During the week I was laid low with bronchitis (I’ll still have it for a while, but my energy levels are improving), two of the very last stalwarts of ’50s monster movie cinema, Ricou Browning and Bert I. Gordon, passed away. Truly a bitter week for fans.
Ricou Browning was one of two men–Ben Chapman played him on the land–who portrayed the utterly iconic Gill Man from Universal’s Creature of the Black Lagoon. Designed by Milicent Patrick, the suit was so perfect that no one has really successfully gotten from its design in all the decades since. The Creature was famously the last of Universal’s “Classic Monsters,” and the first non-gothic one.
Yet if the suit’s design was visually perfect, it still needed inhabitants to bring it to life. Ben Chapman brought a lumbering size and formidable strength to the out of water Gill Man, but on land the Creature was literally out of his element. It was Ricou Browning who played the Gill Man underwater, often holding his breath for four minutes at a time due the streamlined suit’s inability to hold an air tank. Mr. Browning’s lithe, balletic performance added both an unearthliness and yet somehow a bit of humanity to the Creature. How this non-actor so ably managed to communicate the sheer longing the Creature felt for Julia Adams in their famous mirrored swimming sequence is a marvel of physical acting.
Mr. Browning continued to play the Creature in the two sequels, and then went on to a long career in TV and film, often in projects utilizing his underwater skills.
Mr. Browning was 93 at the time of his passing.
