"This is not a play or a motion picture! This is real!"

A news reporter is shouting into a microphone, his death just seconds away.
Several blocks away, a widowed mother huddles with her two young children in a doorway. "We'll be with your daddy soon!" she tells them. "Just a little bit longer! We'll be with him soon!"

Tokyo is in ruins. Geiger counters, ticking so fast the sounds blur, measure the radiation emitted by the children and families who crowd bomb shelters and burn wards.

Victims of the bomb? Well, sort of.

These are scenes from the "Godzilla" you never saw. Unexpurgated, uncut and subtitled, it's a far cry from the heavily re-edited, dubbed, Americanized monster movie you grew up with, which featured inserted scenes starring Raymond Burr (as ace reporter Steve Martin).

Exactly 150 years after Commodore Matthew Perry signed a trade treaty to open up Japan to the West, and 50 years after the Big Guy's first appearance on Tokyo theater screens, Japan's biggest cultural export finally gets his due in the United States with the release of the original "Godzilla" (known as "Gojira" in Japan). A crisp print unspools on the Castro's big screen for two weeks beginning Friday.

It's a revelation.

We tend to think of "Godzilla" as a cheesy monster movie, thanks largely to heavy re-editing in the Burr version that dispensed with nearly 40 minutes of director Ishiro Honda's original vision, two dozen or so sequels that got goofier and goofier, and rivals like "Mothra" and "Rodan." But seeing the original version -- produced by a culture with still-fresh memories of atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and a feeling of being caught in the middle of Cold War paranoia between the United States and the Soviet Union -- it's clear that it's time for a major reappraisal. "Godzilla" is one of the great anti-nuclear films, made by a onetime prisoner of war and documentary filmmaker, with an original vision as well-imagined and chilling as "Dr. Strangelove."

Seriously.

The American "Godzilla" makes but one offhanded mention, halfway through, of nuclear weapons, and it can be dismissed as the crackpot theory of a depressed scientist.

Honda's original cut is rife with nuclear references. Godzilla is clearly awakened by American offshore testing of hydrogen bombs, and he spews atomic breath. Government officials debate -- members of the Japanese government believe Godzilla's atomic origins should be kept from the public to avoid panic; but a female senator (a new phenomenon at the time) says the truth must be told.

One plucky young subway rider tells a colleague she doesn't want to face another tragedy. "Not after I survived Nagasaki. I treasure life!"

"The inference is clear," Steve Ryfle writes in his book "Japan's Favorite Mon-Star: The Unauthorized Biography of the Big G" (ECW Press, 1999). "The bomb and the war left thousands of Japanese families fatherless; now Godzilla has come to claim the lives of the survivors."

Critic Danny Peary, in his book "Cult Movies 2" (Dell, 1983), accuses the company that created the American version of defacing the original by making "deletions that arouse suspicions regarding the covering up of references to damage done by the A-bomb."

OK, so Godzilla is the bomb. But he's also Da Bomb. "Godzilla," despite its relentlessly grim theme and careful (some would say slow) exposition, is flat-out fun.

Special-effects genius Eiji Tsuburaya -- whose re-creation of the Pearl Harbor attack in another movie had the U.S. War Department thinking it was documentary footage -- created a miniature Tokyo on a huge and highly detailed scale. His "Suitmation" innovation looks more realistic than the stop- motion animation used in two American influences on "Godzilla," "King Kong" (1933) and "The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms" (1953). Frankly, the computer- generated animation used in the dreadful American remake in 1998 made the Big G look like a cartoon lizard.

A guy in a suit? Come on. Not in this era of computer graphic imaging, dude.

The American film used Tsuburaya's effects shots, of course -- they're the centerpiece of all that is "Godzilla" -- but even those were edited down. In the original, Godzilla's second attack on Tokyo is a 13-minute temper tantrum -- a bravura performance by Tsuburaya and Godzilla suit actor Haruo Nakajima.

Godzilla first attacks an island of fishermen, who have passed the Godzilla legend down through the generations. "We used to send young girls out to sea to keep him from eating us!" one says.
Also amusing is the assessment of destruction on the island after the attack, which soberly includes "12 cows and eight pigs."

There's even a love triangle -- briefly referred to in the U.S. version, but well developed in the restored version. The beautiful Emiko (Momoko Kochi), the daughter of scientist Yamane (Takashi Shimura, of "Ikiru" and "The Seven Samurai"), is engaged to scientist Serizawa (Akihiko Hirata), but loves seaman Ogata (Akira Takarada). Serizawa is preoccupied, developing the superweapon he dubs the "Oxygen Destroyer," but he sees what's going on between Emiko and
Ogata.

See what happens when Perry Mason isn't around to get in the way?

But whatever version you watch, the central theme of the film is inescapable. Just as "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" grew out of the blacklist of the McCarthy Era, and "Earth vs. the Flying Saucers" and "War of the Worlds" were spawned by Cold War fears of a Soviet attack, "Godzilla" reflects the nuclear nightmare.

But Godzilla isn't just the bomb -- he's hate and anger, war, the poisoned environment -- in short, he is mankind itself, the destruction wrought by the rage within us, an inner ugliness we can never quite seem to shake.

The movie's moral center is Dr. Yamane, who, believing that "the world is a fragile place" and "humans are weak animals," wonders, "Has the world been set back 2 million years?"
We're asking the same questions today. Perhaps that's why the heroes who employ "anti-Godzilla operations" to kill the creature don't feel much like celebrating at the end of the Japanese version. They seem spent, emotionally drained.

As Dr. Yamane warns, in an invective trimmed from the U.S. version, "Another Godzilla will appear, somewhere in the world."

He was so right.

Copyright © 2004, San Francisco Chronicle.