Jack Arnold in 3D
I was thinking about 3D movies and in particular of the first wave of 3D films from the ’50s. Back in university days (mid to late ’80s for me) there was a repertory theatre up in Edmonton called the Princess. It’s still there, but is sadly no longer a repertory theatre; now it plays mainstream stuff. But back then it programmed a wide variety of interesting movies, from art house to cult to independent, and one of the more amusing features they presented was a double bill of Creature from the Black Lagoon and It Came From Outer Space, in the original 3D! This was the early 3D process, with the glasses with the red and blue lenses. I saw the double bill twice, it was marvelous fun, and both times the theatre was packed. The 3D effects were Velveeta cheese generally, but it was highly entertaining watching the gillman come at you or a blast from a raygun chewing into the rock near poor Richard Carlson (who headlined the cast of both films). But beyond that, what was interesting was that they are actually well-crafted films, with the common thread being their director, Jack Arnold.
It Came From Outer Space was based on a short story by genre great Ray Bradbury, and was a tense, atmospheric little SF chiller about an alien spacecraft crashlanding in the desert. Like he would go on to do in the wonderful big-bug film Tarantula, Arnold uses the desert setting to great effect, capitalizing on the eerie, primeval landscapes. The film is one of the earliest examples I can think of with aliens taking over the bodies of normal people. The one thing that gives them away is their glowing eyes radiating from the shadows in one particularly creepy scene. Arnold directs with skill and intelligence, with the result that the movie avoids mere ’50s cheese, and even makes the aliens somewhat sympathetic. They are, after all, merely trying to get off our planet. The 3D process is used as a gimmick, like in most films from the era in this format; It Came From Outer Space is good enough that it doesn’t need it.
The gillman in "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954)
The more famous of the two flicks on this 3D double feature, Creature from the Black Lagoon has another great setting, this time in an uncharted part of the Amazon. Here, of course, a scientific expedition comes in search of the ‘missing link’ between fish and man (yet another charming example of goofy movie science). The gillman, played by Ben Chapman on land and Ricou Browning in the water, is an iconic piece of creature design, easily one of the best man-in-suit creations of cinema.
But once more, Jack Arnold takes care to develop atmosphere, laying thick on the mystery, convincing us that perhaps, deep in the lost primeval waters of South America, maybe, just maybe, there could be something strange and terrifying lurking in the dark waters. The film of course plays on that fear common to many of us, the same one that sends a brief stab of shock through our guts when we’re treading water and something brushes against our leg. There’s a masterful shot of Julia Adams, fetching in a conservative ’50s bathing suit, swimming on the surface while we see the gillman swimming underwater, on his back, tracking her every movement. It is often claimed that this sequence inspired Spielberg in shooting Jaws, and it’s not hard to see why, even if the story probably apocryphal (if I should ever find myself chatting to Mr. Spielberg I promise I’ll ask him). Again, Arnold is careful to instill sympathy for the creature, and so the gillman becomes one of the great movie monsters because, like Frankenstein’s monster as played by Boris Karloff, we partly empathize with him.
Beyond these two films, so memorably viewed on a big screen in their original 3D, Jack Arnold was responsible for unleashing other memorable SF horrors upon the 1950s moviegoers. This being the era of atomic bomb-inspired horrors, two of Arnold’s best were created by radiation. Tarantula was the result of scientist Leo G. Carroll experimenting with increasing the size of animals using atomic isotopes. One of his successes, a giant tarantula spider, escapes his lab to wreak havoc in the same bleak desert setting as It Came From Outer Space (the opening song of The Rocky Horror Picture Show references this: “And Leo G. Carroll / Was over a barrel / When tarantula took to the hills.”). Boasting some truly suspenseful sequences and convincing special effects, which involved an actual spider matted into the film, Tarantula is probably the very best of the big bug films of the ’50s.
The second of his atomic SF films was based on a story by Richard Matheson, The Incredible Shrinking Man. In this moving and thought-provoking film, Grant Williams plays a ’50s everyman whose boat passes through a ‘radiation cloud’ (goofy science again) while he sunbathes on deck. Later, he begins to decrease in size, at first not fitting his clothes, and then growing smaller and smaller until he becomes a curiosity, a freak (literally in one sense, as he has a brief relationship with a circus midget). He keeps shrinking until he becomes potential food for the housecat and then is trapped in the cellar, where he battles a giant spider. The camerawork, sets, and visual effects are extremely well executed and, once again, Arnold injects a humanity into the film that forces us to empathize with the protagonist, as he keeps shrinking, losing his family and all he knows, destined to perhaps move among the atomic fabric and shrink to nothing. It’s a startling fable of inadequacy and the loss of identity in the face of the vastness of the cosmos.
Jack Arnold was something of an auteur, bringing an intelligence and humanity to the types of films that so often fall into risibility.
Postscript:
In John Brosnan’s The Horror People, a collection of interviews with some of the creative people behind horror/SF films from the 1930s to the 1970s, Jack Arnold relates the story of how the crew rigged a device to simulate giant water drops, which drip in the basement where the minaturized protagonist of The Incredible Shrinking Man is trapped. They tried several ways to release water in such a way that it looked like a giant drip, but nothing looked convincing. Arnold remembered finding a box of condoms as a kid and filling them with water and dropping them on people, and in particular he remembered how they assumed a shape like a large water droplet as they fell. So Arnold ordered a rather large quantity of condoms and they tried them out. They worked perfectly. Fast forward to the end of the shoot and the studio execs are wondering why the significant bill for condoms in the accounts of the film. Jack Arnold explains that, well fellas, it was a helluva film to shoot, and so they just had a huge party at the end…
