I’ve long been a sort of sentimental squish about the 1961 B-budget British (say that ten times fast) Kaiju film Gorgo.  Yeah, it’s a cheap (in many ways) rip-off of other, better monster-on-the-rampage flicks like King Kong (1933) and Godzilla (1954).  And its two lead human (I say that advisedly) characters are schmucks, to put it bluntly (Kong’s sleazy show promoter Carl Denham is St. Francis in comparison).  But it’s got something that other monster kaiju films up to that point didn’t have.

It’s got heart.  Right in the film’s last twenty minutes.  When Momma Gorgo shows up.

Sure, Momma here’s a bit of a force of Nature.  She wrecks half of London, squashing its buildings, terrorizing its populace, and flattening its landmarks, including Big Ben (Big Ben got smacked twice that year—in Gorgo and also in 1961’s Konga, which I wrote about here; what an amazingly resilient structure!).  She’s a dinosaur, after all.  So she’s using…dinosauric methods of expression.

But she’s also Gorgo’s mother—she’s out to save her baby, who’s been trapped by the two money-grubbing schmucks, bound in chains, and then displayed in a shoddy carnival to be ogled by the yahoos.  All she wants is to rescue him.  Who, I ask, WHO ya gonna root for?

Cinema loves motherhood.  It’s not alone or unique in that.  All the arts, in all cultures, have elevated the maternal parent.  It’s what we, as humans, all have in common—we all come from a mother.  Whether she’s good or bad, Mom’s our common denominator.

Plenty of bad movie moms are out there (check out my post on Bette Davis as the Most Manic Mommy Ever in The Anniversary), but mostly it’s the good Moms we celebrate (check out my post here on supermom Thelma Ritter).  In films from all genres, from all eras, from all countries, from, for starters, D.W. Griffith’s The Mother and the Law (originally filmed in 1914, released in 1919), to Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Soviet-era masterpiece Mother, to golden-age Hollywood classics like Mildred Pierce and I Remember Mama, up to a modern horror landmark like The Babadook; not to mention multiple-filmed versions of Stella Dallas and Little Women—we see mothers comforting, sorrowing, struggling, and fighting for their young.  No matter the odds, Mom’s in there pitching, right to the end.

And so is Momma Gorgo.  Rising from some hole beneath the Irish Sea (the film’s not too clear on that), she stomps across water and land, all 200-plus feet of her, heading for Londontown, and nothing in Old Blighty is gonna stop her—not jets, rockets, tanks, bombs, bullets, missiles, all haplessly hurled at her by the clueless British armed forces.  There’s also this annoying, and equally clueless, reporter character, driveling through the final scenes on what he calls “this irresistible force of ancient nature.”  Oh, sweetheart.  You have no idea how ancient this ‘force’ is.  It’s Mother Nature that triumphs here.   No wonder Big Momma turns to the camera and snarls.  And I am entirely with her.

The director, Eugene Lourié, was an experienced stompin’-monster hand, having already helmed The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and The Giant Behemoth.  But, says Bill Warren in Keep Watching the Skies! American Science Fiction Movies of the Fifties, Vol. 2, after his small daughter had cried at the end of Beast (for the Beast), Lourié wanted a different ending for Gorgo—one in which “the monsters would win.”  (Let’s raise a cheer for Dads, too.)  He also didn’t want an everything-trampled-into-rubble ending, but the producers, schlockmeister trio King Brothers, overruled him.  They also kept changing the story’s location, from Japan, to France, finally to England, but nixing a setting in Australia, because, said the Kings, “’who cares if a monster destroys Australia?’”

Well—surely the mothers of Australia would have something to say about that.

The film’s last quarter has more than enough noise, explosions, mayhem, ripped-apart miniatures, and man-in-rubber-suit rampages to please the most mindless among us.  In the end, though (spoiler alert), Momma abides.  She and her baby are reunited and head off peacefully together back to sea (although I’m sorry to say the two schmucks also survive; one can’t have everything.)  And I defy anyone watching who has a soul not to sniff away a tear at this point.

Ok, the movie’s about—mother love with rubber reptiles.  Not exactly Grapes of Wrath’s Ma Joad.  But a mother is a mother—especially a tough, ballsy one, who’s willing to go the distance.  In some way or other, for good or nil, we’re all affected by, we’re all influenced by, and we all think back to our mothers.  I lost my own mother about a year ago; and I’ve come to realize that, no matter how old you grow, how long the loss, how distant the memory—you are, and always will be, somebody’s child.

So I’m saluting Momma Gorgo here.  A mother who’s willing to go the distance.  Which can’t be easy in a rubber suit.

Happy Mother’s Day.

You can watch a pretty good color print of Gorgo here on YouTube, while available.

You can watch the MST3K version of Gorgo here (“England’s love letter to Japan!”).  Just the treatment the two schmucks deserve.  (Both the ‘straight’ movie and the MST3K-commentary version are also available for free on Tubi; login required.)

And here’s My Dark Corners of This Sick World‘s YouTube channel review of Gorgo (“merely an elaborate Irish hoax”) with Robin Bailes suitably amazed (if not rubbery suited) by the behavior of the two human leads.  Go, Robin!