BY HANK REINEKE
Creature
Feature: 60 Years of the Gill Man is, essentially, a
seventy-four minute valentine to Universal-International’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Beginning with their lavish staging of The Phantom of the Opera (1925), Universal was Hollywood’s
uncontested House of Horrors, the motion-picture industry’s preeminent fright
factory throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Their films brought to the screen the
most enduring visages of this golden age of horror. The studio made familiar faces – and
occasional bankable stars - of their contract players and talent for hire: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains, George
Zucco, Basil Rathbone, Lionel Atwill, John Carradine, Evelyn Ankers, Maria
Ouspenskaya, and Lon Chaney Jr.
But the trademark old castles and foggy moor scenarios
on which the old Universal films were staged were largely gone by the early
1950s. In the years prior to England’s
Hammer Studios breathing colorful - and sexy - new life into the gothic-horror
genre, the creaking-door chillers of times past had been supplanted by new
atomic-age monsters and belligerent visitors from the farthest reaches of
outer-space. Universal, re-christened as
Universal-International following a company merger in 1946, proved adaptable to
the change. The studio would produce
nearly as many classics during the silver-age of 1950’s science-fiction as it
had with its gothic-horrors.
The most successful and iconic of all the Universal
monster-movies of the 1950s was, without rival, Jack Arnold’s The Creature from the Black Lagoon
(1954). Arnold and producer William
Alland had worked previously – and successfully - on the sci-fi classic It Came from Outer Space (1953), so the
studio wasn’t being incautious when they invested $600,000 of those earnings on
a second collaboration. Photographed in
glorious black-and-white, principal shooting was scheduled for the Universal
back-lot and on the freshwater bayous of Wakulla Springs outside Tallahassee, Florida.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
was one the biggest box-office successes of 1954 bringing in an estimated three
million dollars on its first year of release.
The popularity of the film spawned two successful sequels,
Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956). The original film was such a phenomenon that
its pop-culture status was unusually acknowledged - and cross-promoted - by
rival studio 2oth Century-Fox. In a
famous sequence from Billy Wilder’s The
Seven Year Itch (1955), Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell are seen walking out
of a theater screening of The Creature
from the Black Lagoon. As the two
stroll along curbside, Monroe’s dress billows upward from a rush of air through
the sidewalk’s subway grate.
In a supplement from Creature Feature: 60 Years of the Gill Man, producer-writer Sam
Borowski offers that his affectionate documentary on the history and legacy of
the Gill-man was a labor-of-love. Borowski
recalls first meeting documentarian Matt Crick in lower Manhattan on what was otherwise
a solemn occasion. Both men were in
attendance at a memorial processional following the attack on the World Trade
Center, September 11, 2001. Having long
pondered a tribute to this much-loved monster-series, the producer admits it
was only after Crick signed on that the laborious process of pulling together the
bits of fragmented memories, ephemera and vintage celluloid would commence.
They had a rough-cut of the film assembled as early as
2004, and it was rumored that their documentary would be featured as a
supplement on Universal’s The Creature
from the Black Lagoon “Legacy Collection†release of 2004. For whatever reason, that didn’t happen; even
though the back cover of that DVD set oddly features an attribution credited to
the film (then sub-titled “50 years of the Gill-Manâ€). In 2005, the filmmakers began to showcase
this early cut of the film at indie-cinemas and various film-conventions but,
as far as I’m aware, this 2015 issue on Blu is its first appearance on any home
video format.
The biggest difficulty with the making of such a
documentary was that it was a late-starter. By 2001 there were few very people who had worked on the original film available
to chat with. Producer William Alland,
director Jack Arnold, and co-screenwriter Harry Essex had all passed way in the
1990s. With the exception of the
talented (and still lovely) Julie (aka Julia) Adams, nearly the entire cast had
passed on: gone from consideration were actors
Richard Carlson, Whit Bissel, Richard Denning, and Antonio Moreno. Borowski and Crick did manage an
illuminating interview with co-screenwriter Arthur Ross prior to his passing in
2008. Ross offered he was brought in
late on the first project, originally titled, Black Lagoon, to oversee the writing of a second draft. In one vignette Ross takes credit for
bringing the palpable sense of humanity to the otherwise startling-in-appearance
Gill-man.
The two featured stars of this documentary – and, aside
from Ross, the only ones to share first-person, if entirely anecdotal commentaries
- are Julie Adams and Ben Chapman. Adams
is most certainly the more well-known of the two. Signed by Universal in 1949, the actress
worked near-continuously in the television and motion-picture industry until
the late 1980s when offers became less forthcoming. Adams was doubled in many of her water
sequences by Ginger Stanley, a strong swimmer and cast member of Florida’s
Weeki Wachee Springs Water Show. Stanley
is also on hand here to generously share her experiences with the filmmakers.
Though his name does not even appear in the film’s
credits, Ben Chapman was the tall actor who donned the creature-suit for all
scenes on shot on land. (Ricou Browning,
who appears later in the tribute but doesn’t offer much in the way of
commentary, doubled as the creature in all of the film’s marvelous underwater
sequences). Chapman’s enthusiasm for
having played in such an iconic film is infectious. A frequent guest on autograph-show circuits
and monster movie conventions, Chapman was the friendlier and more out-going of
the two surviving Gill-men, always available to chat or take a smiling photograph
with fans young and old. Chapman, a
Universal contract actor, recalls he was twenty-five years old when he got the
part. His casting was the result of
brawny western star Glenn Strange having turned down the role. Strange, beloved amongst horror film fans for
playing the shuffling, stiff-armed monster in House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, passed on the role as he
wasn’t a particularly strong swimmer.