CREATURE FROM THE
BLACK LAGOON
(1954)
I won't bother rehashing the plot about the half-man/half-fish discovered in the lower reaches of the Amazon, since you've either seen this movie ten million times already or you're never going to. Filmed in 3-D, it contains its share of gimmicky shots of divers firing spearguns directly at the camera. What isn't widely known is that it came out near the tail end of the 3-D fad, and many of the prints originally released to theaters were in 2-D. At any rate, the creature has an appeal which extends far beyond the gimmickry of the film's original format, and he deserves a spot on this website.
Perhaps the most famous sequence from the film occurs when heroine Julia Adams takes an impromptu dip in the lagoon. Performed by stunt double Ginger Stanley (a veteran of the underwater shows at the Weeki Wachee Springs theme park in Florida), her acrobatic swimming attracts the attention of the creature in his underwater lair. As he watches her bathing-suited figure twisting and turning as she glides through the water, his curiousity gets the better of him, and he rises up underneath her and mirrors her swim strokes with his own. The effect is something like a synchronized underwater ballet. When she pulls up and treads water, the creature tentatively grabs at her kicking feet. Steven Spielberg would later admit that this scene was his inspiration for the opening sequence in Jaws, where the female bather feels something unknown brush up against her legs from the depths below. The big difference being that the scene in Jaws lacks the sexual undertones running through the original.
Expert swimmer Ricou Browning portrayed the creature in all the underwater shots, which were filmed at Wakulla Springs in Tallahassee, Florida. But since he was approximately 5'-8" tall, he lacked the desired stature of a true monster, so 6'-4" Ben Chapman donned the rubber suit for all the scenes out of the water. The curious thing is that there are obvious discrepancies between the creature suits worn by the two men. Browning's was made significantly lighter in color so that he'd show up better underwater, and there are noticeable differences in the facial details around the eyes and the gills.
For those of you fond of film goofs, you'll notice in the second picture there's a thin line running diagonally from the top edge. It's not a flaw in the picture, nor a scratch on the original film, since it moves with the background as the camera pans to keep Ms. Stanley in frame. An overhead line or wire of some sort apparently intruded into the shot during filming. I've watched this movie dozens of times and never noticed this until I was making the vidcaps.
Creature from the Black Lagoon became a box office hit in 1954, and went on to spawn two well-made sequels. In Revenge of the Creature (made in 1955, once again in 3-D), he was captured and brought to Florida's Marineland aquarium before eventually going on a rampage and returning to the ocean amidst a hail of bullets. He returned for a final hurrah in The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). Captured once again, this time the scientists perform surgery on him in an attempt to make him human. As the film ends, the half-man, half-creature has escaped his human captors and is heading back to the sea once more, probably regretting the first day he ever saw that woman in the swimsuit.
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