Figure 1-01-001

This Spanish poster (Fig. 1-01-001) for What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is a product of the early Eighties, a time of swelling international admiration for Japan’s economic success. Spanish film promoters hoped that Woody Allen’s “most Japanese” comedy would similarly succeed in their own country in 1981, two years after the publication of Harvard sociologist Ezra Vogel’s bestseller Japan as Number One, the Spanish title of which one of the poster’s taglines echoes. I can’t resist noting that, as a senior at Harvard around the same time, I flunked out of Professor Vogel’s class on “Japanese Society.” (It’s a long story.) Vogel’s book, a paean to Japanese business practices, failed to predict the doldrums into which the Japanese corporate economy as a whole would fall during the post-Bubble Nineties, even as Japanese cultural creativity continued to grow in influence around the globe.

Figure 1-01-002

Figure 1-01-003

Figure 1-01-004

Figure 1-01-005

Figure 1-01-006

Figure 1-01-007

Figure 1-01-008

Figure 1-01-009

Figure 1-01-010

What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is the product of an earlier era, a time when Japan was far less cool. In fact, it’s really two film products: one of them a 1965 spy movie made at Japan’s Tōhō studios, and the other a 1966 Hollywood release that retained the original Japanese footage but overlaid it with a wacky English-language script by comedian-director Woody Allen about the search for a secret egg-salad recipe. The 1965 film is more properly called Key of Keys (J. title: Kagi no kagi; Fig. 1-01-002) and marks the fourth entry in a five-part string of spy romps—the Kokusai himitsu keisatsu (International Secret Police) series—that Tōhō studios launched in 1963 to emulate the Anglo-American James Bond franchise. In some markets—see, for example, this Thai poster (Fig. 1-01-003) and this Singaporean herald (Fig. 1-01-004)—publicists went so far as to assign the series’ Japanese hero the codename “008,” in effect one-upping the British agent’s more familiar “007.” The third entry in the Tōhō series, A Keg of Powder (J. title: Kayaku no taru; 1964), whose plot the Singaporean herald conveniently summarizes (Fig. 1-01-005), contributed a few scenes to What’s Up, Tiger Lily? as well. Although Tiger Lily didn’t play behind the Iron Curtain, viewers in Communist Poland (Fig. 1-01-006) and Yugoslavia (Fig. 1-01-007) would probably have recognized those scenes, since A Keg of Powder was one of a number of carefully vetted West Bloc spy flicks allowed to circulate in Eastern Europe during the genre’s Cold War heyday, among them several from Tōhō studios.

Although What’s Up, Tiger Lily? marked Allen’s debut as a director, what first garnered him attention in Hollywood was his screenwriting and acting turn in the 1965 Franco-American comedy What’s New Pussycat? (Fig. 1-01-008), which also inspired What’s Up, Tiger Lily‘s peculiar title. Tiger Lily‘s hip soundtrack (Fig. 1-01-009), by The Lovin’ Spoonful (Fig. 1-01-010), likewise betrays the influence of What’s New Pussycat?, whose theme song of the same name, performed by Welsh crooner Tom Jones, was already on its way to becoming one of that Sixties icon’s signature hits.

What makes What’s Up, Tiger Lily? a priceless resource for film-historical purposes is Allen’s parodic engagement with the low-budget international movie market as Americans of the Sixties (including myself) knew it. Ironically, that booming business was one that Tiger Lily‘s distributor, American International Pictures—founded in 1954, the year that birthed Godzilla—had played a central role in shaping. It’s not clear to what extent AIP studio heads Sam Arkoff (1918–2001) and James Nicholson (1912–1972), both pioneers of exploitation cinema, recognized or appreciated the irony, or whether anything other than the bottom line was on the mind of Tiger Lily‘s co-producer Hank Saperstein (1918–1998), a Japan-savvy Hollywood promoter who brokered many of the AIP-Tōhō collaborations of the Sixties. The irony is striking, nevertheless. Even as Hollywood outfits like Nicholson and Arkoff’s AIP and Saperstein’s UPA made a lucrative business out of procuring the rights to made-in-Japan films and then reediting and releasing them in dubbed English-language versions full of clumsy translations and inconsistent plotlines, fake accents and ethnic stereotypes, Allen created a new genre of film comedy by deliberately highlighting and exaggerating those familiar conventions for humorous effect. Both having his cake and eating it, Allen poked fun at Uncool Japan’s growing presence on the movie screens of white-bread America while still lining the pockets of his AIP associates.

Figure 1-01-011

Figure 1-01-012

As the folks at AIP knew well, repackaging foreign-made films for domestic release offered a convenient way of turning a profit without incurring major production costs. Differences of language and culture, however, could stand in the way of audience enjoyment. While dubbing might help with the language issue, if never quite seamlessly, other forms of cultural difference continued to set audiences apart. For example, Americans raised on Hollywood fare tended to be unfamiliar with even the most popular of Japanese actors, a circumstance that led Allen to joke in Tiger Lily‘s opening credits that the movie starred “A NO STAR CAST.” The line was meant to be humorous, but in the end it differed little from the various publicity posters of the time that proclaimed that one or another kaijū eiga import featured a “JAPANESE CAST” (Fig. 1-01-011) or a “CAST OF THOUSANDS” (Fig. 1-01-012) without actually naming any. (As another part of this website explores, a common solution to the same dilemma in Italy was to lace the publicity for made-in-Japan movies with entirely made-up, yet Western-sounding, names.)

Figure 1-01-013

Figure 1-01-014

In What’s Up, Tiger Lily?, the best Woody Allen could do to add a familiar name to the cast was to solicit a sultry striptease from China Lee (Fig. 1-01-013), Playboy‘s first Asian-American centerfold model and at the time the girlfriend of Allen’s funnyman mentor, Mort Sahl. Again, Allen chose to have his cake as well as eat it, titillating viewers with a steamy display of “Oriental” flesh (stereotypically coded in the title of the movie, and on publicity posters [Fig. 1-01-014], as feline) while at the same time poking fun at American ignorance of East Asian geography. (It’s only fair to note that Lee’s first name is correctly pronounced “Chee-na.”) Similarly, by giving MIHASHI Tatsuya’s 008 character the very un-Japanese-sounding name of “Phil Moskowitz,” Allen hinted obliquely that there were limits to the interchangeability of racial, religious, and national identities even in the cosmopolitan world of cinema.

Figure 1-01-015

Figure 1-01-016

Figure 1-01-017

Figure 1-01-018

Figure 1-01-019

Figure 1-01-020

Figure 1-01-021

Figure 1-01-022

Figure 1-01-023

Figure 1-01-024

In fact, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? would never have been made were it not for an already established network of trans-Pacific film connections centered on Tōhō studios in Japan and American International Pictures in Hollywood, and bridged by such enterprising middlemen as Hank Saperstein. Much traffic in the kaijū eiga genre traveled along those same circuits. What’s Up, Tiger Lily? itself features a number of familiar faces from Tōhō’s monster films, conspicuous among them MIE Hama (born 1943) and WAKABAYASHI Akiko (born 1941)—Allen’s “Suki Yaki” (Fig. 1-01-015) and “Teri Yaki” (Fig. 1-01-016) respectively—whose acting credits include such kaijū classics as King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962; that’s Hama out in front of the pack in Fig. 1-01-017) and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964; Wakabayashi’s on the left in Fig. 1-01-018). The two Tōhō actresses would soon become even better known to American moviegoers when, ditching 008 for 007, they appeared as Bond girls “Kissy Suzuki” (Fig. 1-01-019) and “Aki” (Fig. 1-01-020) opposite Sean Connery in 1967’s You Only Live Twice—as well as in a Playboy spread (Fig. 1-01-021) that raised eyebrows back home. That same year also saw Woody Allen play a role in a genuine, if in its own way parodic, James Bond film, 1967’s Casino Royale.

The same AIP-Tōhō-Saperstein connection that helped launch the career of Woody Allen led that of a different American celebrity, Nick Adams (1931–1968), down a more slippery slope from Oscar nominee to Hollywood has-been. Some have even seen it as a contributing factor in his early death. (“It hurt him,” claimed one Hollywood gossip columnist in 1968, that “most of his film offers seemed to come from Europe or the Orient” [Modern Screen]. “What else was left? …except death,” another Tinseltown pundit asked pointedly.) The Ukrainian-American actor with the trademark blond hair, familiar to a certain generation of TV viewers as Johnny Yuma of The Rebel (1959–1961; Fig. 1-01-022), undoubtedly pales before Sean Connery in the annals of cinematic espionage. But for Japanese audiences of the Sixties, he was at least a credible rival. 1967’s sequel to Key of Keys, which circulated internationally as The Killing Bottle (J. title: Zettai zetsumei; Fig. 1-01-023, Fig. 1-01-024), saw MIHAHI Tatsuya’s 008 character—”Phil Moskowitz,” in other words—team up with American secret agent “John Carter,” played by the nimble Nick Adams, to foil the assassination of the prime minister of “Buddhabal.” If you don’t recognize the name of the place, that’s to be expected, because “Buddhabal” was just the sort of “made-up but real-sounding country” that Woody Allen had mocked in the previous year’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (In terms of kaijū eiga geography, it presumably lies somewhere in the vicinity of “Selgina,” a Himalayan monarchy that similarly fell victim to Cold War intrigue in 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, although the assassination drama involved a more literal kind of Third World in Ghidorah’s case.) On the other hand, the multinational security organization to which Mihashi’s and Adams’s characters belong has a consistently phony name in Japanese, but varies in English-language publicity materials between the fictional “International Secret Police” and the actually existing, and likewise Paris-headquartered, Interpol. Egg-salad smugglers, beware.

The Killing Bottle wasn’t the first movie in which Adams played American sidekick to a Japanese leading man. After his Hollywood fortunes began fading in the early Sixties, this contemporary and pal of James Dean found what almost amounts to a second career at Japan’s Tōhō studios, following an introduction made by UPA’s Hank Saperstein. From Tōhō’s perspective, bringing a Hollywood celebrity into the fold offered a means of injecting international color—or to put it another way, conspicuous whiteness—into made-in-Japan properties that it hoped would sell better as a result not just domestically but also overseas, and especially in the U.S., where the Japanese studio was eager to raise its profile.

Figure 1-01-025

Figure 1-01-026

Arguably, Adams’s first American-Japanese buddy picture wasn’t 1967’s The Killing Bottle but 1965’s Invasion of Astro-Monster (released by UPA in 1970 as Monster Zero; Fig. 1-01-025), the sixth entry in the Godzilla series. There, Adams had joined hands with TAKARADA Akira (born 1934) to preserve world peace and security not as a spy duo but as a pair of American and Japanese astronauts (Fig. 1-01-026). Suggestively, if none too imaginatively, their respective characters are named Glenn—evoking John Glenn, who in 1962 became the first American to orbit the Earth—and Fuji (written the same way as the iconic Japanese mountain). Since Takarada had played the romantic male lead in the original Gojira, one can scarcely imagine a more appropriate emblem of the cozy U.S.-Japan alliance that kaijū moviemaking at Tōhō had forged by the mid-Sixties. Whereas 1954’s Gojira had portrayed a complicated love triangle haunted by memories of World War Two, 1965’s Space Age bromance between “Glenn” and “Fuji” projected a conspicuously rosy picture of American-Japanese amity, unencumbered by either the historical past or by terrestrial rivals.

Figure 1-02-001

This black-and-white postcard (Fig. 1-02-001) likely predates my birth in 1959, but offers a view of the College Theatre, where I saw some of my first monster movies from Japan, more or less as it appeared during my Sixties childhood. Although it’s no longer a working theater, the building that housed the cinema still stands outside the borough of Swarthmore in southeastern Pennsylvania. The College Theatre can be seen at the center of the postcard, with a white-columned neo-Georgian portico and detached marquee. In the present era of multiplexes, it’s hard to imagine that only one show at a time played in such a large auditorium. Seating capacity at the College Theatre, which opened for business in 1946, was 812.

Figure 1-02-002

Figure 1-02-003

Figure 1-02-004

Among the movies I watched at the College Theatre—most probably as part of a Saturday-morning double bill—was Frankenstein Conquers the World, Tōhō’s 1965 take on Mary Shelley’s classic monster tale. The disturbing countenance of FURUHATA Kōji’s boy-monster (at right in Fig. 1-02-002), the striking presence of a blond American actor (Nick Adams) within a predominantly Japanese cast; the genuinely creepy scene with the crawling hand (Fig. 1-02-003); and the contrived coincidence of the storyline (Nazi scientists ship the heart of Frankenstein’s monster to Japan, where it gets irradiated by the Hiroshima A-bomb blast and consequently mutates) all made a lasting impression. For kids who were primarily interested in fight sequences—for example, this one (Fig. 1-02-004) between Frankenstein’s monster and the kaijū Baragon—cultural particularities such as the thatched-roof farmhouse in the background could easily escape notice, or at least conscious reflection. Until recently, U.S. movie theaters routinely displayed sets of studio-issued publicity images like this one in and around their lobbies—hence the name “lobby card.”

Figure 1-02-005

Figure 1-02-006

Figure 1-02-007

I could hardly have known it at the time, but I may have shared more with Nick Adams, the male lead of Frankenstein Conquers the World, than a Ukrainian-German heritage and an Eastern Pennsylvania birth. Adams’s sexuality has long been a matter of speculation, with sources of varying reliability claiming he was either gay or bisexual. Whatever the reality, the image that Adams presented for public consumption frequently played up his romantic connections with various leading ladies. Although we’ll likely never know and probably shouldn’t care whether Adams actually had an affair with James Dean, as some have alleged, the Hollywood publicity machine lavished considerable attention on his close friendship with Natalie Wood (in profile at left), who had played alongside both Dean (at right) and Adams (facing the camera) in 1955’s Rebel Without a Cause (Fig. 1-02-005). Adams’s career in Japan in the mid-Sixties coincided with the dissolution of his marriage to former child-actress Carol Nugent (Fig. 1-02-006), and gossip columns in Japan were quick to report that his onscreen romance with Tōhō starlet MIZUNO Kumi (born 1937), cast as Adams’s love interest in both Frankenstein Conquers the World (that’s Mizuno above in Figure 1-02-002, at left) and Invasion of Astro-Monster, was more than just an act. Adams’s relative shortness of stature, which may have handicapped his potential in Hollywood, made him an ideal recruit for filming in Japan, since he could add a Western complexion to the cast without upstaging any of the local talent. When paired with the six-foot TAKARADA Akira, his male Astro-Monster costar, Adams made for a distinctly diminutive sidekick—as this Italian poster (Fig. 1-02-007) reflects—thus visually reversing the geopolitical standing of their respective nations while at the same time conveying a sense of mutual dependency.

Figure 1-03-001

Figure 1-03-002

Figure 1-03-003

No matter where you sat along the Cold War ideological spectrum, the U.S. half-sheet poster (Fig. 1-03-001) for 1968’s Destroy All Monsters offered satisfying targets of destruction. One aspect of this itinerary of Cold War devastation puzzles me, however. Given Japan’s China policy at the time, shouldn’t Mothra have been smashing Taibei, the seat of China’s Nationalist government-in-exile, instead of Beijing, whose Communist regime the Japanese government hadn’t yet officially recognized? It wouldn’t be till 1972 that Japanese prime minister TANAKA Kakuei (he’s the black-suited man in Fig. 1-03-002) followed Mothra’s, as well as Richard Nixon’s, path to Beijing and set up full diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic. Unlike Mothra’s imaginary jaunt of 1968, Tanaka’s 1972 visit to the mainland had measurable political consequences. In either case, though, cinema helped mold the everyday perceptions of Cold War audiences. Viewers in Thailand could watch a documentary highlighting the Tokyo-Beijing rapprochement—together with other glimpses of “today’s China”—from the same seats where they had witnessed a made-in-Japan Mothra wreak havoc on the mainland Chinese capital just a few years previously (Fig. 1-03-003).

Around a divided Cold War world, the kaijū eiga genre offered a hopeful vision of planetary unity that numbered among its distinct viewing pleasures. The imaginary threat of globe-roaming monsters and extraterrestrial aliens reminded audiences of their shared humanity, even as it provided uplifting fictional examples of terrestrial solidarity across boundaries of nation, race, religion, and ideology—at times even species identity. What’s more, kaijū films gave viewers the opportunity to experience such dire, yet at the same time community-affirming, scenarios without actually exposing them to physical danger. Whether, and for how long, such a flickering sense of global citizenship would survive beyond the theater exit is, of course, not so easily gauged. Still, the sheer number of people who watched kaijū eiga across the decades, along with the fact that the genre’s audience skewed toward a younger and hence all the more impressionable demographic, suggests that the collective impact could hardly have been negligible. As such, the history of the kaijū eiga is, at least in part, the history of an emerging planetary consciousness, a process that Module 6 of this website will explore in more detail.

Figure 1-04-001

Figure 1-04-002

American promoters clearly recognized the appeal that “Monster Island” held for Cold War kids like myself. Inspired by the success of Destroy All Monsters (1968) and All Monsters Attack (1969; U.S. title: Godzilla’s Revenge or Minya: Son of Godzilla), both of which featured extended segments on the island, publicists in the U.S. came up with the title Godzilla on Monster Island for a film now more commonly referred to as Godzilla vs. Gigan (1972). The choice of name blatantly ignored the fact that monsters’ island home appears only in a few minutes of stock footage. The artwork of the 1978 U.S. publicity poster (Fig. 1-04-001) for Godzilla on Monster Island shows what is clearly an amusement park. A black-and-white version of the scene appears also on a promotional flyer (Fig. 1-04-002) circulated by an Ohio-based film distributor.

In fact, the locale depicted here isn’t Monster Island at all; instead, it’s the Japan branch of an imaginary “World Children’s Land,” where a good part of the film’s action takes place. Coupled with the artwork, the American title of the movie easily conveys the impression that Monster Island is sort of like a Japanese version of Coney Island, complete with roller-coaster ride. In real-world terms, of course, it’s movie theaters that share a greater similarity with amusement parks, since, as “Larry” and “Nancy” note, concession-stand sales were and remain an important component of business revenue in the children’s-entertainment industry.

1993’s Jurassic Park, the first installment of what has since become a larger Hollywood franchise, arguably offers a more high-tech film vision of humans and monstrous saurians sharing the same artificially controlled—yet also easily uncontrolled—Pacific-island habitat, evocative of a theme park. But the core idea was already there in 1968’s Destroy All Monsters, although that earlier film’s Monsterland / Monster Island, despite its fictional “1999” setting, reflected the analog imagination of the Sixties, whereas Jurassic Park‘s Isla Nublar (supposedly located off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica) cashed in on an emerging public fascination with biotech and digital electronics, including computer-generated imagery, that was more in tune with the Nineties as they actually developed.

Figure 1-04-003

In a curious case of global warming, the climate of Monster Island also came to resemble Isla Nublar increasingly over the years. Whereas Destroy All Monsters had identified the kaijū paradise as part of the subtropical Ogasawara chain (as illustrated in Figure 2-02-009, to be examined in the next module), representations from later in the century, such as Jacqueline Dwyer’s Tōhō-licensed but U.S.-published children’s book Godzilla on Monster Island (1996; Fig. 1-04-003), were more likely to drape the island in verdant equatorial hues. In some cases, Jurassic Park may have provided direct inspiration for the tropical makeover; indeed, the American producers of Godzilla: The Series (1998–2000) went so far as to rename their TV version of Monster Island “Isla del Diablo.” But the warming trend may also be seen as a reversion to the kaijū geography of the early to mid-Sixties (that is, prior to 1968’s Destroy All Monsters), in which such fictional South Sea isles as the sun-drenched Solgel—referred to explicitly as an “island of monsters” (kaijūtō) in 1967’s Son of Godzilla—had played a conspicuous role as kaijū breeding grounds.