All He Wanted Was To Hang Out With A Pretty Girl

 Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) – A pre-historic creature is discovered in a quiet corner of the Amazon jungle.  A group of scientists can’t agree if they should study there or capture it and bring it back to civilization.

Directed by Jack Arnold

Starring Richard Carlson, Julie Adams, Richard Denning

Why I Liked It – A classic monster movie with incredible special effects.

Here’s one of the classic and greatest (not always the same thing) monster movies from the 1950s.  It has one of the greatest monsters ever to hit the screen.  As I watched, I remembered that 2017’s “The Shape of Water” drew its inspiration from this movie.  The recent version is a mirror image in many ways.  A “monster” is taken to “civilization” for study.  The relationship between the woman and the creature is the opposite as well.  Both are well worth the time to see.

There are few surprises in the story.  That’s more because the outline has been repeated so many times since then.  It’s “Beauty and the Beast” and “Quasimodo”. People discover a strange creature in a remote part of the world.  The team that finds it fights over how to treat it.  A connection is made between the creature and a member of the team (Almost always a female member.  Is there an example of this kind of connection with a man?  I can’t think of one).  Eventually, the creature is forced into a corner and physical conflict ensues.  Humanity “wins”, in some form or another.  All of those elements shine under the expert handling of director Jack Arnold.  One of the top science fiction directors of the 1950s, he directed “The Incredible Shrinking Man”, “Tarantula” (a favorite!), plus dozens of episodes of some of the most popular television shows of the ‘60s,’70s and 80s (“Peter Gunn”, “Gilligan’s Island”, “The Brady Bunch”, “The Love Boat” and more).  He keeps the tempo brisk, the acting and dialogue on key, and brings home a movie that stands up to the years.

The one outstanding element of the movie is the effects used to create the Creature.  Using two actors in two completely different costumes (they were dramatically different heights), all the scenes in the water are “real”.  Even Julie Adams did her own stunts in the movie.  It brings an amazing feeling of realism to the swimming and underwater combat scenes.  This was a challenge for Ricou Browning, who played the “Gill Man” in the underwater scenes.  Because the water was the creature’s natural habitat, Arnold did not want to see any bubbles from the costume.  This meant the actor had to hold his breath for minutes at a time for some shots.  No computer graphics or models here!

There’s always some sympathy for the creature when I watch these movies.  Think of these stories from their point of view.  A group of strangers burst into their home, mess things up and then try to kidnap them.  If the kidnapping succeeds, they are taken away from their homes in cages/chains, and subjected to all kinds of horrible behavior.  If they avoid the malign intentions of these brigands, the creature will be chased, assaulted, shot and even killed.  The usual stance of the movie story is “Humanity triumphing over the monster!”, instead of a far more accurate “Human criminals kill innocent creature”.  Don’t give me the “Twas beauty killed the beast” nonsense in “King Kong”.  What killed that poor beast was a bunch of greedy, inhumane people and bullets.

I’ve sat through plenty of older sci-fi/monster movies with one eye on the screen and the other doing something else.  Too often there’s not much to engage the brain, but this movie proved different.  There was more than enough going on both above and below the waterline to keep me interested.

Rating – **** Recommended