The Alligator People (1959)

Lon Chaney, Jr! Beverly Garland! In America's Favorite Game Show!

“You’re an alligator? NOW? But Bobby’s teacher is coming over for dinner and all the water glasses have dishwasher spots!”

FADE IN ON THE NEWLYWED GAME THEME:

The following is a Better Living Through Bad Movies presentation.

FADE MUSIC UNDER

Post-War America saw many innovations: The Space Race! Transistor technology! The Sexual Revolution! But most important, we harnessed mass media to pry into the sex lives of dull and not very attractive married couples.

In 1966, The Newlywed Game debuted, and asked the question: How well do you really know your spouse? TV host Bob Eubanks would pose such penetrating queries as “Does your wife prefer to make whoopee with the lights on or off?” But the movies got there first, and the issues they raised were much more hard-hitting. For instance, The Alligator People dared to ask drive-in audiences, “Is your husband a concert pianist, or is he secretly a mutant crocodilian with moist fingertips?”

Let’s find out, shall we?

FADE OUT MUSIC

The Alligator People¹ (1959)
Directed by Roy Del Ruth
Screenplay by Orville H. Hampton, Story by Orville H. Hampton and Charles O’Neal

A psychiatrist who looks like Mr. Dithers from Blondie arrives at a Sanitarium, where he meets with gruff character actor Dougls Kennedy, star of The Amazing Transparent Man (here playing the Ordinarily Opaque Doctor). Dithers has been called in to consult, because Dr. Transparent is “having trouble with a young girl,” one of his patients. Dr. Dithers smiles a weird, mustache-warping grin and says, “Is she…pretty?” I don’t know. Are you…creepy?

The patient, Beverly Garland, is actually Dr. Transparent’s nurse, except he’s been giving her roofies and secretly psychoanalyzing her behind her back. (I know we’re only two minutes in, and I hate to jump the gun, but I’m really beginning to wonder if this is the best date movie I could have chosen.). He makes Bev lie down on a couch while Dr. Dithers leans way over and tries to score a peek down her smock. Dr. Transparent holds the syringe up and murmurs to Beverly, “A nice sharp one for you, this time.” I can only assume he administered her previous injections with a morphine-dispensing Bic Banana.

Beverly goes into a trance, and the two psychiatrists—Dr. Feelgood and Dr. Feelup—perform hypnotic regression therapy on her. Bev confesses that she’s secretly married to Rocky Jones, Space Ranger. Flashback to their wedding night: we meet the newlyweds on a moving train (you know what that means) as a porter pops a champagne cork (and you know what that means! Jeez, Rocky, try double-bagging it, or maybe get one of those topical anesthetics they sell in the back of Hustler).

Now that they’re married, Rocky has a confession to make about why he’s still alive even though his body was previously destroyed in a plane crash. Alas, his story is interrupted by a bunch of telegrams. Bev gets a dirty message from her fellow nurses, while Rocky receives a singing telegram from the soundtrack, and while there aren’t any lyrics, the ominous trilling doesn’t seem to be saying, “Congratulations!” Rocky abruptly leaps off the train, leaving his wife bereft on their wedding night. Fortunately, her girlfriends did just wire her some porn, so…

Bev eventually tracks Rocky to his hometown in bayou country. She gets off the train, finding the station deserted except for a wooden crate covered in stickers that read, “CAUTION RADIOACTIVE MATERIAL” and “COBALT 60” and does what anyone would do in her place; she sits on the box of isotopes and bathes her cooter in gamma rays. I’m hoping this will pay off later in the movie when, angered by Dr. Dithers’ sexism, her vulva becomes huge, green, and incredible.

Lon Chaney, Jr. shows up sporting a straw hat, hook hand, and cirrhosis of the liver. One of the few local Cajuns who doesn’t have a cooking show, he makes his living hauling nuclear waste to The Cypresses, which by an amazing transparent coincidence is the very plantation where Rocky used to live.

Lon and Beverly drive through some scenic Spanish moss while Lon lists the many ways she could die in the swamp—quicksand, water moccasins, foreshadowing—before building to a spittle-flecked rage about the “nasty, slimy GATORS!” He’s a fun tour guide, kind of like those guys who take you on the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland, except maimed and screaming.

Beverly arrives at The Cypresses, which comes equipped with black servants and a sinister widow, Mrs. Hawthorne, who claims to know nothing about Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, insisting she’s more of a Tom Corbett, Space Cadet fan, although she’ll watch Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers if nothing else is on. Since there isn’t another train until tomorrow, Bev is forced to spend the night, but the whole atmosphere of the plantation is so unnerving that she breaks out in a rash of voice overs.

Suddenly, there’s a hail of gunshots just outside Beverly’s window. She runs to investigate, but the bedroom door won’t open! They’ve locked her in, and for the first time since she arrived at this sinister mansion, we really begin to worry if there’s an en suite bathroom.

The maid comes to Beverly’s room to deliver dinner on a tray and exposition on a platter. It seems the house has “trouble,” Widow Hawthorne has “sorrow” and the swamp has “evil.”  Or maybe Mrs. Hawthorne has “evil” and the swamp has “sorrow.” Or possibly it’s like a key party, and they just get drunk and randomly swap nouns.

Widow Hawthorne calls George Macready, who does what he usually does in movies: stands around in a lab coat looking haughty. In this case he has a gator spreadeagled on a table and elaborately bound with leather straps, making it look like Christian Grey’s “Red Room”, if it went the extra mile and featured—along with the usual whips, dripping wax, and paddles—an alligator farm.

Meanwhile, Beverly hears music and sneaks downstairs, where she finds a man in a trench coat and a Don Post monster mask playing the piano. He sees her and runs away, leaving Bev to touch the instrument and muse, “The piano keys…still wet…from his fingers.” Gross. So presumably he was playing Beethoven’s An die Freude, or Ode to Joy of Sex.

Beverly gives Mrs. Hawthorne the third degree, and the old woman admits to being Rocky’s mother. Bev gasps, “His mother…?” and we immediately fade out like it’s a soap opera. I’m almost disappointed they didn’t follow up with an organ sting and a commercial for Duz detergent.

Rocky sneaks into the house to leave his sticky emissions on the Steinway again, and comes face to face with Beverly. He runs out into the rainy night and she chases him through the swamp in her bare feet, the tight bodice of her dress getting all wet and clingy and sheer and how this film didn’t win an Oscar for Best Picture I’ll never know!

Lon hears the unmistakable sound of moist, muddy girl and emerges from his shack. Meanwhile, Bev stumbles toward an actual alligator, which is clearly supposed to react and startle her, but it just lays there.  So—and you can all but hear the director yell from off-camera, “Kick it! Kick it!”—she nudges the thing with her bare foot, and it obligingly writhes around. Its jaws are clearly wired shut, but still…if the dictionary definition of “trouper” doesn’t read “See Garland, Beverly,” me and Merriam-Webster are gonna throw down.

Lon rescues Beverly from a snake and takes her back to his shack, where he offers her traditional southern hospitality by suggesting she drink moonshine and “take off them wet things.” When she demurs, he cuts straight to the sexual assault by wrapping her in a blanket and trying to kiss the back of her head while crowing, “Didn’t I save your life? Don’t you feel like you owe me sumthin’?” So if you’ve ever wondered what Harvey Weinstein would look like playing Paul Prudhomme as Captain Hook, this is your lucky day.

Bev screams and he knocks her cold. Just then Rocky bursts into the cabin and gets in a violent fistfight with a stunt man while Lon has a beer in the catering tent, because he’s ogled, manhandled, and coldcocked his leading lady; now comes Miller Time.

Rocky carries Beverly back to the plantation, then goes to the lab and demands that Dr.  Macready hit him with a massive dose of gamma radiation from the Cobolt 60, since it’s his only chance to return to human form. And since his make-up looks remarkably like the Jack Kirby Hulk, there’s at least a slim chance he’ll transform into Bill Bixby.

Macready tells Bev how he planned to give human beings the reptilian power of regeneration by shooting them up with alligator juice. He “injected this substance into the veins of volunteers. Horribly injured, hopelessly mangled accident victims on the point of death.” So no matter how heroic and ethical the doctors on ER seemed, this is the shit they were pulling just off camera.

Bev and Rocky are reunited at the lab, and being a good 1950s helpmate, she supports his decision to get his scaly ass fatally irradiated. Nothing can possibly go wrong, unless a drunken, hooked-handed sex offender bursts into the lab at exactly the wrong moment and excess radiation causes Rocky to abruptly develop into a bipedal reptile, complete with paper-maché alligator head. But what are the odds of that…?

Rocky-Gator runs off into the swamp for some reason; perhaps he’s embarrassed by his crappy costume, perhaps he’s late for his mascot tryout with the University of Florida. Bev chases after him, catching up just in time to see him drown in quicksand.

Cut back to the Amazing Transparent Doctor’s office, where he and Dithers study the tape recording of Bev’s session, fast-forwarding it, then playing it backwards to see if Paul is really dead.  They conclude that Beverly has totally suppressed the memory of this horrifying and traumatic experience, and the two psychiatrists debate whether they should play the tape for her, possibly bringing on a complete psychotic break. They decide it would be unethical, and we can certainly trust their moral judgment, because they’re doctors. Who like to sedate and peep on their employees.

The end.

But wait!  What about you, the motion picture audience member? Don’t think you’re getting off that easy! What would you do, if you’d been going along, minding your own business, drugging and hypnotizing your nurse, only to discover she was actually the amnesiac widow of a musically-inclined lizard? That’s a bit of an ethical pickle, isn’t it?

Would you tell Beverly Garland that her entire life was a lie? Remember that the news might drive her insane. But it also might prove comforting, and finally explain why she’s the only lady on her block who has a glow-in-the-dark vagina.

Choose wisely.

Or not.  Who cares, really? They’re all dead now anyway.

1. Even though there’s only one, so it really should be titled The Alligator Person, or even—for that Isaac Asimovian touch—I, Alligator.