The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick (Preview)
by Mallory O’Meara. Toronto: Hanover Square Press, 2019. 307 pp., illus. Hardcover: $26.99.

Reviewed by Kevin Canfield

Is the scaly, smitten title character of Creature from the Black Lagoon “one of the most iconic movie creations of all time”? Is the film itself an unqualified “masterpiece”? Mallory O’Meara thinks so, and her ardor for Jack Arnold’s 1954 monster thriller is palpable. In The Lady from the Black Lagoon, the first-time author sets herself two tasks. She aims to demonstrate that a largely unknown artist named Milicent Patrick helped design the Creature but was robbed of proper credit by a sexist boss. And she wants to explain how Patrick’s work inspired her to pursue a creative career of her own. Like the film that inspired its title, the resulting book is at once gripping and choppy, and sometimes it’s quite poignant. 

O’Meara was seventeen and already a “devoted monster geek” when she first saw Arnold’s film. She adored it, especially the scene in which the Creature swims alongside—and lays a gentle flipper on—a scientist named Kay Lawrence (Julie Adams). O’Meara says she immediately identified with the Creature’s sense of alienation. “Covered in acne, awkward, feeling fat and ugly, I didn’t know how to approach people I found attractive,” she writes. This was a turning point in her understanding of the catharsis offered by genre entertainment: “The power of a monster movie is in seeing that dark part of you running around on-screen.” 

Determined to learn more about her new favorite film, O’Meara started digging. Along with a host of facts and trivia, her research unearthed a photo of a paintbrush-wielding woman applying some pigment to the titular monster. A caption identified her as “Milicent Patrick, animator and creature designer.” O’Meara, aware that the midcentury horror movie scene was even more of a lads’ club than the current iteration, found the image “galvanizing.” As the years passed, Patrick became her personal lodestar. By her midtwenties, O’Meara was working for a production company, making films that, if not as widely seen as Creature from the Black Lagoon, occupy similar artistic territory. Meanwhile, she had an image of Patrick and the Creature tattooed on her left forearm. And when it became clear that if she didn’t do it, it would probably never get done, O’Meara began to write Patrick’s life story.

Or something like it. Though The Lady from the Black Lagoon might be classified as a biography, we get to know its author almost as well as its subject. O’Meara takes a memoirist’s approach to historical research, which means that she doesn’t just present what she’s learned about Patrick—she describes her unremarkable interactions with archivists and clerks, peppers her text with the names of friends who helped with the project, and recounts her visit to a government office in what feels like real time (“I made the drive to the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office. Pulling into the parking lot…”). Her personal approach can be powerful, as when she details the sexual harassment she’s encountered as a female filmmaker. But not all of her anecdotes are insightful. In one chapter, for instance, what might have been an interesting discussion about how actors learn to look natural in front of cameras is weighed down by a tedious digression about O’Meara’s author photograph, which appears on the dust jacket. More often, however, O’Meara is charmingly irreverent, and in Patrick she’s found an interesting woman with which to share her narrative. 

O’Meara’s thesis is straightforward. She argues that Patrick deserves more credit than she received for designing the Creature costume worn in the film by actors Ricou Browning and Ben Chapman. Released in 3-D in early 1954, Creature from the Black Lagoon was an heir to Frankenstein (1931), Dracula (1931), The Wolf Man (1941), and other famed Universal Pictures monsters. It garnered some appreciative reviews and took in a respectable $1.3 million at the box office. But Patrick’s contribution, at first touted by the studio, was gradually erased from the public record. Her “work was, like that of many other women, purposefully hidden to rob her of her power and influence,” O’Meara writes. 

Drawing on files at the University of Southern California’s Cinematic Arts Library and the personal collections of her fellow monster “nerds,” O’Meara gives us a vivid sense of Patrick’s eventful entertainment career. After a spell at art school, Patrick was twenty-three when she took a job at Walt Disney’s animation studio in 1939. Her duties included applying ink “to pieces of slippery celluloid,” O’Meara writes, a task that “required nearly surgical precision for hours and hours on end, staring in one spot that was lit underneath by a light box.” She worked on Fantasia (1940) and Dumbo (1941) but left the job in 1941 as the studio, shaken by a recent employee strike, cut its workforce and reorganized its remaining staffers. 

Patrick spent part of the Forties and Fifties working as an extra; she shows up in Chaplin’s Limelight (1952), among others. Between takes, she drew on a sketchpad, and her artistic skills apparently caught the attention of Bud Westmore. One of several brothers who ran makeup departments at Hollywood studios, Westmore brought her on board at Universal. According to O’Meara, the hiring made “Milicent the first woman ever to work in a special effects makeup department,” where she designed makeup schemes for the Errol Flynn film Against All Flags (1952) and was tapped to make drawings of the amorphous, single-eyeballed being in It Came from Outer Space (1953)…

To read the complete review, click here so that you may order either a subscription to begin with our Winter 2019 issue, or order a copy of this issue.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste, Inc. 

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 1