GORGO (1961)
Directed by Eugène Lourié
MGM (Britain), 78 minutes, not-rated
★ (filmmaking) ★★★ (campiness)
People often get nostalgic on their birthdays. Since it’s mine today, I’m visiting the Movie Wayback Machine for a new look at a flick I saw as a kid. In the early Sixties helicopter parents weren’t a thing. Mothers routinely slipped kids a buck and told them to walk downtown to see a movie. (Anything to get them out of their hair.)
I was fond of monster pictures like Godzilla and Gorgo, the latter an attempt to cash in on cheesy Japanese sci-fi. As a film Gorgo is a cave full of cheddar, but the production team knew that and didn’t try to dress it up as a warning against atomic weapons or scientists gone mad. It has an all-male lead cast, which was how most monster movies were made. It stars Bill Travers, William Sylvester, Vincent Winter, and Martin Benson. Never heard of them? That’s a tipoff that you are in the presence of a low-budget picture. Gorgo cost $650,000 to make, which wasn’t chump change—about $6.1 million today—but still wasn’t much. Apparently most of it was spent on rubber suits and Styrofoam.
The plot line involves pearl divers near Ireland’s “Nara” Island—an anagram of Aran—whose rust bucket trawler nearly capsizes when an underwater volcano erupts and sends huge waves across stern and bow. When Captain Joe Ryan (Travers) and First Officer Sam Slade (Sylvester) take a dingy ashore to Nara, a furtive harbormaster tells them they cannot dock for repairs. Why? An orphan lad named Sean spills the beans; there is Viking gold in the waters and sharing isn’t on the agenda.
Until, that is, an eruption-aroused monster stirs from the sea bottom and takes out several islanders. Ryan and Slade cut a deal—some of the gold in exchange for killing it. It occurs to them, though, that such a creature taken alive would be worth its weight in treasure. They proceed to net, chain, and haul it aboard, where several Irish professors pronounce the critter as prehistoric (duh!). They assure Ryan and Slade that the government in Dublin will “compensate” them for their efforts. Instead, they head for London, where Andrew Dorkin (Benson), a Barnum-like circus impresario, offers top-dollar to display “Gorgo,” a backdoor reference to the nickname of the Greek gorgon Medusa.
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| Tower Bridge is falling down/Falling down... |
What could go wrong with placing a large red-eyed, pointy-toothed creature in a deep concrete pit surrounded by electric wire? Gorgo’s mother, for one. When she can’t find junior, she flattens Nara, sinks a British destroyer, and is unfazed by bullets, shells, and depth charges. Mama is ripped and on her way to London. It’s naff fun to watch her destroy vast swaths of London, including Tower Bridge, Big Ben, and loads of Georgian townhouses and apartment flats—if you watch carefully, it’s the same footage recycled in many cases—and there’s nothing the British military can do to stop her. There’s some wry humor of a general telling aides they must “bother” the prime minister to authorize more extreme measures. The ending, though, is not a military solution.
Gorgo is camp on par with cult films like Plan 9 from Outer Space. The special effects reflect the film’s budget. The monsters were done via “suitmation,” meaning actors were placed in scaly, clawed, gape-mouthed rubber suits and sets were built around them. When London falls it’s pretty obvious that it’s a model built of Styrofoam, balsa wood, plastic, and other such materials. Is there a point beyond cheap thrill? Call its morals very Cold War: Don’t seek to destroy what you don’t understand, don’t assume big guns will save you, and don’t screw with Mother Nature. Oddly, though, the bargain basement effects leave more room for imagination than today’s CGI f/x. (Gorgo is better than the sandworm in Dune!)
If you can believe it, chums and I used to argue over who would win a fight between Gorgo and Godzilla. (Director John Carpenter made such a short film, but he’s never allowed it to be seen!) I held out for Gorgo. After all, all Godzilla had was burning atomic breath, but if you can’t stop Gorgo with an army of flamethrowers or four million volts of electricity, Godzilla should take a breath mint and get out of the ring!
Rob Weir
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