The last of the Universal Monsters - The Creature from the Black Lagoon

The Universal monsters began with Frankenstein in 1931. What became the first crossover cinematic universe expanded through the Depression, the Second World War, and into the fifties (though by then, the universe had run its course) and wrapped up with three films featuring the subject of the current film. They began with a bang and finished with a triumph of creature design, atmosphere, and even a couple of thought-provoking turns.

I caught all three of the Creature trilogy a couple of times on TV in the seventies and saw the first entry in 3-D for the first time in the mid-80s. I saw it more recently a few days ago, and my goodness, it’s a good looking film and the 3-D worked. 

What also worked is the atmosphere of the film and how it held all the other pieces together. The film runs at an efficient 79 minutes but hardly feels rushed. The pacing is deliberate and while we see the hand of the Creature twice, we don’t see him in full until a jump cut in an underwater sequence when he first lays on Kay, played by Julie (Julia here) Adams who could well be Jennifer Connelly’s grandma. The sudden appearance is effective and what I still find marvelous is what a great piece of design the Creature is. The attention to detail isn’t wasted; you genuinely get a sense that this could very well be an exotic humanoid living in the remotest parts of the Amazon. 

The Creature and Julie (Julia) Adams in an autographed publicity still.

The cast are uniformly solid, everyone acquitting themselves well. Nestor Paiva, however, walks away with the movie every time he opens his mouth. He plays the river boat’s captain, Captain Lucas with relish. He’s a happy-go-lucky character but when the head of the expedition gets pushy, Lucas pulls a blade - a big one - on him and corrects the director’s attitude.

Antonio Moreno is on hand as geologist Dr. Carl Maia. It is his group who discover a fossilized forearm of one of the Creature’s ancestors (or maybe, kin? We don’t know how old he is, so maybe he’s millions of years old or maybe he’s just the last of his species born x number of years ago).  The find leads Maia to contact his former student, Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson). After a meeting going over the fossil remains, it is decided that the institute where David works and which is funding his research into lungfish, will fund an expedition to commence a dig to find more fossils.

While Maia is away, the Creature gives into curiosity to explore the campsite and when the two assistants panic, he attacks and kills them. The violence is hinted at and we only see the Creature’s arm and hand and his silhouette. 

Upon landing at the campsite, the expedition party discovers the bodies and are on guard. By this point, we have in addition to Maia, Reed, and Lucas, Reed’s boss at the institute, Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning), Dr. Edwin Whitmore (the ever-reliable Whit Bissell), David’s assistant and girlfriend, Kay Lawrence (Adams), and the two man crew of the Rita, the river boat/tramp steamer. 

The characters are well-enough fleshed out for what they need to be. Even so, everyone gets a moment to give a little more nuance than might be in the dialog. Dr. Williams does kind of remind me of directors of orgs I’ve known who are extremely cost conscious until they find a project that they think will draw more funding in. In this case, it’s the Gill-Man himself. Once the expedition heads into the Black Lagoon, a sequestered cove with only one entry point, the Creature makes himself known. 

Williams sees cash and little else and doesn’t seem to care if his find is dead or alive. Reed, by contrast, wants to take him alive and I get the sense he feels like they might be interlopers. They do capture our Gill-Man but he breaks out of his make-shift prison, critically injuring Dr. Whitmore. 

What holds our attention here is that the action is tactile. Normally, when we hear of a “man in a rubber suit”, the result it chintzy and any action profoundly stilted. However, in our present case, the suit is a practical effect on par with the work on Frankenstein’s monster twenty-three years prior. The Creature’s face is already piscine enough that the mouth is downturned and evokes a kind of sadness as a result. This is not one of Lovecraft’s fish-people from Shadows Over Innsmouth, but one wonders if, with more development, we couldn’t have had a sequel with a race of Gill-People. 

Additionally, we get both the human and the Creature’s points of view of the narrative. It is probably bordering on cliche to draw parallels with King Kong, but even Kong rather borrowed from La Belle et la Bête. As with Fay Wray’s  Ann Darrow, Kay is not enamored by the Gill-Man and does the old damsel faint when he has absconded with her and taken her to his lair. Earlier, she did a nice full-throated scream, not quite on par with Ms. Wray’s but up there. No, it is Richard Carlson’s David who understands the unfairness of having encroached on this alien domain and while he attempted to get Mark to see the light, the argument that the humans are the interlopers does not go over well when things turn ugly and people die.

In this regard, the film feels almost more like a nature documentary that evokes discomfort in watching the proceedings. Sure, it is a creature feature from the fifties that ticks off the requisite tropes; scientific exploration gone wrong, imperiled humans, and a cool critter protecting its domain while one human is pushing for profit (okay, additional funding for a research institute). However, like the best of 50s speculative fiction, there is an ethical debate or point being made about the enterprise.

We are still twelve years away from Roddenberry’s Star Trek where the prime directive acted as the moral-ethical guide to exploration. But hell, humans suck at non-interference and leaving habitats alone. Whether on a camping trip or in the Black Lagoon, it just seems we can’t leave things alone.

To be sure, plenty of other works have called into question the ethics of disturbing non-human beings in situ and the dubious morality of “playing God”; although, if I’m being honest, this latter is not always the case in real life; there are plenty of sound reasons for what we do in scientific research that would shoot the theistic bolts off of most 19th century clergy. 

In the film at hand, it is David who keeps the survivors from gunning down the Creature as he staggers past them to return to the water. It is an oddly touching moment, but one that you cannot help but feel comes too late. Of course, if these movies played out the way I’d like them to, you’d have an incredibly dry procedural or a Godard-lite version of American 1950s sci-fi cinema. I’m reminded of something Truffaut said about what Close Encounters of the Third Kind would have been like had he directed it, to the effect that he would have just filmed interviews with the aliens against a blank wall. Of course, I am no Truffaut, and I guarantee you my version would be excruciating. Have no fear; it will never be made!

At the end of the day, and the film, we see an underwater shot of the Creature face down in the water, a silhouette of the last of his species, we assume. What I am not sure of, is if it was the intention to lull people into thinking the Creature was actually dead or were audiences knowing enough to suspect that a sequel was sure to come?

Interestingly, something similar took place in Japan the same year on a grander scale as Godzilla came to ravage Tokyo in Gojira. That film’s ending was similarly definitive; which in retrospect, we know it was not. Of course, Americans wouldn’t see the great kanji until 1956 in its less elegant and thuddingly edited version with Raymond Burr spliced in to the original. The differences in those films are marked, and the themes divergent, but the endings seem born of the same cloth.

Jack Arnold would go on to direct the sequel the following year, and I need to rewatch it as much of it hasn’t stuck with me. If I recall, the Creature is captured by another expedition and brought to a marina in Florida. Mayhem ensues and he wades into the ocean (so he’s adaptable to salt water?) The Creature Walks Among Us did stick with me and I remember being profoundly moved by the experiment that saved his life after being burned all over his body and gave him speech. We actually were now privy to his thoughts and how his exploitation is writ larger in the third entry. It’s a sadder film that echoes Frankenstein’s creation’s plight in The Bride of Frankenstein. 

Kudos to Regal Cinemas for rereleasing this gem; there are few things better than seeing classic movies on the big screen with an audience. The folks in the theater skewed more to my age, but there were a few younguns and I would have been curious to know what they thought. 

There’s a simplicity and a directness in these films and economy of storytelling necessitated by budget, genre, and the audience of the time. The staying power of these films - the better ones like Creature from Black Lagoon - is transferable, though. You need only look at recent films like Flow or Petite Maman or Shiva Baby or This is Spinal Tap to realize that you don’t need hours to tell a story and that very often, a streamlined narrative can pack thematic and narrative richness and density in a shorter feature without overwhelming plot or characters. In each of these cases, though, the plots or concepts are kept simple but what unfolds are well-told tales.