Tarantula! (USA, 1955) 80 min B&W DIR: Jack Arnold. PROD: William Alland. SCR: Robert M. Fresco, Martin Berkeley. MUSIC: Henry Mancini, Herman Stein. DOP: George Robinson. CAST: John Agar, Mara Corday, Leo G. Carroll, Nestor Paiva, Ross Elliott, Clint Eastwood, Bing Russell. (Universal-International)
“…I know Leo G. Carroll
Was over a barrel
When Tarantula took to the hills.”
(Rocky Horror Picture Show)
Although he did many kinds of movies during his tenure as a Universal contract director, Jack Arnold is best known for the handful of science fiction films he made from 1953 to 1958. What distinguishes these films from most others of the genre at the time is their surprising care and craftsmanship. While they were made on modest budgets, you would not find the sub-par production values of the papier-mâché monster from The Giant Claw, nor the normal-sized locusts crawling up miniature buildings in Beginning of the End. The Arnold films were also written with clinical matter-of-factness. Although his films were exciting, they also made you think, “Well, actually, this could happen.”
The Creature from the Black Lagoon could theoretically be the missing link in our evolution. Radiation could cause a man to shrink incredibly. In the height of Red Scare propaganda, alien invaders could take over the minds of our friends and neighbours (It Came from Outer Space)… or our children (The Space Children). Even today, the science of Tarantula makes sense. “In 1980,” says Professor Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll), “the world population will be four billion.” Therefore he is attempting to rectify the potential problem of famine in an increasingly peopled world by enlarging the cells of animals- making them bigger, to increase the food supply. However there is a cardinal truth in the fantastic cinema of Jack Arnold: “We aren’t ready yet”. The aliens in It Came from Outer Space warn us of not being able to grasp new technology; in Tarantula (and Monster on the Campus), mankind pays dearly for its intervention with the course of nature.
What is refreshing about the canon of Jack Arnold is that despite their depictions of science and technology going awry, they still offer hope (with perhaps the exception of The Incredible Shrinking Man). We can feel elated that these scientific romances have such earnest individuals. Even women are strong characters in these films, refreshingly, contributing to save the world rather than merely being carried off by a sex-starved monster.
Stephanie Clayton (Mara Corday) is certainly the love interest for Dr. Matt Hastings (John Agar), but she is his equal. You know she will never put on an apron to bake cookies or darn Beaver’s socks. She can even trade quips and cigarettes with her male companion- not for nothing is her nickname “Steve”. She can be “one of the boys” who go out and save the universe. (Paging Howard Hawks!)
But enough of the Andrew Sarris lesson in film theory. Let us just enjoy Tarantula for what it is, other than an antithesis of 1950s paranoia and sexism. Let us forget the sober rationalization of scientific theory, the subtle cautionary fable, and the interesting gender relations. Think back to 1955 where one wouldn’t notice such psychobabble, wouldn’t yet be conditioned by the CGI of Jurassic Park to dwarf the matte jobs and miniatures of the huge arachnid roaming the countryside. They wouldn’t care that the big animals in Leo G. Carroll’s laboratory were illusions of rear-screen projection. Perhaps more than any other of Arnold’s films, Tarantula takes us back to the wide-eyed amazement of our naive adolescence, our still-untrained eye. Despite the literacy to be found in all of these films, Tarantula is the one most of its time, because it is the one most reliant on the technological feats (or limitations) of its day. Just think of it as superbly crafted nostalgic escapism. We now know that a 1902 trip to the moon couldn’t have landed into someone’s eye socket. And for all the technical liabilities that further date fantasy cinema of yesteryear, why do we love it so?
For the most part, the mega-budgeted summer escapism of today has forgotten the basic rule that pervaded these modest space operas of yore: these old films make us feel like a kid again. When the eye was not fully developed to discern between real or rubber boulders, when we knew the “good parts” were coming because the Theremin began to swell on the soundtrack and brother Joey ran back to the car from the snack bar not to miss anything, when we were still young and naive enough to believe that the world was good and simple, when we still thought that troubles could be solved as easily and so quickly as laughed off as in the comic books, it is for this time that Tarantula was made. You can have The Lost World Part 16. Let’s just remember our youth all over again.
(Gee, and I didn’t even mention Clint Eastwood as the fighter pilot who shoots the tarantula.)
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #2, “The First Annual Summer Drive-In Issue”.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.