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The Fantastic Mystery of Milicent Patrick

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Frankenstein's Monster
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« on: June 05, 2017, 10:17:15 am »


The Fantastic Mystery of Milicent Patrick
Vincent Di Fate

Thu Oct 27, 2011 3:00pm 16 comments  3 Favorites

   
Milicent Patrick with Gill Man Mask, 1953, publicity photos to promote the 3-D motion picture Creature from the Black Lagoon, Universal-International, 1954. Billing her as


She went by the name of Milicent Patrick, appeared in 21 motion pictures over a span of 20 years (1948 to 1968), acted in dozens of television shows, worked as a costumer, character designer, and illustrator on countless other films, and took a significant role in creating the SF cinema’s most distinctive character of the 1950s, yet today she is a mystery woman in the most literal sense of the term.

Her real name is (or was) Mildred Elizabeth Fulvia di Rossi and, according to some sources, she was born an Italian baroness — the Baronesa di Polombara. She was/is a multi-talented, statuesque beauty who, remarkably, shied away from the limelight, and received screen credit for only a relative handful of the many pictures she worked on, both in front of and behind the cameras. The Screen Actors Guild currently lists her among the missing, and no definitive record of her life, her death, or her whereabouts seems to exist beyond the early 1980s.



She was the daughter of Camille Charles Rossi, an architect and engineer who oversaw the construction of William Randolph Hearst’s Castle estate in San Simeon, California. Accordingly, Ms. Patrick spent her youth in San Simeon and in South America accompanying her father on his various construction assignments. It is believed that she was born around 1930. Musically gifted, she had early ambitions of becoming a concert pianist, but instead studied art on a scholarship after she graduated from high school at the young age of 14. She attended the Chouinard Institute in California, and was subsequently hired by Disney to work on animated films in the late 1940s. Her resumé claims the distinction of her being the first female animator ever hired by that famous studio.

In early 1954 she went on tour to promote the March release of the 3-D film Creature from the Black Lagoon. By all early accounts it was a production for which she performed a key role in developing the costume for its title character. In the century-long history of SF films, save for King Kong and Godzilla, there is perhaps no better-known entity than the Creature — nor one more emblematic of both 1950s SF cinema or of the 3-D motion picture process.

Even before Ms. Patrick began her tour, make-up department head George Hamilton “Bud” Westmore had sent memos to the Universal front office taking exception to the studio’s intention to bill her as “The Beauty Who Created the Beast,” by claiming that the Creature was entirely the product of his own efforts. In February, while the tour was in full swing, Westmore went to great lengths to secure clippings of her numerous newspaper interviews, some citing her as the Creature’s sole creator, without mention of Westmore or of the other members of the make-up department staff. Westmore made it clear in his complaints to Universal executives that he had no intentions of engaging Ms. Patrick’s services as a sketch artist again. In correspondence between executives Clark Ramsey and Charles Simonelli dated the first of March 1954, Ramsey noted that Westmore was behaving childishly over the matter, and that Patrick had done everything possible to credit Westmore during her interviews. He further expressed regret at Westmore’s intention to penalize her. True to his threat, however, Westmore stopped using her after she completed drawings for Douglas Sirk’s Captain Lightfoot, released by the studio the following year.

Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge

Her exile from the Universal make-up department brought an end to a promising aspect of her career, and forever clouded the details of her efforts while on Westmore’s staff. During that time, the studio produced their most notable creations of the ’50s science fiction boom, but just precisely what her contributions may have been to those films has been largely muddled since Westmore’s tirade. According to magazine articles and newspaper accounts that predate the Westmore flap, Milicent Patrick designed the Xenomorph for It Came from Outer Space (1953), the Gill Man (Creature from the Black Lagoon ), the Metaluna mutant for This Island Earth (1954), and was a mask maker on Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1953) and The Mole People (1956); a glut of ghastly creations with which any self-respecting monster maker would be proud to be associated.

Universal had made its mark, and a considerable amount of money along the way, as the American film industry’s principal supplier of horror movies during the 1930s and ’40s. During those years, this kind of fanciful escapism seemed to offer comfort to those suffering through the global depression and, later, through the grim realities of the Second World War; but by war’s end the production of such films dropped off sharply. With the ending of hostilities came both optimism and anxiety about the new era that was to emerge from the ashes of that great global conflict. Science suddenly seemed to be a new force that touched the lives of everyone, but it was also a double-edged sword, possessing the power both to enrich and to destroy.

Early in the 1950s producers like Howard Hawks and George Pal had proven quite conclusively that fantastic ideas, supported by the rationales of science rather than superstition, had great credibility with moviegoers in the new Atomic Age, and could pack movie houses with eager patrons. Their efforts inspired dozens of similar productions all across the economic spectrum, from big-budgeted undertakings by the major studios, to shoe-string productions by small independents. Often the distinctions between science and the supernatural were blurred, or were simply ignored.

By 1953 a veritable tidal wave of SF movies, or something very much like them, descended on neighborhood theaters. Early in the 1950s the newly reorganized studio, now renamed Universal-International, made its bid to capture the lead in the making of science fiction pictures. SF seemed the logical modern extension of the horror film, and it operated on many of the same dramatic principles. Thus, U-I’s early efforts in the genre were often thinly disguised monster movies with implausible scientific ideas to support them. Indeed, in seemingly assembly-line fashion, the creatures frequently came out of Westmore’s make-up department before the scripts were even written. Still, the studio’s output of quality category films from this period reads today like a checklist of widely celebrated genre classics.

U-I’s first significant venture into SF was also one of the first 3-D films to be undertaken by a major Hollywood studio. Of all the majors, only Warner Bros. — with House of Wax (1953), its color re-make of The Mystery of the Wax Museum (originally filmed in 1933 in an experimental two-strip Technicolor process) — had been as quick as U-I to take the plunge into making stereoscopic pictures. Prompted by their success, MGM, Paramount, and Columbia soon followed. Until that time, 3-D had been purely the domain of the more enterprising independents, and these early films had little more to offer than low-cost gimmicks that hurled objects at the screen. But the new process had captured the imagination of the movie-going public, and what better vehicle (seemingly so futuristic by its very nature) was there to present SF stories than in this startling process that mimicked the look of the three-dimensional universe? At its height, in the early 1950s, the 3-D process seemed such a watershed of innovation that most studios seriously considered if they’d ever be able to find rental outlets for the large backlogs of “flat” films that filled their vaults.

Joseph A. Smith, illustrator, It Came from Outer Space, 1953, gouache on board, art for insert card, Universal-International Pictures. Click to enlargeUniversal’s first SF picture, It Came from Outer Space, was not just any ordinary story by any ordinary author; it was instead based on a compelling treatment about aliens that could mimic human appearance (thus echoing the anxieties of the McCarthy era, then at its height), and was written by none other than America’s top science fiction writer of the day, Ray Bradbury (b. 1920). By early September 1952, when Bradbury sat down at his typewriter to create the first of his five drafts of the treatment, he’d already made his mark with his popular story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), and was nearing completion of Fahrenheit 451 (1953), a novel about a future in which books are systematically burned.

From the outset, and through the first few drafts, the property was curiously entitled Atomic Monster. Most likely this moniker came from the studio and not from Bradbury, who recalls that the working title of the treatment was The Meteor. In the end, although Harry Essex wrote the final screenplay essentially by just retyping and slightly expanding Bradbury’s final draft of the treatment, It Came from Outer Space became a milestone in the genre. In addition to being Universal’s first real SF picture, and its first 3-D film, it was also shot in a 1-to-1.85 (height to width) aspect ratio, making it an early wide screen movie. The following year, 1954, would see the release of the first practical, truly anamorphic wide screen pictures in CinemaScope and similar processes; usually with aspect ratios in excess of 1-to-2. It Came from Outer Space was also recorded in stereophonic sound, and in some screenings during its premiere, foam rubber boulders were dropped onto the first few rows of seats during an avalanche shown in the film’s opening minutes. The film was also director Jack Arnold’s maiden voyage in the science fiction genre, quickly establishing him as an SF specialist of the first magnitude.

It Came from Outer Space tells the story of science writer and amateur astronomer John Putnam (Richard Carlson), and his fiancée, Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush), who witness the landing of a meteor in a desolate region of the desert beyond the town of Sand Rock, Arizona. When Pete Davis (Dave Willock), a helicopter pilot, flies them out to the crash site, they discover an immense crater into which Putnam descends alone. There, in the steaming depths of the crater, Putnam briefly glimpses a huge spherical ship, and sees something ominous moving about in the darkness of the ship’s interior. When the ship’s heavy door swings shut, the sound initiates a rockslide that completely conceals the vessel under tons of fallen debris. No one but Ellen will believe Putnam’s fantastic claims of intelligent visitors from outer space.

It Came from Outer Space, 1953, Universal-International. Click to enlarge
It Came from Outer Space, 1953, Universal-International. Click to enlarge

As the days pass, members of the community disappear: first, two linemen for the telephone company, Frank (Joe Sawyer) and George (Russell Johnson), who are working out on the desert alone; then an astronomer, Dr. Snell (George Eldredge) and his assistant (Brad Jackson). The missing persons are replaced by suspiciously behaving surrogates who are actually shape-shifting aliens. Putnam eventually learns that the aliens have accidentally landed on Earth and wish only to repair their ship and leave. Once disguised as ordinary people, they can presumably pass freely among the residents of Sand Rock as they go about securing the materials they need to repair their craft. Putnam advocates holding back on any action that might be taken against the aliens when Sheriff Matt Warren (Charles Drake) finally accepts the truth of Putnam’s claim, but the continued abduction of members of the community, to include Ellen, brings an angry mob out to the crater. Before the mob arrives, Putnam makes his way to the ship and persuades the aliens to release their human captives as a gesture of good will. As the townspeople gather at a nearby mine shaft that adjoins the crater, Putnam uses dynamite to seal off the mine, thus affording the aliens time to complete their preparations for departure. Soon after, the ground begins to quake, and the ship breaks through the tons of rubble to rise into the night sky and veer off into black infinity. As the craft disappears, Ellen asks Putnam whether or not the creatures have gone for good. He responds philosophically, “No, just for now. It wasn’t time for us to meet. But there’ll be other nights, and other stars to watch. They’ll be back.”

Through the early drafts of Bradbury’s treatment, the visitors are described as lizard-like in appearance. Having set the objective of their being truly repulsive and terrifying by human standards, Bradbury seems to have concluded that lizards might not do. In the last of his treatments he appears to have abandoned the lizard concept almost entirely in favor of something more nebulous. The ambiguities of his description, however, oddly approximate what finally made it onto the screen. He says that we glimpse only the merest suggestion of something out of a nightmare, “something which suggests a spider, a lizard, a web blowing in the wind, a milk-white something dark and terrible, something like a jellyfish, something that glistens softly, like a snake.”

Harry Essex’s final script, entitled The Visitors from Outer Space, offers little more by way of definition for these beings. His exasperating comment during the scene at the mine shaft entrance — when Putnam finally comes face-to-face with one of the creatures — is that an exact description of “the horrible creature, enveloped in smoke,” will be provided. None, of course, ever was — at least not on the written page.


http://www.tor.com/2011/10/27/the-fantastic-mystery-of-milicent-patrick/
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