This March sees the 64th anniversary of the Creature From the Black Lagoon's first appearance on the cinema screen. Producer William Alland put him there; Ricou Browning and Ben Chapman were the men in the scaly suit.
GILL-MEN, it seems, are all the rage this year. Guillermo del Toro, who first saw The Creature From the Black Lagoon at the age of six, has taken his own reworking of the story out of the murky depths of the Amazon and all the way to the Oscars. The dates are neatly symmetrical: on March 5th 1954, the original Creature movie went on general release; on March 4th 2018, del Toro stood on the stage of the Dolby Theatre and accepted a Best Picture statuette for The Shape of Water. We'll talk more about the Oscars another time, but meanwhile, I wanted to find out how the Creature, who many consider to be the last of Universal's classic monsters, made it to the screen in the first place.
The short answer is: slowly.
It was way back in 1940 when producer William Alland first came up with the story idea. At the time, he was a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre troupe, and had been invited to a dinner party at Welles' house. Another guest, Mexican cameraman Gabriel Figureoa, spun a yarn about a mysterious half-human, half-fish hybrid living in the Amazon basin, who would emerge from the depths once a year to claim a maiden from the local villages. Even though Figureoa swore it was true, Alland didn't believe a word. Still, it was a good story and the idea stuck in his mind.
A decade later Alland was a movie producer at Universal, and recalled Figureoa's tale while trying to dream up ideas for new pictures. He typed up a three-page story synopsis, called it simply 'The Sea Monster' and submitted it for approval. His notes were expanded into a story treatment by writer Maurice Zimm, to which he gave the title 'The Black Lagoon' and which featured a prehistoric throwback referred to as the 'Pisces Man'. The treatment then passed through the hands of scriptwriters Leo Lieberman and Arthur Ross before landing on Harry Essex's desk for final revisions and refinements. The Creature was gaining momentum.
A LOT OF UNDERWATER
Ricou Browning, soon to be the first man to put on the Creature suit, told historian Tom Weaver how his involvement began: "Newt Perry phoned me and said he'd received a call about showing some Hollywood people around Wakulla Springs ... It was Jack Arnold and the cameraman, 'Scotty' Wellbourne and a couple other people ... The kind of movie they were planning to make? Not once did the subject come up. Just that there was going to be a lot of underwater."
Newton Perry was the manager of the Wakulla Springs resort, a cypress swamp about fifteen miles south of Tallahasee with cold but crystal-clear water ideal for underwater filming. Perry was away when the men from Universal came calling, so he'd asked his 23 year old employee Browning to act as host in his absence. This was in July of 1953. Director Arnold had just wrapped up It Came From Outer Space, also with William Alland producing, and was by then laying the groundwork for Black Lagoon. He and Wellbourne had come on a location scout, hoping to find an affordable stand-in for the uncharted Amazon among the Florida everglades.
Browning knew the area well. He'd worked at Wakulla ever since he was a kid performing diving feats for the tourists, and would nowadays double up as lifeguard or ticket collector when not appearing in the daily water shows. Wellbourne had brought along his underwater camera, and wanted to make a few test shots. Browning already had some experience on film, doubling for Forrest Tucker in his underwater fight scenes for Crosswinds (1951), so was happy to oblige.
A couple of months later, he got a phone call from Arnold. "How would you like to be the Creature?" Arnold asked.
"Creature?" Browning replied. "What creature?"
THE CREATURE'S FEATURES
Meanwhile, over at Universal, the monster's appearance was still in development, and would apparently take a wrong turn or two on the way. An early version of the suit, which sported an improbable mane of black hair, was later christened 'the Pollywog' by staff sculptor Chris Mueller. Frank Westmore, who also worked on the film with his brother Bud, later wrote:
"Instead of projecting menace, he looked like a man swimming around in long rubber underwear with black hair stuck to it."
A few reels of test footage were shot at Universal with Ricou Browning in costume, but the 'Pollywog' didn't impress anybody and was swiftly abandoned.
The final look of the iconic monster we know is usually credited to Universal's head of make-up Bud Westmore, but more recently it's been established that actress and artist Millicent Patrick came up with the initial visual concept. The talented but underappreciated Patrick also dreamed up the Xenomorphs from It Came From Outer Space, the Metaluna Mutants in This Island Earth and Boris Karloff's Mr Hyde make-up in his encounter with Abbott and Costello. Patrick's conceptual drawings were handed over to sculptor Jack Kevan, who turned them into a 3-D reality around casts of Ricou Browning's various body parts.
But Browning, of course, wasn't the only one to claim the role. For the scenes shot on dry land, it was the formidable six-foot-five ex-Marine Ben Chapman who donned the foam rubber costume, and Chapman who made all the publicity appearances after the film's release - for which, the costume stayed on. Universal never gave the Gill-man actors a credit, fearing, as Chapman incredulously put it, "the public would think it was just a fake guy in a suit". As if it could be anything else? Despite Chapman's imposing figure, co-star Julia Adams (pictured with Chapman below) remembered him as "very gentle, with a sweetness about him", and would greet him with a cheery "Good morning, Beastie!" every day they appeared together on set.
Chapman has said he found the Creature costume, a one-piece body stocking with moulded foam rubber appliances stuck to it, to be quite comfortable to wear, but putting it on was a complicated process which took a good two or three hours to complete. Manoeuvring this cumbersome arrangement underwater proved even more difficult, and although Chapman had trained as a diver in the Marines, the more experienced (and, at 5' 9", considerably shorter) Ricou Browning was entrusted with all scenes not filmed on dry land.
NO CREATURE COMFORTS
Browning thus had the additional burden of being barely able to see and completely unable to breathe every time he was on film. Furthermore, the foam rubber was naturally buoyant, so lead weights were needed to keep him in position below the surface. The underwater 3-D camera, invented and operated by 'Scotty' Wellbourne, was lightweight and mobile enough to capture some stunning shots with more ease than had been possible even a few years previously, but the process was still a time-consuming one.
Browning used a trusted team of 'safety men' standing by off-camera with air hoses, a technique he had used as a performer at Wakulla Springs. "It was just hard work", he recalled in an interview with arts magazine Pasatiempo. "I would breathe from air hoses, swim in and perform whatever scene it was — for as long as I could hold my breath — and then go to the safety people who had other air hoses and get some air. We had a signal — if I went totally limp, that meant I needed air. It worked out fine, and we didn’t have any accidents at all."
Even if they had, it appears that Universal had more stand-in Creatures waiting in the (water) wings just in case. Henry Escalante, who has a supporting role as Chico in the film, has claimed that he too served as a part-time Gill-man in the later stages of shooting on the Universal Studios lot. This is quite likely true; there is evidence that several stunt men were used at various times, including Rock Hudson's double Al Wyatt, who stood in for the scene where the Creature is set on fire.
Despite the practical difficulties outlined above, principal photography completed - only two days late - on Halloween 1953. The film had gone slightly over its original budget of $595,000, but a preview in Detroit on February 12th went well, and the film soon turned into what is commonly referred to as 'a resounding success'. Sixty-four years, two sequels and many imitations later, the Creature has since become a cinema icon, and the scenes of him swimming gracefully beneath the swimsuit-clad Julia Adams (or her double, Ginger Stanley) have become some of the most memorable in all of horror cinema.
The last word goes to Ben Chapman, who passed away in February 2008, and had his own ideas about what made his most famous role so appealing. "Today’s horror films are too realistic. In our day, the reason they made movies was as escapism. You come out, you feel great. If you look at a movie called 'The 7 Year Itch', with Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, when they come out of the theater, she says ‘Oh, I feel sorry for the creature.' Because if you look in the background, they had just come from seeing “The Creature From The Black Lagoon.”
Sources: Tom Weaver, 'Universal Terrors' / 'The Creature Chronicles'; Pasatiempo - Robert Nott,'The Monster Mash-Up'; Chaos Control Digizine - Bob Gourley, Ben Champman Interview
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