Mothra vs. Godzilla (Ishiro Honda, 1964)

Cast: Akira Takarada, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Yu Fujiki, Kenji Sahara, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito, Yoshifuma Tajima, Jun Tazaki, Kenzo Tabu, Haruo Nakajima, Katsumi Tezuka. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa. Cinematography: Hajime Koizumi. Production design: Takeo Kita. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Akira Ifukube.

The contest between the benevolent insect god Mothra and the rampaging Godzilla sounds unequal. What's Mothra going to do, flap Godzilla to death? It turns out in Ishiro Honda's Mothra vs. Godzilla that the giant lepidopteran has a few unexpected tricks in her repertoire, not the least that she has progeny in the form of larvae with teeth. As usual, the humans are clumsy spectators, prone to do as much harm as good, but fortunately they have the help of Mothra's diminutive acolytes, the Shobijin (Emi Ito, Yumi Ito). We begin with a typhoon that washes a giant egg ashore, whereupon greedy promoters set out to make a fortune exploiting it. The egg, of course, is Mothra's, and fortunately we have an intrepid newspaper reporter (Akira Takarad) and a photographer (Yuriko Hoshi) who are more interested in getting the story than in making money. (The demise of newspapers is going to make such plots obsolete: Can we rely on intrepid podcasters to save the world in future encounters with giant monsters?) The movie is bright and busy entertainment with just enough sermonizing about human foibles to make it feel like the time watching it wasn't misspent.  

Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster (Ishiro Honda, 1964)

Cast: Yosuke Natsuki, Yuriko Hoshi, Hiroshi Koizumi, Akiko Wakabayashi, Emi Ito, Yumi Ito, Takashi Shimura, Akihiko Hirata, Hisaya Ito, Haruo Nakajima, Masanori Shinohara, Shoichi Hirose. Screenplay: Shin'ichi Sekizawa. Cinematography: Hajime Koizuma. Production design: Takeo Kita. Film editing: Ryohei Fujii. Music: Akira Ifekube. 

This time the monster terrifying Japan comes from outer space, not spawned by atomic testing here on Earth. Ghidorah: The Three-Headed Monster centers on a creature that destroyed civilization on Venus before directing its attention toward this planet. Fortunately, it meets its match in some terrestrial monsters, Godzilla, Rodan, and Mothra, although Mothra has some difficulty persuading the other two lunkheads to join forces against a common enemy. But the parts of the film that deal with humans are even more screwy than usual, involving a princess (Akiko Wakabayashi) from another country, visiting Japan on a good-will trip.  Somehow, the princess gets possessed by the spirit of a Venusian who witnessed Ghidorah's destruction of her planet, and she's able to aid the earthly scientists and good guys once he starts his rampage. But the princess has her own human enemies, assassins from a rival political faction, who only complicate things once the monster action starts. Also there to help are the Shobijin, a pair of fairy acolytes to Mothra who facilitate communication with the larval creature. They're played by the twins Emi Ito and Yumi Ito, who are also a musical duo known as Peanut. Fortunately, you don't need all the backstory of these creatures to watch Ghidorah. It's the usual non-stop mixture of dated but charming special effects, with some sly humor thrown in.  

Madadayo (Akira Kurosawa, 1993)

Tatsuo Matsumura in Madadayo

Prof. Hyakken Uchida: Tatsuo Matsumura
Uchida's Wife: Kyoko Kagawa
Takayama: Hisashi Igawa
Amaki: George Tokoro
Kiriyama: Masayuki Yui
Sawamura: Akira Terao
Dr. Kobayashi: Takeshi Kusaka
Rev. Kameyama: Asei Kobayashi
Tada: Mitsuru Hirata
Kitamura: Takao Zushi
Ota: Nobuto Okamoto

Director: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Ishiro Honda
Cinematography: Takao Saito, Shoji Ueda
Art direction: Yoshiro Muraki
Film editing: Akira Kurosawa, Ishiro Honda
Music: Shinichiro Ikebe

Akira Kurosawa's Madadayo isn't quite the autumnal masterpiece we want a great director's final film to be, but it has a suitably valedictory tone. It's a portrait of a kind of Japanese Mr. Chips, a teacher so beloved that his students reunite every year to celebrate his birthday with lots of singing and drinking. The film is based on the life of Hyakken Uchida, an actual professor of German at Hosei University in Tokyo. We never really see what made Uchida so beloved by his students: The film opens with his retirement from teaching so he can devote more time to writing, but we can infer from the genial, eccentrically bookish manner that peeps through his professorial sternness that he has always been a favorite of his students, often drinking with them after hours. The narrative (such as it is -- Kurosawa's screenplay, based on the real Uchida's essays, has no real plot or dramatic arc) picks up on his birthday in 1943, when his former students help him and his wife move into a new house. When the house is destroyed by fire from the American bombing, Uchida and his wife move into a tiny shed that was an outbuilding on a wealthy man's estate and live there until after the war, when his students build a new house for him. We see him celebrate his 60th birthday with his students at a banquet that grows so noisy some GIs from the occupying forces arrive in a Jeep to check it out but leave with smiles on their faces. He's so beloved that when a rich man proposes to build a three-story house across the street from him, thereby casting Uchida's house and garden in shadow, the man selling the land reneges on the deal and then sells it to a group of the ex-students. The greatest crisis in his life is not the war but the loss of a beloved cat, who wanders off one day, causing him so much grief that his wife calls in the students to help find it. Eventually, a new cat takes up with Uchida and life goes on. At the film's end, Uchida collapses from a heart arrhythmia at the banquet celebrating his 77th birthday, but even then he calls out the phrase "Mada dayo!" ("Not yet!"), which has become his ritual defiance of death at his birthday celebrations. Matsumura's performance sustains the film, which at 2 hours and 14 minutes is overlong and more a film for Kurosawa completists than for general audiences. The birthday celebrations become wearyingly exuberant, and the search for the lost cat seems to go on forever, but the film is lightened by Kurosawa's sense of humor and his affection for the characters. It also touches on the changes in Japanese society over the years: The classroom scene at the beginning has a militaristic formality, and the drinking bouts of the early birthday celebrations are all-male affairs. But by the end, not only has Uchida's ever-dutiful wife joined in the celebration, but his students' wives, children, and grandchildren are present, too.