Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

Creature from the Black Lagoon arrives from 1954 with a modest reputation for atmosphere and a much larger reputation for scholarship it never requested. The film concerns an expedition up the Amazon that finds a Devonian fossil, then a living owner of that fossil, then a series of deaths aboard a tramp steamer. The Creature is played by two men, one on land and one underwater, and the underwater photography remains the finest argument the picture makes for itself. It is a monster movie. It has no interest in being anything else, and it says so plainly for eighty minutes.

The Amazon setting supplies a handful of local performers, among them Antonio Moreno, Nestor Paiva, Rodd Redwing, and Perry Lopez, cast in the ethnic register that 1954 Hollywood considered appropriate for a Brazilian river and its inhabitants. This is period practice, not a statement of cultural purpose. Kay Lawrence, played by Julie Adams, is described in the studio's own materials as the beautiful fiancee, and she is used accordingly: swimming, screaming, carried into a grotto. Scholars have since found a great deal of symbolic weight in her stalker. The film did not put it there. Dr. Mark Williams wants the Creature captured for money, which is the closest the screenplay comes to a critique of anything, and it is not close at all.

Barbara Creed's psychoanalytic reading of the monster has traveled far beyond the movie that inspired it. The movie remains a boat, a lagoon, a man in a rubber suit with a magnificent head, and a woman who exists to be taken. This is entertainment, disciplined and unpretentious, and it preaches nothing, which is its own modest virtue in any era.