Beverly Garland plays a newly wed who's abandoned by her husband. She goes seeking him at what seems to be his childhood home, a Tennessee Williams-esque household in the Louisiana bayou called The Cypresses. There she encounters the alligator hating Lon Chaney, with a hook for a hand, the matriarch of the manor, and a mysterious doctor- not to mention a figure in the shadows, playing the piano.
Clocking in at just under seventy-five minutes, for the most part The Alligator People is mostly a Southern Gothic piece that veers into science-fiction toward the end.
I know it's blasphemy, but I just don't get Lon Chaney. He was terrific as Larry Talbot in the Wolfman, and of course Lennie in Of Mice and Men, Even in the Inner Sanctum movies of the forties, he was starting to show some wear, and by time he was doing parts like the hook handed Cajun, it was like he was phoning it in.
Choosing today's movie was a random decision, it was shorter than I'm used to, and it isn't a Universal Movie... but it really was a pleasant surprise. I'm going to try and find more like it.
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