From the 1950s: Creature from the Black Lagoon

1954 Sci-Fi Drama

From Universal-International

Directed by Jack Arnold

Starring

Richard Carlson

Julie Adams

Richard Denning

Antonio Moreno

Whit Bissell

Nestor Paiva

Ricou Browning

Ben Chapman

Perhaps it doesn't stand up to Dracula, the Wolf Man, Frankenstein and some others but in my mind Creature from the Black Lagoon is as famous as sci-fi monster movies can be and more enjoyable than most.  Perhaps it's simply the title, enticing as it is, maybe it's that we develop some feelings for the creature just as he has for the young woman who has come into his home, maybe it was because it was originally shown in 3D but whatever the lure is or was, I was a goner from the first time I saw it.

Frankly, sci-fi monster movies have always been the furthest thing in my movie mind.  By and large they were certainly done on the cheap and the stories were so corny that I was forever saying... oh come on...!  But, trust me here, I saw it because I was pretty batty over Julie (then Julia) Adams, queen of Universal-International's B films, and I am sure I saw her in everything she did in those days.  

To my surprise, as I kid, I found genuine thrills that made my heart race so much that I probably spilled my Milk Duds.  Having seen it again a couple of hours ago, now on the cusp of being called a grownup, I still thought there were some thrills and tension and Ms. Adams hasn't aged much at all.

Frankly, I have to be a little careful in what I say because there is a cult following on this film you wouldn't believe.  They know it forward and backward, in and out and don't take kindly to folks saying disrespectful and stupid things about it.  My God, they'll show up at my front door with spear guns in hand, ready to drown me for any indignities I write.  

On this note, one time many years ago in Orange County, California, I attended some tented convention that either had to do with just this movie or else it was a monster movie gathering in which Creature (and its two sequels) were a part of it.  Truth is I had to be talked into going until I heard that she was going to be there.

My heart did indeed race as I listened to not only Adams but to one of the two men who donned the creature suit... I'm not sure which one.  Damn it was exciting.  It was then I realized there was this very obvious cult.  The tent was bulging.  People gushed over various scenes, quizzed one another, even got a little testy here and there.  It was heady stuff.  

Essentially a beauty and the beast story, it opens with a scientist (Moreno) discovering a huge web-fingered skeletal hand coming out of a limestone rock deposit in the Amazon.  While we're waiting to meet the rest of the players, a narrator gives us some imaginative explanation for why there is such a creature.

The scientist takes his find to doctor and scientist friends at a marine biology institute and they all get so excited to discover more.  The institute's leader (money-conscious Denning) assembles a team to travel to the Amazon.  Carlson (around the time carving out his own sci-fi career) and his love interest, Adams, are two doctors who are included in the team.

Their little tramp steamer chugs its way into the Black Lagoon and before long we meet the gill man with his dead eyes, tall, muscular body and claw-hands.  He swims, of course, like the fishman that he is.  Soon one of those big claws comes out of the murky water and grabs onto the boat and the music bellows.  This is repeated again just in case you didn't connect the first time.

One by one the creature attacks the interlopers and they either die or are severely injured.  I was kind of glad when he did in Denning underwater... he was getting on my bloody nerves.  The creature continued to come on the boat, built a dam at the lagoon's only entrance/exit to keep his quarry penned in and showed us his home, an air-filled underwater cave.  He is even captured once and held in a watery prison on board the boat.

My favorite scene, so strikingly done and often featured in print ads for the film, is Adams swimming across the lagoon with the creature, unbeknownst to her, swimming submerged beneath her.

Finally at the end, after countless tries the creature accomplishes what he's wanted to since this all began... to abscond with Adams.  Watching him grab her (actually, a double) and jump overboard, taking her deeper and deeper and into the cave where she hangs in his scaly arms gets one revved up for the conclusion.

The cast is all polished, giving us their best in a genre that must have caused a lot of laughter when the cameras stopped rolling.  I have never been particularly fond of Richard Carlson or Richard Denning but they, too, deliver the goods.  It takes a certain kind of actor to appear in horror films.  That generally means B actors and Universal had them in great abundance.

Adams and Carlson

Adams was well aware that this is the film for which she is best remembered.  She devotes a chapter to it in her autobiography which was a fun read.  She was under contract to the studio and did as she was told.  Initially, she was taken aback some, but she had such a good time making it and while surprised at the film's great success, she was proud of being its leading (and only) lady.

William Alland, a good friend of Orson Welles and a member of the Mercury Theater crowd, is credited as the person who came up with the original idea.  It would seem that Alland was at a Welles' dinner party when another guest, a South American cinematographer, captivated the small crowd with a tale of an amphibian-humanoid creature who emerged from the Amazon River once a year and snatched a comely beauty from a local village and disappeared again.  As the guests were snickering, the cinematographer, legend has it, produced some photographic evidence.

Alland tucked it all away, thinking it would be a possibility for a screen treatment.  He became the film's producer around the same time that he became a fan of the apparent sci-fi craze.  He had heard those young ticket buyers were clamoring for more.  Pounding out a quickie first draft, he then turned it over to other writers and then apparently a few more until they came up with what we've all seen.

Two men played the creature.  Big, tall Ben Chapman did the job on land and the boat and filmed all his scenes in Hollywood and on Universal's backlot.  The much shorter Ricou Browning handled all the underwater scenes, mainly because he was excellent at swimming and could hold his breath underwater for four minutes or more.  His scenes were all filmed in Florida at the Wakulla Springs State Park.  The two men never met until 20 years after the film was made.   

Ben Chapman on left, Ricou Browning on right

It seems that everyone was crazy about director Jack Arnold, mainly because of his attention to details and the calmness he brought to his set.  However, he didn't do all of the directing.  It was James C. Havens who handled the superb direction of the great underwater sequences.  And since those were filmed in Florida, Havens had little or nothing to do with the California unit.

If there was any problem-- and there was-- it was before filming commenced and dealt with two people in the arena of designing the creature.  Milicent Patrick had been working in the horror picture genre for some time before 1954 and she designed the creature for which she was much lauded.  Well, except from Universal's head makeup artist, Bud Westmore, from the famous Hollywood makeup family.  He apparently got his knickers all twisted over the attention paid to Patrick and he was able to have her name omitted from the opening credits and his inserted.

Universal was shocked that the film became such a hit (and to this day one of the classics of horror films).  They never saw that coming but of course they jumped right on it with a couple of sequels.  First was Revenge of the Creature (1955) with John Agar, Lori Nelson and John Bromfield and then The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) with Jeff Morrow and Rex Reason.  Both were relegated to the garbage heap of super bombs.

Creature features and other such horror films proliferated in the 1950s.  It seemed like there was always one playing and sometimes they came on double bills.  Universal is responsible for many of them and Japan sent a few.  I have always assumed populating the decade with so much of it is due, in large part, to the success of this film, considered to this day a classic of the horror genre.

In 2017 director-writer-producer Guillermo del Toro brought to the screen The Shape of Water, an homage of sorts to Creature from the Black Lagoon.  The amphibious creature in this Oscar-winning best picture was obviously designed after the former.  And in one scene a character says it was picked up in the Amazon River.

Here's a trailer:

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