"The Revolting, Scaly, Monarchs of the Swamp!"

THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE (1959)
Directed by Roy Del Ruth
Starring:
Beverly Garland – Joyce Webster, aka Jane Marvin
Lon Chaney, Jr. – Manon
Frieda Inescort – Mrs. Lavinia Hawthorne
George Macready – Dr. Mark Sinclair
Richard Crane – Paul Webster

Beverly Garland, star of The Alligator People, passed away in December of 2008. With her passing, Hollywood lost one tough, classy drink of water. For the lovers of B-movies she is an icon, appearing in no less than five films for Roger Corman, (Gunslinger, It Conquered the World, Naked Paradise, Not of This Earth, and Swamp Women) not only surviving the director’s hellish shooting schedule but thriving in the physical, fast Corman environment, thank you so much.

While some actors have chaffed and suffered under the Corman doctrine, (Allison Hayes, star of the ever-great The Attack of the 50 foot Woman and a Corman favorite, once asked him flatly, “Roger, who do I have to fuck to get off this picture?”) the director and Garland got along famously. In Corman’s interesting autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (Random House, 1990), Garland fondly remembers Corman this way: “What I adored about Roger was he never said, ‘this can’t be done.’ Pouring rain, trudging through the mud and heat, getting ptomaine poisoning, sick as a dog – didn’t matter. Never say die. Never say can’t. Never say quit. I learned to be a trooper under Roger.” As her work in Alligator People will demonstrate, it was a lesson Garland learned well.

Along with these Corman endurance contests, Garland appeared in over 40 films, among them the noir classic D.O.A (1950). Not for nothing, she was also the first female lead to ever appear on a television series, Decoy (1957-59), in which she portrayed TV’s first female cop, Officer Casey Jones of the New York City Police Department. Goddamn, that’s a resume!

The film under the radiated lights here, The Alligator People, is my favorite Beverly Garland movie because within her performance as Joyce Webster, we have all the traits that made the actress a legend: a combination of refined, sophisticated beauty, iron will, and impulsive, courageous action. A Garland character, with her beautiful smile and brisk intelligence, always held more than her own in polite society. She could also hold her own running at night through a Louisiana swamp in a thunderstorm, searching for an endangered husband, leaping over alligators (more on this later).

The Alligator People opens with the titles and credits rolling over shots of Cajun country, pure moss-hanging swamp, with appropriately sinister music and flat-bottomed boats tied up along a ragged shoreline. Most American B-movies from the atomic age, particularly movies based on irradiated mutation, chose a desert setting for an isolated, stark setting. Alligator People went the other way – all the other way. This setting is crowded with life and water – far too much water and far too much life – the slime in the water seems ready to take shape with green eyes and long rows of teeth; an atmosphere so rich in life that fungus even hangs dripping from the trees. The isolation here is caused by an abundance of life that is distinctly not human, an environment designed to absorb and decay human life.

After the title credits and ominous music finishes, we find ourselves in Louisiana’s Webley Sanitarium and the office of neuropathologist, Dr. Wayne MacGregor (Douglas Kennedy), who has called in friend and colleague, Dr. Eric Lorimer (Bruce Bennet) for a consultation regarding an interesting case. After the two professional men banter compliments for a moment, Dr. MacGregor comes to the point: He wants Dr. Lorimer’s thoughts on a case involving a young nurse who works at the sanitarium.

Dr. Lorimer, clearly the elder statesman, reviews the subject’s file for a moment. “Jane Marvin,” he muses, then gives Dr. MacGregor a sly look over the clipboard. “Pretty” he asks, his expression just short of a leer.

Well, of course she is, says MacGregor’s self-satisfied expression, but he doesn’t answer directly. “Yes, that’s the name she’s using.” He says, struggling for professional decorum.

It seems Nurse Jane (Beverly Garland) has revealed, purely by accident, a disturbing past while assisting Dr. MacGregor in his development of the Narco-Hypnosis technique; whereby a patient is shot full of sodium pentothal and coaxed into a state of hypnosis until they blab their heads off (for this you need a degree?). Dr. MacGregor calls Jane into the office and introductions are made (Garland makes a nice entrance, dazzling in nurse white and her smile working overtime). Say listen, Jane, would wouldn’t mind if Dr. Lorimer sits in on our session of Narco-Hypnosis, would you?

“Not at all. Why should I?” says Jane with all the confidence in the world, hopping right up on the office’s examining table (I can think of several reasons why it wouldn’t be recommended for a young nurse to allow two doctors to knock her out with truth serum and record everything she might say under hypnosis. Does that make me a cynical person? While we are on that tangent, let me just say that through modern eyes, this opening scene comes off as ultra-creepy and something just short of a searing indictment of the medical community. Not only does distinguished, fatherly Dr. Lorimer suggest not once but twice that Dr. MacGregor’s involvement with the case has a direct relationship with the patient’s fox quotient, but MacGregor’s technique with the needle has a sexual overtone that must have had teenage boys in the audience casting surreptitious glances at their dates. “I got a nice sharp one for you today,” he says, grinning lasciviously as he preps the syringe. He even makes a odd, blank face of mild exertion as he thrusts it in, to which Nurse Jane curls her lip and writhes a bit, laying flat on her back on the doctor’s “examining table.” Good God!).

Once Jane is under the gentle persuasions of Narco-Hypnosis, she begins to frown and sweat, telling her story in a hesitant, stumbling voice. The bulk of the remainder of the film is flashback, retelling what has happened to Jane, who is really a woman named Joyce Webster. Her recollections begin on her happy, exuberant honeymoon following her wedding to handsome Paul Webster (Richard Crane), a former patient a the hospital where she works. The two are traveling by train when Paul receives a disturbing cable from back home (Louisiana swamp land). The Western Union upsets Paul so terribly he abandons the honeymoon, the marriage, and Joyce by kissing her goodbye and, without any explanation, getting off the train at the first stop. Joyce watches from inside the train compartment, pounding on the window and calling his name, as the train pulls out of the station. The last we see of Paul, he is walking off with a urgent determination, out of her life.

The flashback ends for a quick scene back at the doc’s office, where, still hypnotized and drugged to her pretty earlobes, Jane/Joyce tells of a years’ long search; of hiring private detectives and searching medical and army records, of finally tracking her missing husband down through a fraternity pin, to his college. Paul's college records finally reveal his childhood home, The Cypresses Plantation in Bayou landing, Louisiana, “down in swamp country.”

We return to flashback, where Joyce is coincidentally met at the Bayou Landing Train Station by the general handyman of the Cypresses, Manon (Lon Chaney, Jr.) an obvious lecherous degenerate with a hook for a hand, covered in tattered, stained clothes and shiny sweat. Manon has come to the station to pick up a crate marked “Caution! Radioactive Material! Cobalt 60” (Oh, hell yes! Now we’re talking Radiation Cinema’s language!). After letting his eyes slither up and down Joyce’s legs once or twice, Manon agrees to take her back to the Cypresses, despite the fact that the residents of the plantation never take visitors. “Well, for you, sweetheart,” says Manon, showing a toothy smile amongst his dirty stubble, ”I’ll take a chance."

While driving through the bayou, Manon has to stop the truck to remove a hunk of rotted tree that has fallen across the road (a muddy path, more like). Here, Joyce has her first taste of the empire of the swamp. She sees snakes hanging from trees and two locals wrangling in the mud and capturing an alligator (and it is a live alligator). “You know how long you’d last if you got a hundred yards off this road?” asks Manon, enjoying her discomfort. “Maybe ten minutes. If the quicksand didn’t get you, the moccasins would.” Here Manon’s bleary eyes become hot with focus and his voice growls with a low madness. “Then there’s always the gators. Dirty, nasty, slimy things!” He slams the truck into gear and the slashing tires fling swamp muck everywhere as they go fishtailing along the path. Okay, got it. Manon's hook-for-hand comes curtesy of a gator snack. Later, we will see Manon drive over alligators, his truck bouncing as he laughs wildly; as well as taking pot shots at gators with a revolver while in a drunken rage (Lon Chaney, Jr., large, filthy and grinning, eats the part of Manon up and spits it out; as he did so many juicy, character rolls in so many great B-films throughout his forty-year career. During the late 50s and early 60s, if the part called for degenerate corruption - for a rotting kind of bug-house nuts, Chaney was your man).

Once at the plantation, we are introduced to the grande dame of the Cypresses, Mrs. Lavinia Hawthorne (Frieda Inescort) a stiff-backed, dusty matriarch of an empty, mossy estate. Joyce explains what has brought her to the Cypresses, of her long, hard search for her missing husband. Listening impatiently, Mrs. Hawthorne denies knowing a Paul Webster (although she clearly does). Indeed, no one named Paul Webster has ever lived at the plantation, and further, it is about time that all inquisitive young women claiming to be Paul Webster’s wife get the hell out of her house and off her property. But Ma’am says the butler, Toby (Vince Townsend, Jr.) there won’t be a train until tomorrow. Oh, hell. “May we offer you the hospitality of the Cypresses for the night?” says Mrs. Hawthorne (as in House of the Seven Gables) rigidly. “I don’t seem to have any choice, do I?” answers Joyce, matching rigid for rigid. Oh, but there is one thing, child, demands Mrs. Hawthorne. “Under no circumstances will you leave your room.”

Naturally the moment Joyce is shown her room, she begins checking every possible exit the room has to offer, fixated upon exploring the house. As expected, there is much to discover among the spider webs and high ceilings. Joyce refuses to leave the house the next morning and eventually learns that Paul Webster not only grew up in the house, but that Mrs. Hawthorne is his mother (the Hawthorne name came from a second husband). We learn also the dark secret that haunts the Cypresses and the reason for Paul Webster’s disappearance.

A local doctor, Mark Sinclair (George Macready) working in the swamps of the bayou with funding from Mrs. Hawthorne, has developed a miracle serum derived from a protein extracted from the pituitary gland of alligators. This serum is a miracle cure for victims of terminal accidents, affording their bodies the miraculous healing properties of reptiles, whom can suffer severe trauma that would kill warm blooded creatures. Years earlier, Paul Webster had been part of a group of volunteers, all horribly mangled accident victims, all on the point of death (Paul had been in a plane crashed that crushed all his bones and burned off his face). This hopeless group of volunteers were given injections of Dr. Sinclair’s gator serum, and all displayed unprecedented powers of recover, their bones and organs re-generating back to glowing health. All seemed wonderful, with Dr. Sinclair practicing his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, when a horrible side-effect began developing in the volunteers. Nope, the serum didn’t cause uncontrollable flatulence, diarrhea, or flu-like symptoms, which seem to blight every single medication on the market today; it caused the victims to slowly develop the physical traits of alligators (which, after consideration, might be more sociably acceptable. I mean, which guest would kill a party faster? The one with the scaly skin of a gator or the one sneezing and farting “uncontrollably” around the buffet table?).

Upon discovering this, the doctor sent out messages to all the volunteers, notifying them of the serum’s side-effects (this was the telegraph Paul had received years ago while on honeymoon; the one that caused him to bolt from the train in panic). In the ensuing years, Dr. Sinclair’s “hospital” has become the Island of Dr. Moreau of the swamp, the victims of his serum stumbling around, no longer capable of speech, their faces covered with canvas sacks. Dr. Sinclair's patients have all been sedated into states of compliance by sun lamps (reptiles get drowsy under the sun), needing a staff of attendants to water them down regularly while Dr. Sinclair researches a cure.

As the days and hours pass at the Cypresses, Joyce notices a shadowy figure in a trench coat slipping into the house at night, often playing the piano moodily; and who leaves wet, slimy footprints all over the nice floors. Showing balls to the walls, Joyce chases Paul one night into the swamp, during a terrific storm, in dress and sensible shoes; only to be “saved” and nearly raped by Manon of the hook and moonshine jug (Alligator Paul gives him a good beating for his trouble).

Paul eventually leads Joyce to Dr. Sinclair’s research facility, where Dr. Sinclair, Paul, and Mrs. Hawthorne all agree to attempt one, last, drastic stab at a cure. Dr. Sinclair theorizes that massive amounts of gamma radiation (this is what the earlier introduced Cobalt 60 is for) combined with high intensity X-Ray, may reverse the effects of the gator serum and restore Paul to normal (although it is assumed that the face and bone healing supplied by the serum won’t be reversed as well). Huge risks are involved, naturally, and such intense levels of radiation might kill Paul. Absolutely nothing more than thirty seconds, stresses Dr. Sinclair, or all bets are off. The switch is thrown and the small, hopeful party watch through protective glass as Paul is irradiated by the Dr. Sinclair’s enormous radiating X-Ray machine.

All bets are lost when Manon, drunk and ranting about the alligator man, crashes the party, knocks Dr. Sinclair cold with a right cross, which allows the overworked radiating instrument to sizzle, snap and spark – giving Paul a good deal more than thirty seconds of exposure. Manon overpowers Joyce, batting her aside, and charges into the chamber, laughing wildly (and no one could laugh insanely like Lon Chaney, Jr.). He can see Paul’s form emerging on the table through the smoke of the ruined lab; completely transformed now - a true alligator man with long, toothy snout and inchoate claws; no longer human. The two begin to fight, but Manon gets his hook snagged on the machine’s heavy electric cabling and is electrocuted in a crackling storm of voltage. As Manon twitches and screams, the alligator man charges passed the women and out into the swamp surround the facility. Paul sees himself reflected in the swamp water and tries pathetically to cover his face with his awkward claws. He is attacked by an alligator (and here the actor portraying the full-blown gator-man, perhaps Richard Crane, forgets the limits of his now-soggy costume and feigns a bite, thereby crumpling his snout like a sock puppet). After killing the real gator, Paul stumbles into some quicksand and is quickly sucked below to his death. Joyce, who has chased him a second time into the swamp, scampering passed alligators (damn, what a woman), watches him die as she falls to her knees, screaming and screaming hysterically.

We dissolve out, and we are back in the offices of our two headshrinkers. Dr. MacGregor turns the tape recorder off (Jane/Joyce is no longer in the room), and our two professionals discuss their professional dilemma: do they play the tape for Jane Marvin, revealing to her her true identity and horrible past as Joyce Webster, thereby risking a crashing descent into withdraw and madness; or do they let sleeping dogs lie, keeping the recording a secret. As the two debate, Nurse Jane comes bouncing back into the room, telling Dr. Macgregor that she is about to leave for the day. She seems so well adjusted, happy and bouncy, that the doctors agree mutually, by quiet glances, to allow her present life of happy suppression. The film ends with a close-up of Nurse Jane Marvin wishing the Drs. a good night.

THE GOOD STUFF: The performances in this movie are the good stuff: first and foremost, of course, is the gutsy, fearless job from Beverly Garland as Joyce Webber; but also tremendous fun is Lon Chaney Jr.’s Manon. Friends, you can smell this guy right through the screen; a mixture of the sweet rot of alcohol sweat and the dead hides of animals that litter his filthy shack. Finally, I loved old pro George Macready, giving dignity to Dr. Mark Sinclair, a role that clearly could have gone “mad scientist” were it not for his sensitive treatment. Macready, with his distinctive facial scar and smooth, aristocratic voice, had been working in feature films for over two decades by the time he appeared in Alligator People; appearing with Glenn Ford in Gilda (1946) and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). Despite The Alligator People being a much smaller production than Macready’s biggest films, Macready certainly brought his A game whenever the camera rolled. Near the end of the flashback sequence, Dr. Sinclair comes into the chamber and looks down at Paul Webster, who is laying on the table below the X-Ray machine. The Dr. talks to his patient one last time.

“Paul,” says Dr. Sinclair, “I’ll never be able to tell you . . . how sorry I am.” And we believe him completely.

As does Paul. “Don’t blame yourself. I certainly don’t,” says Paul, his voice hardly sounding human any more. “To know everything . . . You’re not God, Mark.”

“I feel as if I’ve been playing at it,” says the Doctor, “and have been punished.”

And we believe him again. He will never forgive himself because he knows his own vanity, his own tragic hubris, and its awful effects.

Watch this film for Garland, certainly, but don’t overlook the other spectacular professionals at work here. Sprinkle just a touch of hot sauce on that popcorn and enjoy! WATCH THE TRAILER BELOW! –Radiation Cinema