FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD (1965)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Honda had originally wanted to explore more of the science-gone-wrong theme, but was forced to change the story in the middle to reach a climactic monster battle

This sentence from the Wikipedia article on CONQUERS-- an article which recapitulates a lot of fun history about the movie's genesis, BTW-- explains why the film seems rather schizophrenic. The first half of CONQUERS seems intent on drawing parallels between the hubris that created the Frankenstein Monster and the horrors of the atomic devastation of Hiroshima. Then the second half places this Japanese version of the Monster in the position of a hero defending humanity from a makeshift monster-of-the-day.

In the waning days of WWII, but presumably before Allied forces invade the Reich, the German high command learns that a local scientist has custody of the undying heart of the Frankenstein Monster. and they order the organ sent to their Japanese allies because-- well, I suspect even the Japanese script doesn't give a good reason for the Germans to do so. In any case, the heart-- which may be useful in manufacturing super-soldiers-- ends up in a Hiroshima research facility, just a little while before the city is bombed. The immortal heart is lost and forgotten.

Twenty years later, American scientist Bowen (Nick Adams) is ensconced at a Hiroshima facility, conducting research on cell regeneration for the purpose of healing lost limbs, along with his colleagues Sueko (Kumi Mizuno) and Ken'ichiro (Tadao Takashima). Bowen explicitly says that he came to Japan as a sort of penance for the bombing of the city, but the research has gone nowhere and he considers leaving. Felicitously, he and Sueko encounter a feral boy with a curiously squarish head. The boy, who feeds on small game and on the pets of Hiroshima residents, is caught, but Bowen and Sueko gain permission to study him. In due time they theorize that the boy "just growed" from the Frankenstein-heart, because (they claim) he regenerates his injuries quickly and is Caucasian like the bodies from which the Monster would have been built. (In truth, the actor playing New Frankenstein doesn't look like anything but another Japanese performer.) Ken'ichio becomes somewhat obsessed with the idea of cutting off one of Monster-Boy's limbs, on the theory that this can help their cell regeneration experiments.

However, New Frankenstein saves him the trouble. As a result of the boy's getting a steady diet of protein while in captivity, he grows to a height of maybe ten feet, and so is kept in a cell with a chain on his arm. Frankenstein breaks free of the cell and inadvertently slices off one of his hands pulling free of the chain. Frankenstein escapes the city into the nearby woods, but the three scientists find the hand, still alive and crawling about. They attempt to keep the hand alive but it eventually expires. Ken'ichiro becomes more obsessed with getting a sample of Frankenstein's anatomy before he's eventually destroyed by the army.

Up to this point, this new incarnation of Frankenstein has emphasized the tragedy of the Hiroshima survivors, embodied in the form of a ceaselessly hungry feral child. And it's Ken'ichiro, not Bowen, who comes off like the ruthless scientist, willing to duplicate Frankenstein's inhumanity for the sake of personal advancement. I found this surprising, since a lot of Japanese films project all the evils of WWII upon the U.S, rather than admitting that the bombing was the result of Japan's imperial expansion.

But by 1965, Toho was certainly aware that many kaiju moviegoers loved to see big monster-fights, and thus Honda set up scenes of a second monster, Baragon. While Frankenstein continues to follow his earlier pattern of just feeding off random animals-- and thus becoming a really big kaiju-- the burrowing monster Baragon feeds upon animals and humans alike, so that Frankenstein gets blamed for the beast's actions. Mostly due to dumb luck, the two monsters cross one another's paths and immediately fight. After a lively battle of humanoid freak and reptilian predator, somewhat reminiscent of the one between Kong and a T-Rex in the 1933 film, Frankenstein conquers his foe. But as the result of Baragon's burrowings, the earth around both collapses, so that Frankenstein apparently dies-- though he would be back in altered form for WAR OF THE GARGANTUAS, while Baragon would return in DESTROY ALL MONSTERS.

At one point in the movie, a character expresses surprise that the creature that grew from the Monster's heart has lived so long as a little kid. But if everyone's so sold on the idea that the heart just produced a full body out of nothing-- given that the heart itself has no way to assimilate protein-- why should anyone be surprised that an immortal monster could live so long? This and one or two inconsistencies in the English dub make me suspect that the original idea was different. It would track better if, following the bombing of Hiroshima, some starving child found the heart and ate it, with the result that he became mutated, square head and all-- though incapable of growing unless he got a surfeit of protein. This concept would have emphasized more the human suffering of a Japanese survivor of the Bomb, victimized by two forms of Western science. It would also go a long way toward explaining why the producers cast a Japanese performer in the Monster's role, when the script claims that he's a European concoction. But probably the world will never know.