Rico says the ladyfriend had never seen it, and
Rico didn't remember it anyway, so we watched the
Creature from the Black Lagoon recently. Hokey doesn't
begin to describe it; it
was 1954, after all. (
Rico wouldn't have seen it until much later, probably in the early 1960s.) The low-tech of the monster (though he did a lot of stunts underwater, with no breathing apparatus) was offset by the then-new
AquaLung, invented in Paris during the winter of 1942–1943 by the engineer
Émile Gagnan and then
lieutenant de vaisseau (ship-of-the-line lieutenant)
Jacques Cousteau; they used the classic two-bottle, two-hose version:
Starring
Richard Carlson and
Richard Denning as the warring scientists, the love interest was
Julie Adams, who did the then-obligatory screaming whenever she saw the monster, played by
two actors,
Ricou Browning as
The Gill Man in water, and
Ben Chapman as
The Gill Man on land; they were uncredited, it's said, in the forlorn hope of convincing audiences that the monster (photo, below) was real...
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