The Screen Debut That Makes Revenge of The Creature Historic
This appearance will make your day.
Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of the great movies in the Universal Monsters pantheon, introducing the human/amphibian missing link known as the Gill-Man into the pop culture zeitgeist for the next 70 years. Director Jack Arnold, perhaps the best sci-fi filmmaker of the 1950s, creates a palpable atmosphere of menace as his boatload of scientists venture down the forbidding length of the Amazon River, the monster — obsessed with a woman (Julie Adams) in the boat — stalking them even as they hunt for him.
On the other hand, the hurriedly produced 1955 sequel, Revenge of the Creature, is basically a knockoff of the original (with a different cast). And while the creature himself and the underwater photography are as compelling as before, there's an air of "cash grab" to the whole enterprise. Yet Revenge of the Creature may be remembered for one thing more than any other aspect of the film or its place in genre cinema: it marks the uncredited screen debut of Clint Eastwood, launching an acting and directing career that has cast a long shadow over the Western, crime, and drama genres in particular — and is still going today.
Eastwood shows up about 15 minutes into the picture as a lab technician named Jennings. He discloses to the main character, Dr. Clete Ferguson (John Agar), that one of four rats is missing from a cage that also contains a cat, leading him to believe that the feline has consumed the poor rodent — until he suddenly feels something in the pocket of his lab coat and pulls out the missing rat. He’s never seen again, and the strange little bit of comedy serves no discernible purpose to the rest of the story. Eastwood himself seems stiff and somewhat nervous in his minute or so of screen time, and it’s a little jarring to see him at a youthful 25 years of age.
Eastwood took on a number of minor (and often uncredited) roles in both films and TV shows throughout the rest of the ‘50s, before scoring his breakout role as cattle drover Rowdy Yates in the CBS Western series Rawhide, which lasted from 1959 to 1965. That in turn landed him the lead role of the Man with No Name in Sergio Leone’s classic trilogy of spaghetti Westerns. The three films — A Fistful of Dollars, (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) — not only revitalized the genre but catapulted Eastwood to stardom on the big screen (he never did a TV series again, although he was reportedly cast as Two-Face for the Batman TV series — but the show was canceled before his episode was filmed).
Clint Eastwood in his first feature film role in Revenge of the Creature.
He returned to the Western genre again and again, both as a director and star, with iconic films like High Plains Drifter (1973), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and his masterpiece, the revisionist Unforgiven (1992). Eastwood began directing in 1971 with Play Misty for Me, a thriller from which Fatal Attraction heavily borrowed much of its story 16 years later. Perhaps his best-known role is that of loose cannon cop “Dirty” Harry Callahan, whom he played in five films starting with 1971’s Dirty Harry and ending with 1988’s The Dead Pool. He also has two sets of best picture and best director Oscars on his shelf, for Unforgiven and the boxing drama Million Dollar Baby (2004), and many other nominated films to his credit.
Curiously, although he directed a supernatural drama titled Hereafter (2010), Eastwood has never returned to science fiction since his walk-on in Revenge of the Creature. The closest he’s come was the 2000 adventure film Space Cowboys, in which he, Tommy Lee Jones, James Garner, and Donald Sutherland are four retired test pilots who venture into space to repair a satellite. While starring in and/or directing movies of nearly every stripe — including romances, comedies, musicals, biopics, political thrillers, and courthouse dramas (including his most recent film, 2024’s Juror #2) — Eastwood has never again worked in the genre in which he got his start.
Even if he never did return to sci-fi, Eastwood is still part of an illustrious list of stars who got their big screen break in the genre, including Leonardo DiCaprio (Critters 3), Chris Hemsworth (Star Trek 2009), Drew Barrymore (Altered States), Ethan Hawke (Explorers), John Boyega (Attack the Block), Joaquin Phoenix (SpaceCamp), Elijah Wood (Back to the Future II), and Elisabeth Moss (Suburban Commando). Eastwood’s towering career and impact on filmmaking certainly speak for themselves, so maybe, for him, Revenge of the Creature was enough.
