What do you call a 165- foot metaphor with a bad attitude and a taste for Japanese?
Call him 50 years old. "Godzilla" - tall, dark and radioactive - was released in Japan in its original form in 1954 and went on to leave deep, wide footprints not only on the sci-fi genre but the international film industry at large. Some of its influence has been less than beneficial - the ludicrous dubbing into English of the American version was a major factor in turning at least three generations of intelligent moviegoers here against anything but subtitled foreign films. And in turning the dubbed Japanese horror film into a joke.

When you factor in Americans' lack of enthusiasm for subtitled films (I don't get it, but that's what distributors tell me), "Godzilla" probably did for foreign film distribution in the United States what its title character does to Tokyo.
But what may surprise people who know Godzilla only from reruns on the old WOR-TV or the obese remake of 1998 is that the first "Godzilla" is a first-rate movie. On Friday, the original, uncut, never-before-released-in-America version is being distributed by Rialto Pictures (and opening at Manhattan's Film Forum), and what is being presented to us is not just a landmark monster flick but a hard lesson in disparate worldviews - to wit, the post-nuclear Japanese versus the Cold War American.

Godzilla himself (how they know he's male is never explained, and we really don't want to know) is a walking, stomping metaphor for the atomic threat. Long the stuff of Odo Island legend, Godzilla has been roused from the ocean floor by U.S. H-bomb tests that have rendered him highly radioactive. Freighters begin spontaneously combusting, mid-ocean; enormous tracks are found on beaches. And after a series of depth- charge attacks are launched against the monster, he reduces Tokyo to smoke and ash (the images clearly meant to evoke the Allied firebombing of the city in 1945).

Despite the occasional model helicopter tipping over, or the ship-in-the-bathtub technique resorted to by a time-pressed director, sci-fi master Ishir" Honda, the film has a great deal of humor - in one particular shot the monster, being approached by two scientists in divers' suits, looks over his shoulder so nonchalantly it's hilarious. But all of this, and the anti-nuclear message, were lost in translation when Godzilla hit America.

Besides the bad dubbing, the most noteworthy (and strange) addition to the 1956 U.S. version were the scenes shot in Hollywood featuring actor Raymond Burr (as scientist Steve Martin) and theninjected into a film that was already being made 18 minutes shorter than the original Japanese version. The Burr stuff is generally silly and forced; it's the deletions from the film that are most provocative.

Among them: a sequence in the Japanese Diet in which a politician argues that the threat posed by Godzilla must be kept from the public, while a woman citizen (suggesting a new feminism in Japan) insists that the public needs to know, her vehemence suggesting the lingering rage over Japan's nuclear bombings. (Later, a woman commuter hopes Godzilla won't get her - "not after I survived Nagasaki.") The role of Godzilla as a kind of stand-in for the H-bomb is played down throughout the U.S. version. And the conclusion - in which Godzilla can be defeated only by a weapon that may prove equally or more perilous than atomic energy - is made downbeat in Japan, upbeat in America.

Which is not to say one needs a degree in political science to enjoy "Godzilla" (or "Gojira" in Japanese, which apparently means "gorilla-whale"). The new 35mm print looks terrific, and the movie works - as it was meant to - as purely popular entertainment. Takashi Shimura, a star of Akira Kurosawa's "Rash"mon" and "Seven Samurai," brings his mournful eloquence to the role of Dr. Yamane, who insists Godzilla must be studied, not killed, so they can learn how he survived the nuclear blasts. And much of the film is dedicated to the romantic triangle involving Yamane's daughter, Emiko (Momoko Kochi), and her rival scientists - the mysterious, eye-patch- wearing Dr. Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata) and Ogata (Akira Takarada), who is less appealing. Why? Because he lacks Serizawa's dedication and brilliance and seems generally more self-absorbed, which makes his characterization another interesting factor in the crossover life of "Godzilla."

In an opening scene, Ogata is disappointed that the Godzilla emergency is forcing him to miss that evening's performance of what we see on his program is the Budapest String Quartet. Is it significant that Emiko's less charismatic suitor would be the one absorbing Western culture and becoming, by implication, less Japanese? It's just one more intriguing aspect to a movie with an ever-critical message, and a fascinatingly checkered past.
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