Julie Adams, the beloved star of Creature From the Black Lagoon (1954) has died at the age of 92. She was one of those figures who hit paydirt (if not financially – then culturally) in a monster movie which has withstood the test of time. As an elderly woman, she gave interviews, attended festivals, was totally cool and grateful with her legacy being this 1950s B-movie, happy that new generations continued to discover the movie and her.
People also might remember her as the real estate lady on Murder, She Wrote. I loved her in that!
I love her as Vera Radford, the boss-lady of the “fat farm” in the Elvis movie Tickle Me (1965). Tickle Me is – as usual – an underseen and underappreciated movie. It’s a self-aware wink-wink lampoon of the Elvis Formula Movie, with a random Ghost Town subplot tacked on at the end, just to make it even weirder. In Tickle Me Elvis got to make fun of the movies he was making, showing that he was always in on the joke. He even breaks the fourth wall a couple of times, staring straight at us like “Can you believe the shit they’re making me do? What the hell is even going ON in this movie.”
He also performs “It Feels So Right” in Tickle Me, early on, and is such a powerful sexual persona that all he has to do is stand there, and allow people to feast their eyes. And he does so in a spirit of generosity, not vanity. Not to be tried by amateurs. I wrote a whole post about it.
Julie Adams is seen first at the .26-second mark, grooving to what he’s putting out there, like everybody else – male and female – grooves to what he puts out there. If you resist, you’re an idiot.
Elvis plays a rough rodeo-rider slash singer (because of course) who gets a job at an all-girl “spa” (as we would call it now) in the middle of the desert. Imagine being a woman, stranded in a desert, away from all men, taking yoga classes, eating salads and being “healthy” – when into that environment strolls Elvis, a guitar-playing rodeo-riding walking-male-sexpot-erotic-muse. Naturally, the horny lonely girls all GO BANANAS for him. He wreaks HAVOC. And Vera may be the boss, but she falls for him too. She is, after all, a sentient human being.
Julie Adams said she had a great time on Tickle Me, and loved working with Elvis. She said he did everything “beautifully.” Every behind the scenes in-between-takes photograph of the two of them shows them engulfed in laughter. They had a ball.
Julie Adams understood genre, how it operated, what was required of her as an actress. She had fun with all of it. In Tickle Me she is charming and funny, she creates a believable character (in a completely ridiculous context), and highlights him gorgeously, giving him something to play off of.
She understood everything. She also understood the most important thing was: if you are lucky enough to have any kind of career at all in show biz … ENJOY IT.
Rest in peace.
