:41:02
For medium shots, the holes were
bigger and he could see better,
:41:05
and for long shots, he had eyes with
good-size holes, and could see fine.
:41:09
For Ricou Browning, working
underwater, it was a lot harder.
:41:12
At first, he tried to wear goggles
under the creature mask,
:41:16
but once water got in the goggles,
you couldn't get it out.
:41:18
They gave him a face mask,
:41:19
but that made the gill-man face
bulge out too far.
:41:22
Finally, they just gave up,
and he used his naked eyes.
:41:25
That was tough, because the creature
mask was bigger than his head,
:41:28
and sometimes the eyeholes were
a couple of inches from his real eyes.
:41:32
Seeing out was like lookin' through
a keyhole from a couple inches away.
:41:36
He said his vision was often very blurred,
and that a lot of it was kinda hit and miss.
:41:41
The creature suit we see
in the movie was not the first one
:41:44
the make-up department came up with.
The first one was very different
:41:48
from the eventual design,
and it was rejected pretty quickly.
:41:51
Ricou Browning described it as more
streamlined than the one we know.
:41:54
According to Ricou
"It had less scales, less fins,
:41:58
and the head was more like
you were wearing a tight stocking."
:42:01
"A little bit more human in appearance."
:42:03
That early rejected head
was sculpted by Chris Mueller,
:42:06
almost certainly from
a design by Milicent Patrick.
:42:08
And when Universal started thinking
about making a second Creature movie,
:42:13
there was talk of
adding a Gill-Woman.
:42:15
The rejected gill-man head,
or something like it,
:42:17
would have been used
as the head of the female creature.
:42:20
When the rejected head was made,
it was supposed to be a gill-man,
:42:23
but the eventual gill-man head used
in the picture looked so ferocious
:42:27
that this more human head looked
almost feminine by comparison.
:42:36
Q Magazine: "This horrendous
pseudo-science-fiction melodrama
:42:39
revolves, wildly, in three dimensions
and with considerable excitement,
:42:43
around a poor ancestral fish that
never quite made the grade to man."
:42:47
"However, it ain't funny, McGee.
On the contrary, it's pretty scary."
:42:50
"And Creature from the Black Lagoon
is a first-rate thriller-chiller of its type."
:42:55
But when the movie played on TV,
the New York Times always called it
:42:58
"about as charming as a dead cat".