THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959)
Newlyweds Paul and Joyce Webster (Richard Crane and Beverly Garland) are taking a train to their honeymoon destination. When Paul receives a frantic telegram, he gets off at the next depot to make a phone call. The train leaves without him and he disappears. After a months-long search, Joyce tracks her husband down to his family's estate, The Cypresses, in the bayous of Louisiana. Despite everyone's best efforts to keep it from her, Joyce learns that a failed medical experiment is slowly morphing Paul into an alligator. Also on hand are Levina Hawthorn (Freida Inescort), Paul's mother; Dr. Mark Sinclair (George Macready), who experiments with alligator genes in an effort to cure unnamed diseases; and Manon (Lon Chaney, Jr.), the drunken groundskeeper who lost his hand to an alligator and now spends his waking hours shooting at them.
An atypically brunette Beverly Garland delivers a reasonably effective performance as Joyce. Her devotion to Paul, even after he turns into an alligator, is surprisingly touching.
As the reptilian Paul, Richard Crane bears thick layers of clay on his face and hands (but nowhere else on his body) and speaks in a low-pitched growl that suggests a reel-to-reel tape being played at a low speed. Once he fully morphs into an alligator, sporting a costume that's beyond ridiculous, we're ten minutes away from the end of the film. Crane has little to do beyond stumbling into the swamp, pretending to fight a real-life (though heavily sedated) gator, and falling into some quicksand and dying of suffocation.
As Levina, Freida Inescort speaks in an accent that goes all over the place but rarely sounds Southern. Meanwhile, not one of the remaining characters speaks with any accent.
Lon Chaney portrays the drunken, angry Manon in a manner that makes me think the actor was genuinely smashed. It certainly was possible as Chaney was known to like his booze. Besides, if your career had gone from “The Three Musketeers,” to “The Alligator People,” wouldn't you drown your sorrows too?
Unsurprisingly, the film is rife with continuity issues. Among them:
- The story is told through flashbacks as a hypnotized Joyce recalls her repressed memories of the bayou. However, the flashbacks include several scenes in which Joyce was not present. So how could she have known about them?
- When she gets off the train in Louisiana, Joyce sees a wooden crate marked RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL and sits down on it.
- When Manon arrives at the station to pick up the crate, he is driving a truck with THE CYPRESSES clearly painted on the doors. Joyce then asks him, “Have you ever heard of The Cypresses?”
- Joyce leaves her suitcase on the railroad platform as she talks to Manon. When he agrees to drive her to The Cypresses, neither puts her suitcase in the truck. Yet when they arrive at the plantation, Joyce removes her suitcase from the rear of the vehicle.
- And what a suitcase it is! Though barely larger than a purse, it contains numerous changes of clothes.
- When Paul discovers that Joyce is at The Cypresses, he frantically tells Levina, “She's got to leave on that morning train tomorrow!” As opposed that morning train yesterday?
- Since the film establishes a deep animosity between Paul and the gator-hating Manon, one might expect a final showdown between the two; but one would be disappointed. Instead of dying at Paul's hands (or claws or whatever), the drunk-ass Manon gets himself electrocuted.
- By his own admission, Dr. Sinclair's equipment runs on “millions of volts of electricity.” Since the plantation is deep in the heart of bayou country, I have to wonder where all that electricity came from.
- Joyce chases Paul out of the mansion wearing high heels. However, she is wearing tennis shoes when she gets to the swamp just moments later.
- Near the end of the film, a horrified Paul sees his reflection in the swamp water. It's well after dark.
THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE has its moments, but they're few and far between. For the most part, it's an emblematic chunk of late '50s, low-budget, pseudo-scientific tripe.
