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Jack Arnold's horror classic
The Creature from the Black Lagoon spawned not one but two iconic images: the web-footed humanoid gill-man with a hankering for women and the leggy, luscious Julia Adams, the object of his desire, swimming the lagoon in a luminous white bathing suit. Not since
King Kong has the "beauty and the beast" theme been portrayed in such sexually charged (though chaste) terms. Arnold turns an effectively B-movie plot--a small expedition up a remote Amazon river captures a prehistoric amphibian man, who escapes to wreak havoc on the team and kidnap his bathing beauty--into a moody, stylish, low-budget feature. The jungle exteriors turn from exotic to treacherous when the creature blocks their passage and strands them in the wilds. Much of the film is shot underwater, where the murky dark is animated by shimmering shards of sunlight, creating images both lovely and alien (the studio-built sets of the creature's underground lair are far less naturalistic, but serve their purpose). As with most of Arnold's '50s genre films, he's saddled with a less than magnetic leading man (in this case the colorless but stalwart Richard Carlson) and a conventional script, but he overcomes such limitations by creating a vivid and sympathetic monster (helped immeasurably by a marvelous suit of scales and fins) and establishing a mood thick with atmosphere. The film was originally shot in 3-D.
--Sean Axmaker
Review
The Creature From the Black Lagoon may seem more clich today than it did in 1954; so many movies have borrowed from this source that it's hard not to snicker while watching it. But downshift your disbelief, turn up your camp receptors a few notches, and you'll thoroughly enjoy this film. Unlike most other 3-D pictures of its era, it is mercifully low on "throwing stuff at the audience" sequences, though seeing the film in stereo certainly adds to the not-inconsiderable beauty of the film's underwater sequences (and watch out for the plaster cast of the creature's claw!). Richard Carlson is a better-than-average hero, Julie Adams is a superior damsel in distress (in a damp swimming suit), Jack Arnold keeps the story moving nicely and lays on plenty of mysterious undercurrent, and Universal Pictures knew how to make a monster when they put their mind to it. If the Creature isn't as immediately memorable as Frankenstein's monster or the Wolf Man (who were both near the end of their run when this movie was made), he easily beats out the dozens of aquatic beasts that later slithered onto drive-in screens. In an imaginative suit designed by Bud Westmore, diver Ricou Browning made the Gill-Man a graceful force to be reckoned with in the water, and Ben Chapman was even more powerful (if less mysterious) when he played the Creature on land. The Creature From the Black Lagoon was one of the last worthwhile monster movies from Universal, the studio that most enthusiastically embraced the horror genre in the 1930s and '40s, and, even if one can tell at times that this is a past-prime horror flick, it has enough craft and high spirits to serve as a potent reminder of just how strong even their second-string stuff could be. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
