E-Mail This Article to a Friend Victims of the H-bomb A look back at Godzilla and the Rosenbergs BY GERALD PEARY

You think you’ve seen Godzilla, the legendary 1954 Japanese science-fiction saga, some late night on TV? Guess again, for what you viewed was Godzilla: King of Monsters!, the chewed-up, sliced-down, haplessly tinkered-with 1956 US recut, in which a pre–Perry Mason Raymond Burr was added, through clever-but-tacky editing tricks, to made-in-Japan dramatic sequences. He’s Steve Martin, an American in Asia who’s a first-hand witness as the Jurassic Age scourge (a tyrannosaurus variant) steps on Tokyo, turning the then-city-of-six-million into miso soup. Burr’s omniscient voiceover provides a life-is-beautiful upbeat ending that smoothes away everything the Japanese original, a solemn end-of-the-world preachment, tries to get across.

The real Godzilla (Gojira in Japanese), newly restored and expertly subtitled, and with 40 minutes of unseen-in-America footage, comes to the Brattle this week (June 11 through 20), and oh, what a difference from the stunted, stilted, depoliticized Hollywood release. This black-and-white epic from filmmaker Ishirô Honda, Akira Kurosawa’s pal and sometimes second-unit director, is an impassioned pacifist work that in the shadow of the A-bombs dropped on Japan calls for the end of nuclear tests and a retreat from the atomic age.

This is serious science fiction. Although Godzilla’s stomping on the city (as his dragon breath turns Tokyo aflame) isn’t as impressively staged as King Kong’s 1933 dismantling of New York, what lingers in mind is the aftermath: gruesome scenes in a Tokyo hospital of dying children. A doctor holds a Geiger counter to a little boy and then shakes his head, realizing that the lad is fatally irradiated. There’s one sure way to read these horrific sequences: as an elegy to the civilian dead and maimed of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even poor Godzilla is a nuclear-age victim. For generations, he’s lived below the ocean in a cave, feeding on sea creatures. (Okay, okay, he does devour an occasional islander vestal virgin.) But it’s the A-bomb that has uprooted him, brought him to the surface, where, confused and alienated, he sends ships to Davey Jones’s locker, derails a commuter train, heads into the capital city for an impromptu killing spree. The Japanese script is explicit about what motivates the pissed-off Godzilla: "H-bomb tests damaged its natural habitat."

May I mention the slight human story? A somewhat batty palæontologist (Takashi Shimura, glorious star of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai and Ikiru) is in denial of Godzilla’s murderous habits because he wants the prehistoric creature kept alive for study. Kyohei has a beautiful daughter, Emiko (Momoko Kochi), whose former suitor, Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), is Godzilla’s most arresting character: a suffering, Gothic soul whose anti-oxygen invention is the world’s sole chance to stop the prehistoric behemoth. When Serizawa tosses a pellet containing his potion into a fish tank, all that’s left are goldfish skeletons. What if a similar pellet were thrown into the ocean, at Godzilla’s swimming hole? And Godzilla?

What keeps the movie from real excellence is the undeniable ordinariness, and lack of personality, of that thing from which everyone is running. When you finally sight the mighty dinosaur (he’s on screen only twice in the film’s first 40 minutes), you can only say, yawning, "Is that all there is?" Pallid Godzilla needs a sprucing-up trip to Photoshop! What is terrifying and transcendent: composer Akira Ifukube’s stupendous musical score. Let there be a CD soundtrack!

It would be nice to think that Godzilla affected the actual arms race, but in the 1950s no pulp movie could stop the USA from building hydrogen bombs. Then, as now, we just didn’t want other countries to do it. In 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, American husband and wife, were executed as "atomic spies" for supposedly supplying government secrets to the Soviet Union. Were the Rosenbergs set up, as many have argued, by the rabidly anti-Communist American government? Ivy Meeropol, filmmaker granddaughter of Ethel and Julius, aimed to find out, and also to learn about the intimate lives of her relatives who died in the electric chair decades before she was born. Those who missed Heir to an Execution, her intense and very moving family documentary, earlier this month at the MFA (where it was co-sponsored by the Boston Jewish Film Festival) can catch it this Monday, June 14, at 8 p.m. on HBO. Among its many attractions: wonderful on-camera interviews with Michael Meeropol, Ivy’s articulate, ever-angry father.