by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s San Diego Vintage Sci-Fi screening (http://sdvsf.org/) was a bit of a marathon: all
three of Universal-International’s “Gill Man” movies in sequence: Creature
from the Black Lagoon, Revenge of the Creature
and The Creature Walks Among Us.
I’ve written extensively about these movies on my movie blog, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/11/gill-man-sequence-creature-from-black.html,
based on our screenings of all three movies from the Universal Legacy boxed set
for our Hallowe’en features in 2011. I didn’t think I’d have that much more to
add about them, but this time around Creature from the Black Lagoon didn’t seem as strong as I remembered it (there were
some awfully ponderous longueurs
in between the excellent action scenes) and the other two movies actually
seemed stronger. There was surprisingly little overlap between them either in
cast or behind the camera. Nestor Païva as the captain of the Amazon fishing boat in which the
scientists explore the titular Black Lagoon in the first film was the only actor, at least one playing a human, who carried
over between the first two films. Champion swimmer Ricou Browning played the
aquatic version of the Creature in all three but his land incarnation was a different
stunt actor each time: Ben Chapman in Creature from the Black Lagoon, Tom Hennessy in Revenge of the Creature and Don Megowan in The Creature Walks
Among Us (and you can see the progression
because each new Creature was stouter than the previous one had been — I guess
they had to keep letting out the Gill Man costume each time). Jack Arnold
directed the first two films but was replaced by John Sherwood for The
Creature Walks Among Us, and the first two
were shot in 3-D (Revenge of the Creature is so far the only sequel to a 3-D film that was also shot in 3-D, and
is likely to remain so until James Cameron gets off his throne and makes Avatar
2 already) but the third one wasn’t.
Charles and I have both seen Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3-D and the film gains a lot from the dimensional effects — aspects of Arnold’s
direction that had always puzzled me before just seemed more right in 3-D — and I only wish the Vintage Sci-Fi
proprietor’s video projector could accommodate 3-D so we could have seen both
the first film and Revenge that
way.
What comes off most strongly seeing the films in sequence —
“binge-watching,” as they call it today — is that in each new movie, with a
different set of writers each time, the filmmakers went farther in trying to
make the Gill Man a figure of real pathos. In Creature from the Black
Lagoon he’s pretty much just an unmotivated
machine of destruction — though they gave him a crush on leading lady Julia
Adams (in all three films he falls for a woman wearing a white swimsuit — if he
were human that would be called a fetish) à la Kong’s thing for Fay Wray in the original 1933 King
Kong. In Revenge he gets a lot more screen time and becomes a figure
of almost Frankensteinian pathos. Revenge is usually considered the weakest of the three films — partly because
in terms of power and authority, the human leads, John Agar and Lori Nelson,
are far below Richard Carlson and Julia Adams in the first film (you could
believe Julia Adams as a dedicated, committed scientist interested in
partnering Carlson’s character both professionally and personally, while Nelson seems much less interested
in her supposed career than in getting John Agar to marry her —she’s your
typical movie dumb-blonde of the 1950’s and Agar doesn’t help; he was a close
friend of John Wayne and tried mimicking Wayne’s physical and vocal mannerisms
even in roles, like this one, for which they were totally wrong) — but this
time around I found it considerably better than I remembered it in making the
Gill Man someone you would feel sorry for, especially when he’s being poked and
shocked with a cattle prod in the tank at Ocean World (“played” by Marineland,
Florida, the world’s first aquatic theme park and the prototype of Sea World)
to get him to recognize the command “Stop!” I’ve also been struck that in a way
Revenge of the Creature is a
prototype for Jurassic Park: a
living prehistoric animal is put on exhibit by an unscrupulous entrepreneur,
escapes and causes havoc. (I particularly like the scene in which the real Gill
Man knocks over the wooden cut-out of him at the entrance to Ocean World which
advertises his exhibit.)
The Creature Walks Among Us is an even stronger — though stranger — movie, which
mashes up not only the first two Gill Man movies and Frankenstein but also Written on the Wind, a property Universal-International was filming at
the same time with Douglas Sirk directing and showing off his ability to bring
depth and power to a pretty typical soap-opera script. The Creature
Walks Among Us reunited the two male leads
from Universal-International’s big color science-fiction film from the previous
year, This Island Earth, Jeff
Morrow and Rex Reason. They gave Morrow the equivalent to the Robert Stack role
in Written on the Wind — the
wealthy and insanely jealous husband who gets more and more convinced that his
wife is a no-account tramp — while Reason got the Rock Hudson part of the hunky
guy on her husband’s staff whom she’s clearly falling for. As the wife, who in Written
on the Wind was played by Lauren Bacall
(who said in her autobiography she didn’t understand why that film got such a
cult reputation later — she said she thought it was a nothing script she took
only because making a movie seemed healthier for her psyche than just sitting
around the house waiting for her then-husband, Humphrey Bogart, to die), they
got an actress named Leigh Snowden whose career went nowhere but who seemed
quite capable and could have become a star with the right buildup.
The plot of The
Creature Walks Among Us, written by Arthur
A. Ross, is a doozy: Dr. William Barton (Jeff Morrow) is determined to capture
the Gill Man where it was last seen — the Florida Everglades — and find out if
it has lungs and can be converted into an air-breathing creature, which he
thinks would help solve the problem of how humans could survive in outer space.
His assistant Dr. Thomas Morgan (Rex Reason) thinks he’s nuts and doesn’t want
to be part of such a diabolical experiment, but Barton is convinced that he can
create an entirely new form of life out of the Gill Man. (In an age in which
genetic engineering has become almost routine this plot “plays” quite
differently than it no doubt did in 1956.) Morgan doesn’t want to do the
experiment, but in the end they have
to because in order to capture the Gill Man, they threw a flaming bomb of
gasoline at him and it irreparably burned his gills. They not only make him
over into an air-breather but put clothes (made from sail canvas) on his as
well, making him oddly resemble Tor Johnson from Ed Wood’s movies — though
Charles “read” him as an artificially created Black person, an artifact of the
“scientific racism” of the early 20th century that held that Blacks
weren’t fully human but just a lower step on the evolutionary ladder between
apes and white people. (Charles says he’s encountered this attitude mostly in
the novels of Tarzan creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, who apparently got his view
of Black people at least largely from the scientific racists.) The Gill Man
ends up attacking and killing a lion that’s threatening some sheep on Barton’s
private estate in Sausalito (near where I did a lot of my growing up, which
alone makes this a special movie for me!) — Barton has, among other things, his
own private zoo with all sorts of exotic animals on the ground — and at the end
the Gill Man walks towards a beach and returns to the water for an ambiguous
ending which I’ve always wondered about — did Arthur A. Ross mean us to believe
that the Gill Man didn’t realize he could no longer breathe water (or did
Arthur A. Ross himself forget
that according to the previous scenes of his script, the Gill Man could no
longer breathe water), or did he mean it — the reading I’d prefer given my
affection for doomed romanticism — as the Gill Man deliberately committing
suicide because he’s no longer at home either on water or land?
