by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the very interesting “Something for an Empty
Briefcase” I picked out a much less exalted program for the rest of the
evening: “Mark of the Octopus,” fourth episode in the first season of Sea
Hunt, a famous vehicle for Lloyd Bridges as
deep-sea diver Mike Nelson whose attraction was mainly the relatively novelty
of SCUBA equipment (the name is an acronym for “Self-Contained Underwater
Breathing Apparatus”) and the quite good underwater photography. (The many
shots of Bridges without anything on above his waist don’t hurt either, and he
was a hot-looking guy with an impressive basket even though he didn’t have much
in the nipple department.) When the episode opens we see a shot of an offshore
oil-drilling platform and the voice of Mike Nelson on the soundtrack (Charles
seemed more amused that his namesake later hosted Mystery Science
Theatre 3000 than by the similarity in
their own names!) telling us that it’s due to him that we have that wonderful
installation tapping the riches of underwater energy — and I couldn’t help but
think, “We’re supposed to think this is a good thing?” Then Mike starts giving us the flashback
that four months ago a survey boat belonging to the company that drilled the
well (oddly referred to as a mining
company in Arthur Weiss’s script) was found abandoned, all except for a crazy
guy on board who kept eating flies and spiders … oops, wrong movie. The boat
had actually sailed with two men on board, geologists for the mining company
looking for potential undersea oil deposits, only both had disappeared — and it
turns out one of them, Wilkes (Steve Mitchell), killed the other and made off
with the survey information.
The Coast Guard, whose personnel are depicted the
way official policemen are in most private-detective fiction (as idiots who
need the help of the amateur to solve the crime and avoid leaping to the most
obvious conclusion about it), decide that the dead diver was killed by an
octopus because markings similar to those left by an octopus’s tentacles were
found on his body — but Mike and his assistant/girlfriend Dr. Kate Marlow (Mari
Aldon) realize that octopi don’t attack humans and therefore some skullduggery
is involved — and sure enough, it turns out that Wilkes used a plastic cord
with suction cups on it that left marks resembling those of an octopus. Mike
goes out — after telling Kate to stay out of the final climax (in that annoying
sexism common to 1950’s movies and TV shows) — with Bennett (Peter Hanson),
official of the mining company and Wilkes’ nominal supervisor, only Bennett
turns out to be in on Wilkes’ conspiracy and the two of them try to ambush Mike
underwater. Of course they fail, and all ends happily (except for the
environment and the atmosphere). The show was directed by action specialist
Andrew Marton and was well done, especially the underwater photography — Monroe
Askins is the overall director of photography but apparently someone else,
Lamar Boren, did the underwater shots — while the executive producer was Ivan
Tors, who’d already made a name for himself with the movies The Magnetic
Monster and Gog and would later achieve the heights of his peculiar
fame with the Flipper movies and
TV series, so it’s not surprising that a good chunk of this film was shot at
Marineland of the Pacific (essentially the beta version of Sea World; the
original Marineland was in Florida and was used as a location in Revenge
of the Creature in 1955) and offers a
glimpse of the aquatic theme park and the kinds of performances it would offer
in their infancy.
