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Creature from the Black Lagoon
Mar. 10th, 2018 09:01 amWe had to watch The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), because of The Shape of Water. So here is my review.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_from_the_Black_Lagoon
The wikipedia entry has a lot of great facts. I totally have a donation set up to give $3 to Wikipedia every month. :)
The first thing I was impressed by is the sophistication of the female lead, Kay, played by Julie Adams. I didn't recognize Adams from anything else, even though she's been in a ton of films opposite many of the great leading me, including Elvis! Kay is a scientist but doesn't get credit for her work... so everyone else is Dr. So and So, except her. :P It really made me think about the recent biopic about Jane Goodall and how she went to work at Gombe, Tanzania, in association with Louis Leakey, who helped her get funding so that she could study chimps and get a PhD from Cambridge without ever having gone to university beforehand! Goodall first went to Gombe in 1960, and they stipulated that her mother had to go with her! So that is similar to the way Kay is treated in the movie... she is always the object of concern and protection. But she does get to drive the speedboat and is the only person to survive direct contact with the monster.
Kay's boyfriend Dr. David Reed is an ichthyologist and is a sympathetic character. The stupid is mostly centered in Dr. Mark Williams, David's "boss" from the aquarium in California, who is driven by some idea of bagging the creature as a trophy, even though David is very sensible about studying its habitat and not trying to kill it. David is a likeable guy, who treats Kay like a real person and is sensible about her ambitions, and he tries to be fair to the creature, who is really very dangerous, with a body count that mounts up quickly. Brown people are pretty much toast in this film. ):
A huge highlight of this film are the many long scenes underwater. This is in real contrast to the Shape of Water, where only the final scene takes place under water. The images of Kay swimming, with the Gill-man following her underwater are amazing. When the film was shot, they hired two guys to play the creature, one on land and one in the water. (Not sure why the water guy couldn't also be the land guy). Water guy is Ricou Browning, who started doing underwater scenes in the 1940s at Wakulla Springs and Weeki Wachi in Florida, and has directed underwater scenes up to Boardwalk Empire in 2010 (including Thunderball, the 1966 Bond film)! This is pretty cool, because my head canon all along is that Gill and Elisa move to Florida and set up an attraction. There are still mermaid shows at Weeki Wachi!! all this is to say, you will be amazed at how beautifully the Gillman swims along underwater in that suit, which they did an amazing job with. In my mental conception of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, I had only images of the Creature outside the water, on land, kind of lurching along very woodenly. This is not the movie you will see!! Only a few scenes feature the creature on land (and unfortunately, they are kind of wooden). The creature in his element is amazing, and you can totally see why Guillermo Del Toro was fascinated to remake the whole concept. The score is pretty typical of monster movies, but, it is striking how enjoyable it is to watch long, LONG underwater scenes with no dialogue of any kind, no sound effects, just the score and maybe some burbling. I feel like this is why Elisa uses sign language. There is a lot of frantic gesturing underwater when the two scientists are swimming about with their flippers and Aqualungs. This also brought back childhood memories of Jacques Cousteau, who developed the Aqua-lung, and whose movie The Silent World won a Palme d'or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival -- so they had the technology in the 1950s to make amazing underwater films, and that is what they did! "Here zee ocean is teeming with life, but everywhere zair are signs of man's encroachment." -- The Brain, pretexting as Jacques Cousteau. (Please enjoy this episode of P&B, if you've never had the joy of it. Rob Paulsen, who voices Pinky, also voiced Arthur in the cartoon series of the Tick. Pinky and the Brain is by far my top favorite thing Steven Speilberg ever did.)
All this to say, I really enjoyed the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It does show some of its prejudices from the times, (the boat captain is a caricature that made me think of Stinking Badges), but on the plus side, it is gripping and shot so beautifully underwater that it is very fun to watch. I give it four out of five stars. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creature_from_the_Black_Lagoon
The wikipedia entry has a lot of great facts. I totally have a donation set up to give $3 to Wikipedia every month. :)
The first thing I was impressed by is the sophistication of the female lead, Kay, played by Julie Adams. I didn't recognize Adams from anything else, even though she's been in a ton of films opposite many of the great leading me, including Elvis! Kay is a scientist but doesn't get credit for her work... so everyone else is Dr. So and So, except her. :P It really made me think about the recent biopic about Jane Goodall and how she went to work at Gombe, Tanzania, in association with Louis Leakey, who helped her get funding so that she could study chimps and get a PhD from Cambridge without ever having gone to university beforehand! Goodall first went to Gombe in 1960, and they stipulated that her mother had to go with her! So that is similar to the way Kay is treated in the movie... she is always the object of concern and protection. But she does get to drive the speedboat and is the only person to survive direct contact with the monster.
Kay's boyfriend Dr. David Reed is an ichthyologist and is a sympathetic character. The stupid is mostly centered in Dr. Mark Williams, David's "boss" from the aquarium in California, who is driven by some idea of bagging the creature as a trophy, even though David is very sensible about studying its habitat and not trying to kill it. David is a likeable guy, who treats Kay like a real person and is sensible about her ambitions, and he tries to be fair to the creature, who is really very dangerous, with a body count that mounts up quickly. Brown people are pretty much toast in this film. ):
A huge highlight of this film are the many long scenes underwater. This is in real contrast to the Shape of Water, where only the final scene takes place under water. The images of Kay swimming, with the Gill-man following her underwater are amazing. When the film was shot, they hired two guys to play the creature, one on land and one in the water. (Not sure why the water guy couldn't also be the land guy). Water guy is Ricou Browning, who started doing underwater scenes in the 1940s at Wakulla Springs and Weeki Wachi in Florida, and has directed underwater scenes up to Boardwalk Empire in 2010 (including Thunderball, the 1966 Bond film)! This is pretty cool, because my head canon all along is that Gill and Elisa move to Florida and set up an attraction. There are still mermaid shows at Weeki Wachi!! all this is to say, you will be amazed at how beautifully the Gillman swims along underwater in that suit, which they did an amazing job with. In my mental conception of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, I had only images of the Creature outside the water, on land, kind of lurching along very woodenly. This is not the movie you will see!! Only a few scenes feature the creature on land (and unfortunately, they are kind of wooden). The creature in his element is amazing, and you can totally see why Guillermo Del Toro was fascinated to remake the whole concept. The score is pretty typical of monster movies, but, it is striking how enjoyable it is to watch long, LONG underwater scenes with no dialogue of any kind, no sound effects, just the score and maybe some burbling. I feel like this is why Elisa uses sign language. There is a lot of frantic gesturing underwater when the two scientists are swimming about with their flippers and Aqualungs. This also brought back childhood memories of Jacques Cousteau, who developed the Aqua-lung, and whose movie The Silent World won a Palme d'or at the 1956 Cannes Film Festival -- so they had the technology in the 1950s to make amazing underwater films, and that is what they did! "Here zee ocean is teeming with life, but everywhere zair are signs of man's encroachment." -- The Brain, pretexting as Jacques Cousteau. (Please enjoy this episode of P&B, if you've never had the joy of it. Rob Paulsen, who voices Pinky, also voiced Arthur in the cartoon series of the Tick. Pinky and the Brain is by far my top favorite thing Steven Speilberg ever did.)
All this to say, I really enjoyed the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It does show some of its prejudices from the times, (the boat captain is a caricature that made me think of Stinking Badges), but on the plus side, it is gripping and shot so beautifully underwater that it is very fun to watch. I give it four out of five stars. :)
