Jack Arnold

Jack Arnold (born October 14, 1916, New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.—died March 17, 1992, Los Angeles, California) was an American director who was considered one of the leading auteurs in the science-fiction genre of the 1950s.

Arnold began his career directing and producing dozens of industrial films and documentaries for the government and the private sector. In 1953 he joined Universal Studios, where he directed one of the first films in the popular juvenile-delinquent genre of that decade, Girls in the Night (1953). Telling, as its tagline put it, the “Tense, Terrifying Truth About the Big City’s Delinquent Daughters,” it never rose above its B-film budget and cast, but it did help pave the way for now-canonical films in the genre, The Wild One (1953; directed by Laslo Benedek) and The Blackboard Jungle (1955; directed by Richard Brooks).

(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)

Arnold’s next film was the groundbreaking It Came from Outer Space (1953). Based on a Ray Bradbury story, the quietly creepy yarn about aliens who take over the identities of small-town Arizonans after their spaceship crashes is considered one of the seminal films in the science-fiction genre. It also boasted one of the more effective uses of the then-popular 3-D process. The Glass Web (1953), also shot in 3-D, was a murder mystery starring Edward G. Robinson and John Forsythe.

With Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Arnold cemented his position as the new master of “cinema fantastique.” More an old-fashioned monster movie than an exercise in science fiction, Creature was shot in 3-D but achieved its fame largely through release in a standard format. It provided the blueprint for scores of subsequent science-fiction films, most of them offering inferior versions of its effective rhythms, gripping score, and constant suspense. Enormously successful at the box office, it spawned the sequel Revenge of the Creature (1955), which Arnold also directed. The Man from Bitter Ridge (1955) was an unremarkable Lex Barker western, but the more-memorable Tarantula (1955) was second only to the previous year’s Them! (directed by Gordon Douglas) in effectiveness; both films featured “big bugs” that were created by nuclear accidents. Arnold’s next films were the formulaic crime thriller Outside the Law and the western Red Sundown (both 1956).

In 1957 Arnold directed the classic The Incredible Shrinking Man, an adaptation of a novel by author Richard Matheson, who also wrote the script. Although its special effects are crude compared with contemporary cinema, the film imparts a sense of wonder more vital than that of many big-budget epics. It centres on a man who, again the victim of a nuclear accident, shrinks to the size of an atom, battling giant spiders and cats along the way. It remains an iconic film of the era.

The Tattered Dress (1957) was a melodrama featuring Jeanne Crain and Gail Russell. Arnold then turned back to the Old West for Man in the Shadow (1957), starring Orson Welles (in his only western) and Jeff Chandler. The Lady Takes a Flyer (1958), a mainstream romance, featured Chandler alongside Lana Turner, who played a pilot who dislikes the prospect of being domesticated. High School Confidential! (1958), a tongue-in-cheek juvenile-delinquent film starring Mamie Van Doren and Russ Tamblyn, returned Arnold to B-film territory. The Space Children (1958) was a solemn story of mysteriously brainwashed children sabotaging a nuclear test site, while, completing a very busy 1958, Monster on the Campus had a less weighty message: one should not ingest the blood of a prehistoric fish unless one wants to devolve into a prehistoric killer.

By the late 1950s Arnold’s most notable work had been in the science-fiction genre. In 1959, however, he directed the British production of Leonard Wibberley’s satirical novel The Mouse That Roared and turned in a comic masterpiece, in no small part thanks to the talents of Peter Sellers. With that film’s success, Arnold never made another science-fiction movie. After the Audie Murphy western No Name on the Bullet (1959), he directed the Bob Hope–Lana Turner comedy Bachelor in Paradise (1961); The Lively Set (1964), with James Darren romancing Pamela Tiffin in between drag races; another Hope film, A Global Affair (1964); and the poorly received comedy Hello Down There (1969), with Tony Randall, Janet Leigh, and Merv Griffin. Arnold later turned out a pair of blaxploitation pictures, Black Eye (1974) and Boss Nigger (1975), along with the sexploitation entry Sex Play (1974; also called The Bunny Caper).

While his film output began to decrease in the 1960s, Arnold remained busy in television. He directed episodes for such shows as Dr. Kildare, Gilligan’s Island, Mod Squad, The Brady Bunch, and The Love Boat. He also made several TV movies, including Sex and the Married Woman (1977) and Marilyn: The Untold Story (1980). He retired from directing in the mid-1980s.