Rate: 'Creature from the Black Lagoon' (1954)

It's pretty much the same with me. Competently made, it's almost a caricature of  U-I creature feature of the 50s. There's little to distinguish it from the other sci-fi flicks the studio produced back then, but for the look of the title character itself. The studio had no directors of the James Whale caliber in those days; nor even Karl Freund. Tod Browning wasn't a Universal guy but for Dracula. Robert Florey and Rowland Lee came and went, did good work. different from what Whale did. Even in the 40s Uni was better in the genre hungover war years and shortly thereafter than in the 50s. Good to excellent directors came and went, and some journeyman directors could make surprisingly good films. They had Roy William Neill for the Sherlocks, and at his best he was a well above average talent. Jack Arnold just wasn't in the same league. He was competent, never inspired. U-I was a different outfit from Uni, and it showed in everything they made. It was a better fit for Douglas Sirk. I like many of the studio sci-fi pictures, especially the Shrinking Man one and This Island Earth, but something was missing from most of the U-I efforts in that genre. They often feature (much) larger than life creatures, and yet the films themselves lack that quality that the studio back ten or twenty years earlier.