Photo: Director Jack Arnold (right) shows star Grant Williams how to handle a giant prop used in the making of The Incredible Shrinking Man.
If director Jack Arnold were alive today, he would be 93. A former stage actor and also a writer who occasionally co-authored his screenplays, Arnold was an underrated master of genre (science fiction, horror, westerns, film noir) and of film form, the only filmmaker to have directed four features in the 3-D format. His best-remembered movies include It Came From Outer Space (1953), The Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957 – his masterpiece), High School Confidential (1958), The Space Children (1958), and The Mouse That Roared (1959). To celebrate his birthday, and in the spirit of Catherine Grant’s great Film Studies for Free website, Bright Lights After Dark offers the following collection of links relating to director Arnold and his work.
Allan Gray – Thoughts on ‘No Name on the Bullet’
Arbogast – Unusual Histories (Tarantula)
C. Jerry Kutner – Welcome to the Modern World: Program Notes for a Michelangelo Antonioni-Jack Arnold Film Festival
C. Jerry Kutner – 3-D Noir: Thank You, Mickey Spillane!
David Cairns – “All the Same I Feel Sorry for the Creature” (Creature From the Black Lagoon)
David Cairns – ET Go Home (It Came From Outer Space)
David Cairns – Lost in Space (The Glass Web)
Ed Howard – Jack Arnold Double Feature: Tarantula/Monster on the Campus
Ed Howard – The Monolith Monsters
Gary Tooze – The Incredible Shrinking Man DVD Review
Gary Tooze – Tarantula! DVD Review
John Brosnan – Jack Arnold: A History of Horror
Mark McGee & Susan Frank – Interview: Classic Sci-Fi Film Director Jack Arnold
SPECIAL BONUS for readers lucky enough to possess their own anaglyphic (red/green) 3-D glasses – a clip from It Came From Outer Space (1953) that shows Arnold’s feeling for the otherness of landscape and why I consider him the first American master of three-dimensional mise-en-scene. (Via David Cairns.)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SALILUO-gpM]
