So last night , after a weekend of science-fiction and horror discussions, I was in the mood for a classic Universal horror film and gravitated instantly towards my all time favorite of those films, Creature From The Black Lagoon. Creature is a marvelous film that still holds up remarkably well today, 56 years after its initial release. (1954) With two enormous chili-dogs I settled in for a pleasant night of chills and entertainment from the classic film.

The story is simple, A scientist find a unique fossil far up the Amazon river. It is incomplete, but suggests a whole new order of amphibian life.He consults with fellow scientists and they launch an expedition to hopefully find the rest of the curious fossil. Of course what they find is so much more than a fossil, a living specimen of the new amphibian order, the Gillman, know to us primarily as The Creature.

So much of this film seems to recall King Kong for me. The isolated locale, the native myths, the somewhat sympathetic portrayal of the monster, the monster’s fascination with a beautiful woman, all echo the themes that we can find on Kong, while exploring them in a different and more personal setting.

Richard Carlson plays Dr. David Reed an ichthyologist intensely passionate about his science and his desire to capture the gillman alive to further science. That’s him in the classic heroic pose center in the photograph to the right. He voices the films moral center and appeal to reason. Carlson did a journeyman’s job playing the character, not especially memorable, but neither was it a flawed performance.

His love interest, and the woman who so fascinates the creature, is Kay Lawrence, played by the lovely Julie Adams. Given the period that this movie was made in, it is not surprising that her character is sketched rather thinly. She is a scientist, and does put forward observations consistent with that, yet she is never referred to as doctor,  the mark of a true scientists in Hollywood, and serves mainly as a love interest for Dr Reed and macgiffin for the Creature. Ignoring the cross species desires it is understandable why the Gillman was so attracted to her, Julie Adams was a lovely woman and possessed a real screen magnetism. (I will also confess to be more attracted to redheads and brunettes myself so objectivity is not really something I can proclaim on this point.

The triangle is completed by Dr Mark Williams, played by Richard Denning. (That’s him to Carlson’s left in the picyure above.) His character is boss to both Dr Reed and Kay with a suggestion that there may have been an emotional history between he and kay that Dr. Reed disrupted. His character serves as heavy and the motivating force that propels the plot forward. The gillman doesn’t venture far from the lagoon and without Dr Williams insistence on going forward no story would have occurred.

This was one of the big 3-D movies from Hollywood’s 3-D craze in the 50’s. that said, aside from a few shots of things coming straight at the lens this film plays very well in 2-D, that director Jack Arnold, understood film making as a story telling process and did not let the special effect hijack the movie. (Something many directors today are clueless about.) I have had the luck to see this film projected in a theater in 3-D and the effect worked wonderfully. I regret that home video has killed the revival market, even as I rejoice in owning so many wonderful titles at home.

This is a film worth watching and one you really should see if you consider yourself an SF fan.