Godzilla

Nine years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and months after a Japanese fishing crew was irradiated by an American hydrogen-bomb test, Ishiro Honda made a monster film that is really a war film: a creature woken by nuclear testing lays waste to Tokyo, and the imagery is deliberately that of the firebombing.

The tone is funereal. There are hospital wards of the dying, a children's choir, and a scientist who has invented a weapon worse than the bomb and refuses to let it exist. It is not a romp and was never meant to be.

Eiji Tsuburaya's suitmation, a performer in a heavy rubber suit crushing miniature sets, was chosen partly because stop motion would have taken years, and it created a form that ran for seventy years.

Akira Ifukube's score and the monster's roar, made by dragging a resined glove down a double bass, are permanent.

Watch the Japanese cut. The American version with Raymond Burr is a different, lesser film.