Many authors of film biographies strain a little to justify book length. They assemble their tomes from rafts of banality; or justify their efforts by calling their subject an “American Rebel” because she complained about her salary; or stand on tip-toes to make their subject look more important than he was.
Ishiro Honda: A Life in Film, From Godzilla to Kurosawa (Wesley University Press) should serve as a model of how to do a film biography—any biography, really. Beautifully designed and produced, Ishiro Honda incorporates many illustrative photographs of the Japanese director and his associates without becoming a coffee table book; the text is clearly written, free of academic jargon or fanboy effusions; the book answers to a need as the first full-length account in English of Honda.
Ishiro Honda makes a strong case for the director’s significance. Godzilla (1954) wasn’t the first film to connect the birth of monsters with atomic radiation but became the best known and most recurrent among radioactive cine-beasts. While Japanese art house directors like Akira Kurosawa earned acclaim amongst the intelligentsia, those cineastes usually looked down on Honda’s oeuvre. Partly the problem was the badly edited and overdubbed condition of his American releases and partly from a cultural prejudice that demeaned science fiction. Serious filmgoers dismissed Godzilla and friends as kid stuff.
As authors Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski show, Godzilla was a technical achievement as well as a commentary on nuclear age anxiety. Japan is the only nation to endure atom bombings and the memory was fresh when Honda went to work. Significantly, America, despite its looming military presence in Japan, is entirely absent from the original Japanese version of Godzilla (Raymond Burr was spliced into the U.S. release). Japan is on its own and must thwart the menace with the ingenuity of its own people.
After Godzilla gained American fandom, Honda was known on these shores for such SF movies as Rodan (1956) and Mysterians (1957). However, at home, Honda was recognized as a versatile director of comedies that poked fun at Japan’s postwar Westernization alongside family dramas and films that explored the lives of working people in cities and in villages. He was a subtle moralist who showed how Japan’s rising prosperity “complicates life and corrupts individuals.” Gently, he coaxed or inspired his actors and crews to give their best.
Although he is still overshadowed in many accounts of Japanese cinema by his old friend Kurosawa, the unassuming Honda took on the role of assistant director on one of the art house giant’s greatest epics, Kagemusha (1980). The collaboration seemed to reinvigorate both filmmakers late in their careers.
