exposition (“she turns back, turns with her young...leaving man himself to ponder the proud boast that he alone is lord of all creation”) as if trying to force a recognition of Joe and Sam’s hubris that their characters fail to show themselves. Such deliberate thematic framing makes the leads’ overall indifference seem especially bizarre – and disappointing, given Lourie’s original intentions.
Coincidentally, this issue also crops up in Lourie’s 1958 science fiction work, The Colossus of New York. In a Frankenstein-tinged story, a scientist dies, and his father places his brain inside a horrifying mechanical body. Like Gorgo, the film prompts sympathy for the titular Colossus, but in the inevitable doom that follows, his father never really acknowledges the cruel thing he’s done. There’s just a perfunctory “I only wish that heaven...can forgive me for what I did” at the very end.
Colossus also underserves the lone woman in its cast, the scientist’s widow, whose grief is frustratingly relegated to a secondary concern. Gorgo, meanwhile, features no women at all beyond Mama Gorgo herself.
And so, Gorgo sits in an awkward position. Its special effects are fantastic, we feel for its monsters, the music is grand, and its basic premise is a classic tale of mankind’s arrogance à la King Kong (1933) and Mothra. But the fact that its characters are so stubbornly averse to introspection makes it feel incomplete. Gorgo remains a classic of the genre, and I by no means suggest that it’s a bad film, but it lacks a compelling human side to its monster drama. It is so close to being one of the greats, but falls short.
With a new release from boutique label Vinegar Syndrome, we can revisit Gorgo in 4K – if for nothing else than to see Mama Gorgo trample parliament.
