The Creature from the Black Lagoon

Following the end of World War II, there was a boom in science fiction, both in literature and film. Writers like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein wrote novels about space colonies, time travel, robots, and rocket ships. Movies from the serious to the silly also dealt with our relationship to the future and technology. There was the heavy-handed and didactic The Day the Earth Stood Still right along with the ridiculous Abbot and Costello Go To Mars and Cat-Women of the Moon. Science fiction has always been a way for us to explore the utopian or dystopian possibilities of our future as well as a method for us to deal with our anxieties about our present.

With the introduction of the atomic age and the Cold War, Americans had plenty to be optimistic about and plenty to fear. The American economy was roaring, and new scientific discoveries were being made regularly, but at the same time, uncertainty about the effects of atomic power and its influence on world politics underscored all of the country’s success with a shot of fear. Many sci fi movies from the era centered around invasions of some kind, an echo of worries about the Red Scare, and others focused on the ramifications of science gone wrong, which is often seen as a metaphor for concerns about the bomb. 

 In the case of one of the great B-movies of all time, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, it’s more a matter of being afraid of what science might discover. Released in 1954, the film’s iconography is among the most influential in monster movie history. Everyone knows the sight of the monster, the scaly, bug-eyed thing known as The Gill Man, and the phrase “from the Black Lagoon” is everywhere, including a series of kids’ books my daughter loves – The Teacher from the Black Lagoon, the Lunch Lady from the Black Lagoon, etc.  But what I find is that, even though people recognize the images, they generally haven’t seen the actual movie – which is a shame.

It is the epitome of mid-1950s B-movie sci fi. It begins with a geological expedition in the Amazon that discovers a fossilized hand of some kind humanoid fish creature. The geologist takes it to some colleagues and together they mount an expedition into unexplored regions of the Amazon River to find where it came from. Part of the team includes a scientist who simply wants to increase the world’s knowledge and his boss, who is driven almost exclusively by the financial gain a big discovery will earn. It’s like the two dueling voices of science and capitalism in crew-cuts and swim fins. Another scientist, Kay Lawrence played by Julie Adams, is on the team to serve as a voice of reason and not a small amount of 1950s era eye candy.

The team arrives at the Black Lagoon, the place where they think the fossil originated. Of course, the problems begin as they figure out that maybe not everything is as fossilized as they thought. The gill-man, an amphibious missing link, lurks in the dark waters and has no problem killing intruders as he finds them. However, in a stunning underwater sequence, the gill-man also encounters Kay as she swims around the lagoon in her iconic, blisteringly white bathing suit. Beast falls for the beauty, and the conflict between nature and science, reason and mystery commences. 

The cinematography is gorgeous, and the underwater sequences are borderline poetic. The gill-man suit is a marvel of movie making technology, especially for its time. As the creature advances on its victims, you can see its gills moving as he breathes. It’s high tech stuff for a rubber suit in 1954.

It’s silly and schlocky in many ways but as you watch it you see one thing after another that has been imitated, stolen, or riffed on. B-movie that it is, The Creature from the Black Lagoon still has a buzzy, atmospheric power that packs a punch today.

Detour

Edward G. Ulmer’s 1945 film noir, Detour, is one of the great B-movies of all time. Filmed in black and white on a shoestring budget in a matter of days with no name stars, it is one of the purest distillations of film noir there is. Like all film noirs, it’s the story of a morally ambiguous protagonist who runs into the wrong woman at the wrong time and the universe just seems to be against him. There is no happy ending, just the question of how wrong things can go before either the law catches up with him or the movie ends, whichever comes first. 

Actor and former amateur boxer Tom Neal stars as Al Roberts, a bitter would-be musician, whose lounge singer girlfriend leaves New York for Los Angeles to pursue fame and fortune. The shot of Al walking away from her in the fog once she’s made her decision with only the white globe of the streetlight visible in the gloom is atmospheric and very noir-ish but also an example of how the film’s low budget affected its aesthetic. No need to build a set if all you need is fog and a street lamp.

Once she’s gone, Al turns into even more of a sad-sack, lamenting all the could’ve’s and should’ves. He decides he’s going to do something with his life and join her on the west coast. But because he’s broke, he has to hitchhike. He gets picked up by a shady, misogynist bookie who is also heading to LA, and everything seems great until the bookie is accidentally killed. Al, instead of calling the cops or looking for help, hides the body, takes the bookie’s car, wallet and identity, and takes off for LA.

The story really picks up steam with the appearance of Vera, a hard-bitten hitchhiker who finds her way into Al’s stolen car. Played by Ann Savage, Vera is all sneering venom, greed, and anger. She figures out quickly that Al isn’t who he says he is and from then on it’s a cat-and-mouse game with Vera very much in the cat role. It’s not a nuanced performance but it punches you right in the face, and nuance isn’t always required.

The two become locked in a roundabout of blackmail, suspicion, betrayal, and self-hatred as they hurtle towards Los Angeles. The ongoing banter and battle between Al’s sad sack victim versus Vera’s white hot tough girl is immensely entertaining, and their acidic relationship builds and builds until all that acid boils over.

Detour is famous for its B-picture status, and there are plenty of myths about its production. The director once said that the entire movie was filmed in six days, and the popular legend is that the budget was around 20 grand. However, research reveals the movie was probably made over the course of four weeks, shooting on a budget of about a hundred thousand dollars. That sounds like a lot but by comparison, that same year the Bing Crosby vehicle The Bells of Saint Mary’s was made with a budget of 1.3 million. So the production quality of the Detour looks more like a hundred cents. Cheap rear projection, silly editing mistakes, and sets that look like cardboard at times are all part of the Detour experience.

The film did well enough at the box office at the time and then fell into semi-regular late night rotation on TV. It was in the 70s and 80s that Detour began to be appreciated as a prime example of film noir. Tom Neal and Edward Ulmer both died in the early 70s, but Ann Savage, Vera herself, happily did live appearances in relation to the film well into her 80s.

Detour fell into public domain years ago and is easy to find on Youtube. If you have an hour and seven minutes and feel like a bracing blast of 1940s B-movie darkness and paranoia, Detour is just a click away.

Killer B's

We’ve all heard different actors referred to as A-listers or B-movie actors. Years ago, comedienne Kathy Griffin had a show called Life on the D-List. This terminology comes from the days of double features, back when theaters trying to fill seats would play two movies back to back, sometimes with a newsreel or cartoons in between. The first picture featured recognizable, big-name stars; had high quality, often “important” subject material; had a big production budget; and was often in Technicolor and sometimes a big aspect ratio like Cinemascope. That picture, known as the A picture, had all the good stuff, but because those were expensive to make, market, and show, the second movie needed to be cheap. So, the B picture usually featured actors who were lesser known; a much smaller budget; a less ambitious or perhaps more exploitive story; and was usually in black and white. And so the A-list was born (as was the B list and everything else.)

Double features are a thing of the past, of course, but the idea remains. Prior to the home video revolution of the 80s, made for TV movies were the new second-best in cinema. In the 80s and 90s, the equivalent of the B-picture was a movie going straight-to-video. If it wasn’t good enough to appear in theaters first and was released direct to VHS, it probably starred Lorenzo Lamas and was filmed in the producer’s back yard in Malibu.

The 21^st century has brought the advent of streaming video, and initially, a movie going straight to streaming had the same stigma as straight to video. But now Netflix is complicating that by dumping buckets of money on A-listers like Martin Scorcese and others, trying to convince them to release their first-run work either directly to streaming or simultaneously in theaters and online.

A-listers like Will Smith and the horrible Woody Allen have both produced original material for streaming with mixed results at best. Disney is now in the process of establishing its own streaming service. This will have a huge impact on all other platforms considering how many subsidiaries Disney owns and could potentially pull from all other venues. If it proves popular enough, Disney could even choose to release its first run movies on streaming only and cut out the cost of dealing with theater chains altogether. Imagine Frozen 2 or Toy Story 4 or the second half of Avengers: Infinity War only being available for home viewing and then only if you subscribe to Disney’s streaming service.

The idea of what qualifies as A-list or B-list material used to be as easy to identify as figuring out which movie was in color and which was in black and white. But with the advent of more sophisticated moviemaking technology and more prevalent home viewing platforms, those definitions are becoming increasingly complicated.

The financial contraction of Hollywood filmmaking also affects the creation of B-pictures. With budgets for tent pole projects getting bigger and bigger, there’s less money for smaller, less ambitious movies. Because Infinity War cost 316 million dollars to make, there’s less cash to make a small love story or an economical gangster picture. So I worry that B-pictures as we understand them might cease to exist altogether. Instead of small, lesser-known but still interesting pictures coming to the theaters, we may be headed for a future of just getting continually swamped with endless Netflix projects.

And that would be a shame because so much of what we think of when we envision westerns, science fiction movies, gangster pictures, and film noir comes from that low-budget, no-stars tradition. Yes, many of them are low-quality schlock and are just fun to watch because they’re so bad, they’re good. But some are legitimately great movies. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll tell you about two of my favorite B-movies: 1945’s ultra low-budget noir, Detour and 1954’s wildly influential monster movie, The Creature from the Black Lagoon.