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(1916–1992). American director.
Directed for television: "No Food for Thought," "Time
Is Just a Place" (1955), "The Sound of Murder" (1956), episodes of Science
Fiction Theater; "Panic in 3-B," "Unexpected Murder" (1959), episodes of World
of Giants; "Waiting for Watubi," "Angel on the Island" (1964), "X Marks the
Spot," "Diamonds Are an Ape's Best Friend," "Music Hath Charm," "They're Off
and Running," "Three to Get Ready," "Forget Me Not," "It's Magic," "Goodbye,
Old Paint," "Gilligan's Mother-in-Law," "Beauty Is As Beauty Does," "The Little
Dictator," "Smile, You're on Mars Camera," "The Sweepstakes," "Castaway
Pictures Presents," "Agonized Labor," "Nyet, Nyet—Not Yet," "Hi-Fi Gilligan,"
"Erika Tiffany Smith to the Rescue" (1965), "You've Been Disconnected," "Will
the Real Mr. Howell Please Stand Up," "Allergy Time," "The Friendly Physician,"
"'V' for Vitamins," "Meet the Meteor" (1966), episodes of Gilligan's Island (also
co-produced series); "Matchless," "I Can't Fly" (1967), episodes of Mr.
Terrific; "The Man Who Came to Pasta" (1971), episode of Nanny and the
Professor; "The Last Phantom," "The Thornhill Affair" (1976), episodes of Holmes
and Yo-Yo; "Which One Is Jaime?" (1977), episode of The Bionic Woman;
"The Queen and the Thief" (1977), episode of The New Adventures of Wonder
Woman; "A Haunting We Will Go" (177), episode of The Hardy Boys/Nancy
Drew Mysteries (1977); "The Guardians" (1980), "The Dorian Secret" (1981),
episodes of Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.
Also directed for television: episodes of It's About
Time (1966); episode of The Magician (1973).
Story with Robert M. Fresco, screenplay Fresco and
Norman Jolley: The Monolith Monsters (John Sherwood 1957);
Acted in: The Mummy's Tomb (uncredited) (Harold
Young 1942).
The regrettable answer surely involves something that
might be regarded as irrelevant: namely, Arnold's activities after he directed
the films he is famous for. It is not simply that his films of the 1960s and
1970s have little to do with science fiction and are uniformly awful to boot;
it is rather that he was spending most of his time directing for television, a
medium where directors can rarely assert themselves, and even specialized in
television's most undemanding and less respected genre, the inane situation
comedy aimed at younger viewers. When you are researching the career of a Film
Legend, you do not want to dig up references to The Brady Bunch and Nanny
and the Professor; when you are researching the career of a Film Legend,
you do not want to devote extensive time to nailing down how many episodes of Gilligan's
Island he directed.
Criticizing Arnold for his career choices might seem
uncharitable, even churlish: certainly, a man has a right to earn a living, and
any informed observer of the Hollywood scene in 1960 could see that the B-movie
market was dying, forcing directors to accept any stray assignments that might come
their way, and that most of the directorial assignments in the coming decades
would be for television. Further, there might have been any number of
legitimate concerns, ranging from financial disasters to health problems, which
would require a fifty-year-old man to trade his creative freedom for a steady
paycheck supplemented by occasional films of any variety. However, other
directors of Arnold's age and stature, such as Samuel Fuller and Don SIEGEL,
resolved to remain in the arena, to keep fighting the good fight to direct the
sorts of films they wanted to direct, and they were able to craft for
themselves filmographies reflecting their distinctive characters that
eventually earned them larger budgets and critical acclaim. Why didn't Arnold
do the same? Perhaps, it is because resolving to compete for desirable work and
adequate resources in a tough, tough market demands a certain amount of
self-confidence; Fuller and Siegel had it, while Arnold didn't.
That theory would be supported by The Incredible Shrinking Man,
the one major film whose virtues can be unambiguously attributed to Arnold's
directorial skills (because no one can plausibly portray its producer,
Arnold Zugsmtih, as an unacknowledged genius). Handicapped both by an
evocative but clunky script co-written by neophyte Richard MATHESON
and by a weak cast headed by the hapless Grant Williams, Arnold nevertheless
imbues the film with heart and gravitas that still has an impact today.
He may have strongly identified with its hero, a man who keeps getting
smaller and smaller and is eventually more or less forgotten by everyone
he once knew; as they carry on without him, he finds solace in conquering
a tiny spider and telling himself that even a microscopic man must have
a meaningful role to play in the universe. Arnold may have seen his own
future in Williams's saga, a director who would become more and more invisible
in Hollywood during the decades to come. A certain aura of self-abnegation
can also be detected in his first, and arguably best, science fiction
film, It Came from Outer Space, which at first plays as a typically
paranoid invasion-from-space nightmare, complete with familiar friends
turned into ambulatory zombies in the manner of Invaders from Mars
or Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers; yet hero Richard
CARLSON learns that the aliens in this case are
really good guys and becomes their cooperative ally in obtaining the resources
they need to get away from Earth. One might also say, more cynically,
that Carlson is simply a man who is willing to surrender to the inevitable—like Arnold himself.
A overview of his career: after failing to find
success as an actor (he can be briefly observed as a reporter in The Mummy's
Tomb), Arnold started directing films in the 1950s; while noted only for
his science fiction films, he also worked on westerns and crime dramas. In
partnership with Alland, he directed five heralded films that slightly but
steadily declined in quality—It Came from Outer Space, Creature
from the Black Lagoon, Tarantula, Revenge of the Creature,
and The Space Children; some would add the strange and marvelous This
Island Earth to the list, on the grounds that Arnold was brought in to
direct its climactic scenes on the planet Metaluna. Separated from Alland, he
directed, in addition to The Incredible Shrinking Man, the absolutely
pathetic Monster on the Campus and a serviceable Peter Sellers vehicle,
the Ruritarian The Mouse That Roared, before turning most of his
attention to episodic television.
In the 1960s and 1970s, he became a favorite of sitcom
producer Sherwood Schwartz, helming numerous episodes of Gilligan's Island,
It's About Time, and The Brady Bunch. One also finds him credited
with episodes of all sorts of generally undistinguished television series, such
as Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky, Dr. Kildare, Mr. Terrific,
It Takes a Thief, Love, American Style, McCloud, Alias
Smith and Jones, The Magician, Archer, Ellery Queen, The
Bionic Woman, The New Adventures of Wonder Woman, The Hardy
Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, and The
Fall Guy. Having been schooled by Schwartz, his last venture into science
fiction film, Hello Down There, was nothing more or less than an
overextended half-hour sitcom about a family living in an experimental
underwater house. His other films during this period included two terrible Bob
Hope comedies (Bachelor in Paradise and The Global Set, an
excursion into soft-core pornography (Sex Play), two blaxploitation
films with Fred Williamson (The Black Eye and Boss Nigger), and
two roundly panned television movies (Sex and the Married Woman and Marilyn:
The Untold Story). Call, if you will, the first decade of his career The
Legend of Jack Arnold, but for the rest of his story, the only appropriate
title, unfortunately, is The Incredible Shrinking Director.
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