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Malick certainly remembers the overture, the Universal logo becomes a cosmic globe cooling in the Big Bang aftermath, footprints on wet sand give the Devonian Age that turns up intact in the Amazon. The discovery is a fossilized claw in a limestone quarry, the mission that follows continually questions who's invading whose habitat. (Early on, Jack Arnold puts the camera inside an aquarium and pans past striped and dotted specimens to find Julie Adams rapt on the other side of the glass.) The scientific curiosity of the biologist (Richard Carlson) shares the boat with the trigger-happy imperialism of the producer (Richard Denning), they sort things out in the inlet "like the beginning of the world" (cf. Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes). An amphibian missing link for Arnold's own King Kong, strapping and rope-lipped and touchingly plaintive in between rampages—in the most poetic combination of menace and sensuousness, the heroine enjoys a swim (an up-angle on the surface consumed by sunlight turns her into a silhouetted nude out of Olympia) while the creature mimics her movements below, not quite grabbing her ankles. "For a merman, he takes a fine picture." Petty normalcy on dry land, slimy lyricism in the aquatic depths, upstairs-downstairs in the humid wilderness of a studio tank. Frissons for days: Staring up impassively from a bamboo cage, the Gill-Man rises and attacks until a broken lantern sets his scales on fire, he's next seen as a webbed clutch poking through a porthole. (Nets and harpoons and bubbles also figure in the pellucid 3-D effects.) "We've just began to learn about the water and its secrets, just as we've only touched on outer space." The beast sinks to the bottom with a heart full of lead, embodiment of Arnold's thin line between "black lagoon" and "beautiful lagoon." With Nestor Paiva, Antonio Moreno, Whit Bissell, Bernie Gozier, Henry Escalante, Ricou Browning, and Ben Chapman. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |