Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)

 

 

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

 

BEN CHAPMAN (1925 - 2008) BEN SERVED IN THE MARINE CORPS, BUT OUR HERO WAS BEST KNOWN FOR THE TITLE ROLE IN TCFTBL. THE ROLE WAS TURNED DOWN BY GLENN STRANGE, MAKING BEN'S 6 FOOT 5 INCH FRAME A NATURAL CHOICE. HIS HEIGHT FURTHER INCREASED BY THE CREATURE'S FOAM RUBBER SUIT. BEN STOOD SIGNIFICANTLY TALLER THAN THE REST OF THE CAST. PROFESIONAL DIVER RICOU BROWNING WHO PLAYED ALL THE UNDERWATER CREATURE SCENES, AND BEN CHAPMAN THE LAND CREATURE, NEVER MET DURING THE MAKING OF THE FILM. BROWNING'S UNDERWATER SCENES WERE FILMED IN FLORIDA, AND CHAPMAN'S SCENES WERE FILMED IN CALIFORNIA

"It plays upon a basic fear that people have about what might be lurking below the surface of any body of water. You know the feeling when you are swimming and something brushes your legs down there - it scares the hell out of you if you don't know what it is. It's the fear of the unknown. I decided to exploit this fear as much as possible in filming ‘The Creature from the Black Lagoon.’"

Director Jack Arnold

One of the pleasures of writing these essays based on other’s lists of favorites is that I am guided to great films I have never seen before. Another pleasure is being reminded of favorite films of mine that I allowed to fall by the mental-wayside because there are always new entertainments coming in. As I prepared for this essay, I was shocked to realize, I had not seen “Creature from the Black Lagoon” for a full 35 years, yet all that time its Monster, and a few especially strong visuals, stuck with me.

Going all the way back to the 1920s, Universal Studios dominated the Horror genre, though other studios had fine Producers and Directors who produced short strings of excellent work in the Genre, nothing could compare for the collective iconic power of Universal’s output in its Golden Age of Monsters between 1923 (“The Hunchback of Notre Dame”) and 1941 (“The Wolf Man”). After that, the drop of in quality of their films were recognized by all, and it has been argued that the real horrors of WWII made the once great Monsters quaint and laughable.

With the end of WWII, with the USA enjoying extraordinary international power, improving standard of living, and extraordinary optimism, but there came with that a return of deeply abstract anxieties,. It was not completely unlike like the earlier period social and economic unrest between the World Wars that led to the rise of Fascism in Europe and the solidification of Communism farther East. As WWII led so quickly to the Cold War, Monsters were granted new life, this had to be more than mere correlation.

Universal profited from this immensely, but reviewing a list of their Horror/Monster films from the 1950s (there were 22 of them) virtually everyone worth watching was Directed by the same man, Jack Arnold.

Arnold worked in the realm of SF more than Supernatural, and his SF, though not really Scientifically accurate, was still real SF, not technological window-dressings on the Gothic tropes. Notably, Arnold mostly avoided Mad Scientists, usually giving us Scientist Heroes, and when his Scientists went bad, they were misbehaving, not crazy; he treated them as working professionals rather than an earlier era’s Victor Frankensteins. Also, though he has only one film set in space or on an alien planet (he directed some of the segments of “This Island Earth” (1955) for which he received no credit) he conveyed an alieness of Earth-based settings better than anyone else of his generation. Richard Scheib put it nicely, “Throughout his films, Arnold pit human beings in a metaphorical relationship with landscape. Humanity was constantly seen as a stranger in landscapes that resonated with the vastness of geological time.”

As Arnold’s triumphs seemed disconnected with the great work of the earlier era, he helped cement the fact that the past was the past, and yet this film, his most famous, did not reject, but embraced that by-gone era.

A mixture of Monster Movie, Jungle Adventure, and Beauty and the Beast, “Creature…” most obviously evokes not Universal’s greats (virtually all derived from classic literary sources) but RKO’s Monster masterpiece, “King Kong” (1933, based on an original screenplay). The story conceit goes back to 1941, when Actor/Writer/Producer William Alland, then at RKO, was having dinner with Orson Welles. He was told the Mexican legend of the Fish-man by Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, "this creature that lives up in the Amazon...Once a year he comes up and claims a maiden, and after that, he leaves, and the village is then safe for another year...He [Figueroa] said, 'You people think I'm joking, don't you?' and he then insisted that this was absolutely true, that he could produce photos and this and that...!’"

Figueroa went on to have a great career, but had no involvement in this project. Alland, who apparently was the man who brought Arnold to Universal, was intimately involved. This tale was a striking departure Alland and Arnold’s prior SF, “It Came from Outer Space” (1953), which a sinister but also optimistic moral fable of Mankind’s stark choices between Humanistic Compassion and Mob-driven Bloodlust, boldly pushing the boundaries of the SF genre into new conceptual areas. It is a now classic in its own right, but not nearly as successful as this unapologetic nostalgia piece.

But as critic after critic has noted, “The Creature…” feels more like an elegy for Monsters past than a revival of them. The script was rather mundane but contained numerous (unfortunately inadequately realized) elements that were stark evidence that everyone understood that the times they were a changing. As Darren, from “The Movie Blog” wrote, “It is told mostly in broad daylight along the Amazon River, the new world that has gradually been explored and quantified…it seems to lament the fact that the world is an increasingly familiar place. The shadows are retreating, leaving less space to hide the monsters we love so dearly.”

Notably there was treatment of Scientific Rationalism as the moral high-ground, and its outright disdain for torch-and-pitchfork bearing Vigilantism. Much of the script celebrates the Scientific process (though there’s plenty of evidence that the Writers, Harry Essex, Arthur Ross, and Maurice Zimm, were not especially Scientifically literate), it also exalts Environmentalism and condemns Imperialism. Intertwining these ideas, especially in such an old film, implies a sophisticated Intellectual ambition that it couldn’t 100% deliver on.

The prologue that takes us all the way back to the creation of the Universe, trying to reconcile Deep Time, as described in Geological Science, with Biblical literalism. This went right to the heart of America’s then most pressing philosophical divide: Dwight D. Eisenhower had just become President, he would push the agenda of Scientific literacy harder than any President before him, and most of those that followed; but at the same time he empowered the anti-Science Activism of some Religious Denominations by putting the Separation of Church and State into Question (until Eisenhower, our Nation’s motto was, “Out of Many, One,” he saw it changed to, “In God We Trust,” and he also had “Under God” inserted in the already 60-year-old Pledge of Allegiance). The ‘50s may have been our greatest era of exalting Intellectual Elitism, but those Elites were still uncomfortable company for most of our Nation’s Proletariat and Petite Bourgeoisie (ie. the overwhelming majority of Americans), and since a non- or even anti-Religious attitude was comfortable within that Elite, there was always the fear that if you seemed too Scientific, you might be one of those Godless Communists. Symbolic of the era’s tension, the film got both its Biblical literalism and its Scientific concepts equally wrong (regarding the Science, it measured Deep Time in millions of years, but Planet Earth is an estimated 4.5 billion years old, and life probably first appeared 3.8 billion years ago).

This would be the last mention of Religion in the film, but the Science remained very important to the writers even though they kept screwing it up. The idea that an honest Scientist, more committed to truth than personal gain, was convincingly conveyed as the perfect moral ideal. There’s also much talk about how we know as little that happens on the bottom of the sea, or in the remote (but shrinking) environments of the less Industrialized Continents, as we do in Outer Space. As our hero, Dr. David Reed (Richard Carlson) states:

“More and more we’re learning the meaning and the value of marine research. Look, look over here – this lung fish. The bridge between fish and the land animal. There are many thousands of ways nature tried to get life out of the sea and onto the land. This one failed. He hasn’t changed in millions of years. But here – here we have a clue to and answer. Someday spaceships will be traveling from Earth to other planets. How are human beings going to survive on those planets? The atmosphere will be different; the pressures will be different. By studying these, and other species, we add to our knowledge of how live evolved, how it adapted itself to this world. With that knowledge, perhaps we can teach man to adapt themselves to some new world of the Future.”

And when our heroes start considering exploring the Black Lagoon of the title:

“This is exactly as it was 150 million years ago, when it was part of the Devonian era.”

(Ummm…both the dating and the description of the flora and fauna are both Scientifically inaccurate.)

Other than the Monster, David’s main antagonist is his colleague and friend, now boss, Dr. Mark Williams (Richard Denning). When the exploratory expedition realizes that the Creature is real, Mark’s immediate impulse is to shoot it, “We must have proof!”

David, less Imperialist and more Environmentally minded, objects, “We can learn more from it if it’s alive.”

This argument putters along for the whole length of the film:

David: “You don’t sound like a Scientist, you sound like some big game hunter out for the kill.”

Mark: “We may not be back home, David, but you still work for me.”

As Mark, Richard Denning is excellent because he remembers one rule about villains that most actors forget, everyone is a Hero in their own heart. Denning recognizes that Mark thinks he’s the Hero, so that’s how he plays him -- his actions demonstrate who he is, but his posturing is his self-conception, this makes him far more realistic and sympathetic. Meanwhile, Richard Carlson is burdened with all the speeches, and though he carries himself well enough, the weight of the burden is obvious (he was far better in “It Came…”).

There’s another wrinkle within these two men’s conflict, and it ties more directly to the anti-Imperialist themes. At one point David rages at Mark, “Why’d you shoot first? We weren’t attacked!”

Ummm…actually, the Creature had already murdered two innocents at this point, but the silly Humans had dismissed those dead as a Jaguar attack. Here we hit on a really complex element of the script’s Moralism, and not appreciated as much as it should’ve been.

Essentially, the Creature is a stand-in for all the Worlds’ threatened Indigenous peoples. Those peoples, like Industrialized and Imperialist peoples, are both territorial and violent, but the Industrialized and Imperialist have the obvious upper-hand in the competition over who gets to keep existing territories or expand into new spaces. The first two to die are themselves Indigenous laborers (Rodd Redwing and Perry Lopez) left behind by Dr. Carl Maia (Antonio Moreno) because an amazing fossil discovery requires a better funded expedition, so the Doctor rushes back to the Instituto de Biologia Maritima. Though the savagery of the Creatures attack is hard to justify in the context of the specific victims’ lack of offence, the victims’ very existence on the Creature’s land is an existential threat to its way of life.

Compare this to the take on a similar conflict in the John Wayne film, “The Searchers” (1956), almost universally recognized as the finest Western film ever made, but also, and inescapably, as racist an American film you’d likely to find in the post-WWII era. The central conflict revolves around the idea that being an Indian, touching an Indian, or even being touched by an Indian against your will, is so unclean it is a mortal sin. John Wayne’s character’s “liberalization” in the final scene is his acceptance that a White rape victim might be able to re-earn her Whiteness in time, and therefore should not be butchered in an honor-killing. Yes, we shouldn’t forget that “The Searchers” had a solid historical grounding, Native American raiders did butcher blameless and defenseless families, and enslaved and abused those they did not kill, and the story is drawn from several documented incidents of just that. But the film is only interested in White victimization, not how Native Americans were invaded and slaughtered. It ignores how cycle of violence started, it was only concerned in defining the triumph of Whiteness through real, but cherry-picked, images of non-White aggression.

Here, the Creature was unconditionally Monstrous when first introduced, but progressively more sympathetic (though no less violent) as the film unfolds. Though it has no voice, its POV is understood. We never root for it (we’re Human, it is not, Tribalism counts) but we also don’t want it to die. But it must, because the whole of Human history has taught us (or at least we think it has taught us) is that the clash of cultures must result in the obliteration of the weaker. The fact that we sympathize with the Monster even though he never becomes any less frightening makes Creature’s death in the end a tragedy rich with ambiguity, again, much like “King Kong” but also Universal’s greatest Monster movie, “Frankenstein” (1931). Like these other Monsters, there would have been much less Monsterousness to complain about had the Monster been left in peace to begin with.

And that is the brilliance of Denning’s take on Mark’s character, because Mark is essentially John Wayne, and we are being told that we shouldn’t embrace that definition of Heroism or Masculinity anymore. (Here I should throw in, Wayne’s films post-“The Searchers” were more sympathetic to Native Americans, but, unfortunately, none of them were near as magnificent a piece of cinema.)

Another forward-looking aspect of the film was its treatment of sexual politics, but unfortunately here, it stumbles badly, despite its effort to be progressive, it’s more retrograde than it realizes.

Up to this point (and even thereafter) Monster movies (and Westerns and War movies and Musicals) generally featured a cliché Love-triangle, where we have two male leads trying to win the heart of the same girl. It is quickly obvious who is the Alpha male, and that Alpha-ness entitles him to mate so absolutely sometimes even it seems to shape Cosmic forces: the plot mechanics often kills off the lesser of the two men, often in an act of self-sacrifice on behalf of the Alpha, so female choice is less a part of sexual selection than Male hierarchies and rituals.

That triangle is mocked here. There is only one female character, Kay Williams (Julie Adams) and her relationship with David is established before the film beings. Mark obviously resents this, but it is equally obvious, even to him, that there’s nothing he can do about it; there’s a much different tension than typical because Kay got to choose, and even after doing so still feels entitled to keep her job -- you see, Mark’s her boss also. She does fret about that at one point, but Dr. Edwin Thompson (Whit Bissell) assures her that that the quality of her research is such that Mark is dependent of her, not the other way around.

Also, her relationship with David is pretty “modern.” Maia, the oldest cast member and most courtly of the men on the boat, seems surprised that Kay is still working alongside David, instead of her raising babies, “Are you two married yet?”

“No, no, David says we’re together all the time anyway. Might as well save expenses.”

(That line indicates the Scriptwriters understand Economics about as much as they do Evolutionary Science)

So the film is boldly Feminist? Not exactly, that stuff is all in the script, but what does Kay actually do during the course of the film?

Well, I don’t see her doing any Science, or any form of labor at all. She spends a lot of time looking pretty (bar-none, she’s the prettiest girl ever to grace a Universal Monster movie), and she screams in terror a fair amount of the time, and has to be rescued three times. Think about it, three times in a movie that’s only 79 minutes long, that has to be a record.

As the film mocks one cliché love triangle, it focuses on another triangle, which is stranger, utterly hopeless, but still compelling. Though unstated, the Creature is clearly the last of his kind and his maleness is never in question. When he sees Kay swimming he is completely enraptured. Kay, of course, isn’t attracted to the Creature, but she is fascinated by it, and develops sympathies for it similar to David’s (again, echoing “King Kong”).

The film's most famous sequence was filmed underwater. Kay (in this scene she was played by Adams’ stunt-double Ginger Stanley) is swimming, the camera is below her so she is suspended like an angel in the dappling sunlight (her fetching one-piece bathing suit is virgin white). Unknown to her, Creature moves to her, matching her strokes, swimming upside down directly below her; it’s an erotic underwater ballet, obviously suggesting sexual intercourse even though they don’t touch.

Then Kay stops in the water, dog-paddling as she converses with the men on the boat. The camera repeatedly returns to her submerged feet, and the Creature’s hand. He reaches for her, but then pulls back, afraid to touch the dream. He does this again and again. It’s sinister, but also heart-rending; emotionally, we are closer to him than her at that moment. All of this is passed over lightly in the Script, but Arnold lingers on the sequence, making it the film’s center-piece.

This is why the movie is a Classic, not any of the intellectual subtexts it raises but can’t develop. It was the very heart of the film’s marketing, demonstrated in the famous tag-line, "Centuries of passion pent up in his savage heart!" Wrote, Jake Tucker, “The Creature is the greatest monster of a decade filled with monsters. He outshines his irradiated and overgrown brethren because there was the slightest bit of humanity in him. He lusts, he is cunning, and he feels pain. He is an animal on the brink of becoming something more.”

Most of the best remembered SF/Horror films of the era are praised for employing a “documentary style” to grounding the reality of the film’s Fantastic elements (“The Thing From Another World” (1951), “Them!” (1954), “The Quatermass Xperiment” (1955)); none of Arnold’s work quite evokes that, but not of it is very far removed either, and it is worth noting he cut his teeth as a Documentary-film-maker. This was his fourth foray into fiction, and, like two of his prior fictions (the above mentioned, “It Came…” and the nior, “The Glass Web” (both released 1953)), “The Creature…” was part of the era’s 3-D fad. Arnold never over-played the 3-D elements, making his films better than many of its contemporaries that tried to exploit the short-lived fad, and I’d argue his background in Documentary film may have inoculated him from the gimmick’s distractions. There are few people alive today that saw “It Came…” in 3-D, and those that did, agree it is better in conventional 2-D, but “Creature…” was different, one of the few real triumphs of the technique, and it is the underwater sequences, with the bodies weightless in an expansive void, which make all the difference.

(Even today, with better technology, most films are better in their 2-D versions, but a notable exception is “Gravity” (2013), set in near-orbit Outer Space, again it is the bodies weightless in an expansive void, which make all the difference.)

Filming underwater is a technological challenge, and far worse back then than it is now, so rare-ish in feature film, granting this movie an enduring visual novelty.

Also memorable, but almost as problematic as it was memorable, was the film’s score composed by Hans J. Salter (who was one of the top composers of Universal Monster movies since “The Ghost of Frankenstein” (1942)), Herman Stein (having already worked on “It Came…”” he was fast becoming an important contributor to Universal Monsters, especially the Arnold films), and Henry Mancini (who would soon become considered one of the greatest composers in the history of film). The music became iconic, defining Horror movie music for the rest of the decade and beyond, but it was also intrusively over-indulged; that was the Producers fault, insisting that the Creature’s theme, a bold, three second, statement in horns and percussion, be used at least 130 times in the 79 minute film (and no, I wasn’t the person who counted all the instances).

But the film’s main magic was the Creature himself. The original design concept came from Arnold, and this anecdote is amusing because it seems touched with spite. Arnold is better remembered today than the majority of the other Directors of his era, but was then less honored than many, many, who are completely forgotten now. Though he receive recognition within the SF genre (“It Came…” was nominated for a Hugo, and a later film, “Incredible Shrinking Man” (1958) won) all of his fictional features were ignored by Hollywood’s Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. What few know is that he was nominated for an Academy Award, but this was before he started making the films he is now so famous for; his nomination was for his feature-length documentary, “With These Hands” (1950) which recreated the Triangle Shirt Waist Factory tragedy (a history-changing fire that happened in 1911). Apparently he was looking at his certificate, which had a picture of the Oscar statue on it, and imagined Oscar with a frog’s head.

The main designer was a highly gifted former animator that Universal managed to steal from Disney, Millicent Patrick. It richly mixed textures, rough and smooth scales, the glint of water on wet skin, air pumps allowed to gill movements on the face which allowed a degree of expression even though its fish-like eyes seemed dead. It was cumbersome in some contexts and incredible graceful in others, terrifying in one scene where in, arms outstretched as it lumbers forward at the audience (borrowed from James Whale’s “Frankenstein”), but pitiable in others (like when captured and caged, and it gills puff-out, seemingly laboring to breathe). It wasn’t a giant Monster like the same year’s “Them!” and “Godzilla,” but human-scale and remarkably realistic looking, so that decades truest heir to Universal’s proud tradition, equal to the best work of Lon Chaney (“The Hunchback…” and “Phantom of the Opera” (1925)) and Jack Pierce (“Frankenstein”).

As this masterpiece was the work of many, it was easy for jealous Bud Westmore claim sole credit; though Patrick was denied recognition for the next fifty years, she had a fine career; in cinema she was best known as an actress, and outside cinema was a much-sought-after Children’s Book Illustrator. Westmore’s career was also one of continuing accomplishment, having most baring here was that he did the make-up for the TV show “The Munsters” (first aired 1964) which was an affectionate spoof of the Golden Age of Universal Monsters.

It required two actors to play the Creature. On land, the actor was Ben Chapman, who a was 6’5” ex-Marine, while underwater the actor was Ricou Browning, who was three inches shorter and a long-time professional swimmer, so two suits had to be manufactured at a cost of between $12,000 and $15,000 (it’s unclear to me if that was for each or combined).

Browning’s suit was painted bright yellow it improve contrast in the lower-light underwater environment. Also the suits had no breathing apparatus, Browning was required to hold is breathe for four-plus minutes at a time. Some sources credit him with directing the underwater sequences (which he would do in later films like “Thunderball” (1965)) but I can’t confirm this, and Assistant Directors Fred Frank and Russ Havernick are sometimes similarly credited, also without confirmation. Because of his specialized skill-set, Browning would play the Creature in later films, making him the only actor to be cast in the role more than once.

Browning moves with incredible grace underwater despite the restrictive suit, this contrasts effectively with Chapman’s lurching awkwardness as the literal fish-out-of-water. That awkwardness was probably, mostly, a deliberate choice, but both actors were nearly blind in the suits, and Chapman did accidentally injure Adams by bashing her head against a wall in one of the kidnappings. Also, because he couldn’t see properly, during a fight scene he failed to catch a machete swung at him by another actor, and took the blade, at full force, on the side of the head (he was lucky the costume’s material was so thick).

The scenes in the Amazon jungle were filmed at locations in the Florida Panhandle, and though they are convincingly remote-looking, the crew never strayed far from civilization. There’s an amusing anecdote wherein Browning, in full-suit, needed to get out of the water fast to go to the bathroom. There was an unsuspecting mother and daughter on the opposite shore. "They took off, and that's the last I saw of 'em!"

(Like Patrick, neither Chapman nor Browning received any on-screen credit).

The film proved a huge hit despite only middling-good reviews (SF and Horror had little support in the critical establishment). Arnold’s prestige grew, but most of his efforts that followed were closer cousins to “It Came…” than this one, though he did Direct one of the two sequels this film generated (1955 & 1956). These sequels (which I haven’t seen) aren’t especially hated, but there is unanimous consensus that they pale in comparison to the first.

Other than Arnold’s outing, Universal’s SF and Horror outing continued their decline, best symbolized by the fact that “Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy” would be released the following year.

The Creature ultimately suffered the same fate are all of Universal’s greatest Monsters, it became a popular kids Halloween costume and a plastic model kit. He never disappeared from our culture, making frequent cameo appearances in comedic films and TV that nostalgically evoked Universal’s Golden Age of Monsters (for example, “The Munsters”), and was frequently mimicked in other low-budget films (a notable example was the dumber-than-cheese but still hugely entertaining, “Octoman” (1971), essentially an uncredited remake Directed by frequent Arnold collaborator Harry Essex, who helped Write this film).

There has long been interest in an official remake, big-budgeted and not Camp-Comedy, and this proposed project repeated attracted significant talent like Directors John Carpenter, Peter Jackson, Ivan Reitman, and Guillermo del Toro, all of whom grew up mesmerized by the film and wanted to give it due homage. Some of these aborted projects were to involve some of the original creators, like in the 1980s when John Landis attempted to launch a version that would’ve been Directed by Arnold (then doing TV work) and scripted by “Quartermass’…” Nigel Kneale, perhaps the greatest of all SF,F&H Scriptwriters and who become prominent in England around the same time that Arnold became prominent in the USA. The Del Toro version would’ve Scripted by Arthur A. Ross, another co-writer of this film, and Produced by Gary Ross, his son.

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