Review: The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Discovering the history and background of Milicent Patrick, the only woman designer behind one of the classic Universal Studios classic monsters (Creature from the Black Lagoon) has all the elements of an intriguing history that both sheds light on the hyper-sexism of Hollywood and reveals a curious and fascinating portrait of Patrick; though one that readers will still feel distanced from. O'Meara shows the lengths to which she will go to find research on Patrick but in doing so, the book diverts attention from Patrick onto O'Meara, robbing the spotlight to which O'Meara is trying to argue that she deserves. It attempts to be too much: a narrative of O'Meara's quest, Patrick's life, and an argument about the inherent and eternal sexism of the film industry. Those three things can go together but it often feels like there wasn't sufficient information on Patrick for a full book and so O'Meara fills it up with her research question speckled with some reflection and commentary--it comes across a bit shallow and takes away from what readers picked up this book for (a book at Milicent). This is too bad because both stories are really interesting and it seems like O'Meara could have a memoir all her own based upon what she shares while she could have taken a more focused approach on Patrick and the few others in the film industry to illustrate the sexism that she so rightly rallies against. Regardless of that, it's still worth reading and learning both about Patrick and O'Meara.
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