Films: 1950s
(1954) Creature from the Black Lagoon
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Creature from the Black Lagoon
Director: Jack Arnold
Release: 1954
Universal International responded to horror cinema's 1950s shift toward interstellar menace and atomic mutation with "Creature from the Black Lagoon."
Reaching into the past and into the Amazon River, writer Harry Essex mixed authentic legend and Universal's penchant for scientific explanation to create a plausible terror that stood in opposition to both competitive phenomena.
The creature in question resides in a forgotten corner of the jungle, discovered when a team of archaeologists unearth a fossil of one of its predecessors. The expedition that follows, lead by actor Richard Carlson's fairly square-jawed David Reed, is full of several kinds of tension. Reed's colleague and romantic partner, Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams), has worked with Richard Denning's Mark Williams for too long to allow the three-person point-crew work.
Williams and Reed spend the voyage marking territory over Lawrence until a larger threat intrudes. The creature hasn't taken kindly to the penetration of its lair and it begins to eliminate the humans (starting with the South American component, according to a certain troublesome studio logic). It marks Lawrence as its necessary mate and the threesome becomes a foursome as the two human men battle the amphibean, and each other, for the female.
Director Jack Arnold packs enough subversive sexual imagery into "Creature from the Black Lagoon" to resurrect Freud. Spear guns are thrust in every direction and fired underwater in great bursts of liquid. The water is filled over and over again with a frothy white substance as Reed and Williams seek to drug the creature into submission. There's a healthy wrestling match in the steamer's laboratory, during which Reed delivers a fairly unarguable thrust of the pelvis to Williams buttocks. And then there the wiggling penis-headed beast, loitering in the murk until it snaps necks or drag Lawrence to its hidden grotto.
The film isn't exactly campy, however, despite its quasi-sexual charge.
Arnold keeps his actors earnest, although they struggle with wooden dialogue and apparently impromptu monologues on the mysteries of the waters (a needless voice-over at the film's start hammers the oceans-not-outer-space theme into athe audience's skull, just in case).
The only real moments of thespian note are the muscle-boy confrontations between Reed and Williams, and those are defused whenever the plot needs to hurry along.
What saves "Creature from the Black Lagoon" from the B-list slag heap, besides its sense of phallic fun, is its photography. Underwater director James Havens and underwater photgrapher Scotty Welbourne deliver a vast black void in which actors form sometimes haunting sigils.
Surrounded by clouds of their own carbon dioxide, the shapes and movements in places are balletic. The underwater team set up shots from within treefalls, or in sudden proximity to the creature's head (which looks far more effective when submerged). Images and actors are obscured by sudden kicks of silt or they dangle in the nothing, from which anything might emerge.
"Creature from the Black Lagoon" is Universal's last heavyweight addition to its horror franchise, 23 years after it opened the door with "Dracula." It staggers in places, but is buoyed by the adventurous visuals and its subversive subtext.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Creature from the Black Lagoon, 1954
Director Jack Arnold packs enough subversive sexual imagery into "Creature from the Black Lagoon" to resurrect Freud. Spear guns are thrust in every direction and fired underwater in great bursts of liquid. The water is filled over and over again with a forthy white substance as Reed and Williams seek to drug the creature into submission.
