The H-Man revisited

Nearly avant-garde in spite of itself, Ishirô Honda’s The H-Man (1958) is an anomaly from Japan’s Godzilla era, a faceless, shapeless blobby monster contaminating the water supply and making people dissolve on contact. Honda segues freely from policier to gangster picture to noir (complete with a Gilda-esque chanteuse belting out the blues in a local nightclub), with moments of Sirkian melodrama, Stray Dog-ish location vérité to far-from conventional monster shenanigans and a flexible roster of faces who challenge the need for having a lead character at all. Fascinating.