The Gill Man underwater
by Lee Price
The Creature at Home in Weird Florida
Compared to King Kong on the Empire State Building, the Creature at Marineland may sound like small potatoes. But for me, it’s not. This is personal. When I saw Revenge of the Creature (1955) as a young boy, I knew Marineland as the place we visited on summer vacations. I had sat in those bleachers watching the porpoise shows, sitting above the exact same tank where the Creature had once been manacled and broken free. I’ve never been to the top of the Empire State Building, but I’ve walked where the Creature rampaged. That’s holy ground for me. It’s personal.
My parents loved the glass-bottomed boats, the swamps and cypress knees, the mermaids, and the water ski shows of 1960s pre-Disney World Florida. On our vacations there, they humored my desire to stop at every park that advertised (life-size, concrete) dinosaurs. And I loved the signs at the parks that would proudly announce that Esther Williams’ movies, or Tarzan movies, or Creature from the Black Lagoon movies, had been filmed there. I could stand by the bank of some waterside paradise and imagine that the Gill Man’s webbed footprints might still be preserved in this mud, like ancient dinosaur footprints. The word kitsch hadn’t entered our vocabularies yet. This was simply Florida.
We visited Marineland, which looked exactly like it did in Revenge of the Creature. We visited Silver Springs, once visited by Hollywood crews for nearly every movie purporting to take place in Africa or South America. We visited Weeki Wachee, with its mermaids and mermen who looked human but swam sort of like the Gill Man did. And so many more memories from visiting the manatees at Homosassa Springs to walking the catwalk through the swamps at Cypress Knee Museum.
Historic postcard of Marineland in its glory days
In my heart, I always knew that the Gill Man’s natural habitat – the place where he could swim freely or run amok amid tourists – was pre-Disney World weird Florida. It was a different time and a different kind of weird than we see nowadays. It was Gill Man weird, with rivers and swamps that looked identical to those of the Amazon River Basin (because they WERE Hollywood’s Amazon tributaries, as well as the jungles of Tarzan’s Africa). I sensed this truth all along. The Gill Man was never really from the Amazon. He was a native Floridian, a Florida Man.
The Creature’s Black Lagoon home location is primarily Wakulla Springs, a park up in Florida’s panhandle, 15 miles south of Tallahassee. Captured at the outset of Revenge of the Creature, the Gill Man is transported to Marineland, located on Florida’s Atlantic coast, midway between Jacksonville and Daytona Beach. Then the Creature escapes and stalks his new love interest (Lori Nelson as Helen Dobson) up the St. Johns River toward Jacksonville. Underwater footage for this section was filmed at Silver Springs, a mile or two northeast of Ocala.
And lurking in the background of it all is Weeki Wachee, located on Florida’s Gulf side near Brooksville, one of Florida’s most delightfully weird attractions. Established in 1947, Weeki Wachee attracted audiences to a small theater built into the side of a natural spring, with viewing windows below the water line for a clear view of the spring’s fish, manatees, mermaids, and, sometimes, alligators. Here, audiences watched attractive young women, known as the Weeki Wachee mermaids, perform aquatic ballet and enact fairy tales, often smiling and waving to the children in attendance.
While the Weeki Wachee location never actually appears in any of the Creature movies, the site exerted a profound influence on the productions. Early in the location scouting portion of Creature from the Black Lagoon pre-production, the second-unit Creature team met with Ricou Browning, an athletic young man with ties to both Wakulla Springs and Weeki Wachee. The Hollywood visitors quickly realized how all-around indispensable Browning might be to the production. After seeing test footage of Browning swimming, Creature director Jack Arnold asked him to play the Creature for its underwater scenes. A quick study, Browning intuitively grasped what needed to be done and quickly organized an informal group, primarily of Weeki Wachee Florida insiders, to support his underwater performance (while the first unit, under director Jack Arnold, organized the production elements to be filmed in Hollywood).
Building on his experience with the Weeki Wachee theatricals, Browning figured out how to use Weeki Wachee hose-breathing technology and underwater pantomime to bring a plausible aquatic monster to life on film. Browning’s team worked with scuba-diving 3-D cinematographer ‘Scotty’ Welbourne’s team to create the immaculately framed, lit, and performed underwater scenes that would be a highlight of all three Creature movies. When the Creature memorably swims underneath Julie Adams in Creature from the Black Lagoon and Lori Nelson in Revenge of the Creature, that’s Browning swimming underneath Ginger Stanley, the talented Weeki Wachee mermaid who Browning recruited to serve as a reliable and responsible stunt double.
From the opening of The Creature from the Black Lagoon to the close of Revenge of the Creature, we’re immersed in the weird Florida of a bygone day, still capable of summoning a magical place and time, when little boys visited the abodes of monsters, visible from the bottom of a glass-bottomed boat.
Through the Looking Glass
The deservedly iconic scene in Creature from the Black Lagoon where the Gill Man shadows Julie Adams as she swims in the Black Lagoon has a creative counterpart in Revenge of the Creature. No, not the scene where the Gill Man shadows Lori Nelson as she takes a dip in the St. Johns River with John Agar. There’s no creativity in recreating the scene but with the addition of one unnecessary character. That’s just lazy.
The intriguing counterpart is the scene where the Creature follows Lori Nelson as she moves from one porthole window to the next inside the lower level of the Marineland seaquarium. As with so many of the best scenes in the first two Creature movies, this is a scene where Ricou Browning and underwater 3-D cinematographer ‘Scotty’ Welbourne appear to be firmly in charge. Welbourne follows the Creature from behind with an over-the-shoulder shot as he follows his love interest as she moves down the corridor. Thanks to Browning’s incredible body language, the Creature’s fascination with Nelson is clearly conveyed. As with the scene in the first movie, the heroine is unaware that she is being watched. An impossible yearning is visually conveyed, similar to the classic scene in Black Lagoon while clearly yoked to the new plot and location.
Ricou Browning as the Creature watches Lori Nelson through the aquarium viewing windows at Marineland.
In these underwater shots, and in others scattered throughout both movies, Welbourne’s poetic black-and-white images approach the abstract, especially when he tilts his camera upward to catch a silhouette of characters backlit by the sun shining through the water. In Creature from the Black Lagoon, Kay is shown this way during her swim, viewed from a Creature point of view. Sexy as Julie Adams is, the shot is less provocative than ethereal, effectively emphasizing her vulnerability. This strategy is repeated later as the corpse of Mark Williams (Richard Denning) languidly rises toward the Lagoon’s surface. It’s oddly poetic, somewhat suggestive of a classic image captured the following year when director Charles Laughton depicted a murder victim underwater in his classic The Night of the Hunter (1955).
Left: Death in CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954). Right: Death in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955).
The Perfect Creature Movie
Somewhere between the time when Creature producer William Alland first heard an Amazonian man-fish story from cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa in 1940 and the time when he wrote down the three-page “Sea Monster” story concept document for Universal in 1952, Alland united the man-fish idea with the Beauty and the Beast narrative formula. Specifically, he employed the King Kong version of Beauty and the Beast.
Here’s the plot: A team of adventurers travels to an unexplored corner of the world, they find a monster who is attracted to the sole woman on the expedition, the monster carries off the woman and takes her to his lair, the good guys rescue the woman and capture the monster and bring it to civilization, the monster escapes and terrorizes the neighborhood, the monster carries off the woman again, and then the woman is rescued (again) and the monster destroyed. That’s the King Kong trajectory.
In his original “Sea Monster” proposal, Alland proposed two possible endings for his man-fish. In the first, the monster is destroyed during the first rescue of the woman, with the monster dying in his primeval lair. In the second, the monster is captured and brought back to civilization leading to a final bout of escape-terror-rescue and the inevitable resolution.
Viewed in succession, Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature tell this whole story. The Creature from the Black Lagoon essentially ends at the midway King Kong point where Bruce Driscoll and Fay Wray scramble down the vine from Kong’s lair on Skull Mountain, finally plunging to safety in the water below. End of first Creature movie. Revenge of the Creature opens with the capture of the monster, then keeps to the Kong trajectory with the arrival of the monster in civilization (Marineland!), the monster’s terrifying escape, the carrying off of the love interest, and the final rescue of the heroine and climactic destruction of the monster.
John Agar rescues Lori Nelson from the Creature (played here by Tom Hennesy).
The problem with Revenge of the Creature is that it’s too long! When Kong arrives in New York, King Kong is two thirds over. Its story moves swiftly from Kong’s escape to his fall from the Empire State Building. Revenge of the Creature has 82 minutes to fill and it suffers from the padding. While it’s still a very good b-movie (way too good to have ever deserved the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment it received), it could have been so much better.
In my dream version of Creature from the Black Lagoon, the original script would have expanded on Alland’s second option, telling the whole story in a single movie. With due respect for a charming Lori Nelson and a grudging “he’s-okay” for John Agar, they can both be dismissed from the plot. Julie Adams and Richard Carlson from the first movie should accompany the Creature back to Marineland. Instead of a fickle Gill Man casually dropping his crush on Adams to pursue Nelson, the audience can enjoy a straight through line that starts with Adams and ends with Adams. King Kong never ditched Fay Wray for some visiting blonde! Monsters are loyal. You should not do Beauty and the Beast with two Beauties!
In my mind, the appropriate length for a King Kong movie is 100 minutes (note: Most assuredly NOT a Peter Jacksonian 188 minutes!). The Creature doesn’t need more than that. This can be accomplished with a little editing and a few reshoots. The first movie barely needs to be touched. Trim five minutes (maybe that unnecessary Carlson/Denning fistfight) and it can come in at 75 minutes. That leaves a major trim of Revenge of the Creature, down from 82 minutes to 25. Sorry but we’re going to have to lose the chimpanzee and Clint Eastwood antics at Marineland, everything with Agar and Nelson, and that whole boat romance on the Porpoise III bound for Jacksonville. Instead, the Creature arrives at Marineland, gets shackled to the aquarium floor, moons after Julie Adams through the porthole windows, breaks out, grabs Adams and carries her out toward the ocean, and then civilization definitively destroys the Creature – by guns or biplanes with machine guns or an Oxygen Destroyer or whatever else may be at hand.
Or we can go all the way back to the Beauty and the Beast plot, and this time roll the film as revised by Shrek (2001). At the water’s edge, the Creature pauses to kiss Julie Adams. As their lips touch, the curse is broken and she turns into a Gill Woman, her authentic self now free to embrace her Creature. They disappear into the sea to live happily ever after. Too far fetched? Well, it kinda worked for Guillermo del Toro, so don’t be too dismissive!
A happy ending for a Gill Man in THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017).
REFERENCES
The Creature Chronicles: Exploring the Black Lagoon Trilogy by Tom Weaver with David Schecter and Steve Kronenberg, with an introduction by Julie Adams: The authoritative source for all things Black Lagoon.
The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara: Milicent Patrick gets the advocate she deserves. A really fun read, too!
Creature from the Black Lagoon (Complete Legacy Collection, DVD or Blu-Ray): With Tom Weaver commentaries for all three movies, plus the Back to the Black Lagoon documentary with ace horror film historian David Skal.
Various discussions on The Classic Horror Film Board at tapatalk.com: In my opinion, the greatest and most civilized of all currently active film discussion boards.
When processing Creature information, it all boils down to this: If Tom Weaver says it, I believe it.
Portions of this blog entry were previously published at the “21 Essays” blog in 2013.
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