While you could hardly argue
that the world’s favourite leathery
squinting tough guy is the star of this sequel to The Creature from the
Black Lagoon, his brief and uncredited appearance is made all the more
entertaining for his subsequent legendary status.
Directed by Jack Arnold, one of the more intelligent exponents of the
Fifties B-movie genre, this fishy tale follows the hapless Gill Man as
he is scooped out of the Amazon and dragged to a Florida aquarium. Obviously
nobody there had seen King Kong as before you can say Fay Wray, the creature
has taken a shine to a pretty girl and busts out of his watery prison
to be with her. Mayhem, predictably, ensues.
Clint’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turn comes early in the
movie, as we’re being introduced to hero John Agar’s unusually
jovial research lab – though we should probably expect nothing
less from a professor called Clete Ferguson. It’s the kind of lab
where getting a chimp to blow hilarious raspberries is considered valid
research into simian intelligence. Oh, the wacky world of post-war science!
But the 25-year-old Clint, making his acting debut and listed only as “Lab
Technician”, is having trouble with another member of the animal
kingdom. Investigating the notion that there are no natural enemies in
the animal kingdom, provided there’s an adequate alternate food
source for all, he’s put a cat in a cage with four rats – but
now there are only three!
Clint is vexed. “It’s my considered opinion that rat number
four is lying inside that cat” he proclaims. But what’s
this? He puts his hand in his pocket to confirm that he gave all the
animals their morning feed and what should he find but the missing rat,
alive and well and apparently undetectable - even when foraging in the
undergarments of Dirty Harry. Humiliated by a rodent, young Mr. Eastwood
exits stage right and is never seen again.
Need to know: Clint went on to make an uncredited cameo in another 1955
sci-fi flick from Jack Arnold, as a jet pilot in the giant spider romp
Tarantula, before finally finding fame on seminal TV western Rawhide
in 1959. The rest, as they say, is history. The Creature, meanwhile,
returned once more in 1956’s The Creature Walks Among Us, in which
meddling scientists turn the Gill Man into a pudgy-faced air breather
with predictably catastrophic results.
Availability: Clint’s debut is available as part of the Creature
from the Black Lagoon Legacy Collection on DVD.
