As unimaginable as it sounds to us younger folks, there was a time when Clint Eastwood wasn’t a Hollywood icon. “Rawhide” wasn’t airing on CBS yet, and Sergio Leone’s masterful, genre-defining Spaghetti Westerns (some of which are among the ones you have to watch even if you don’t like the genre), like “A Fistful of Dollars” or “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly,” were a long way from gracing the silver screen.
But, almost ten years before that, Eastwood was already making moves as an actor. He kicked off his acting career in 1955, getting minuscule and uncredited roles, the first one being a part in the “Creature from the Black Lagoon” sequel, “Revenge of the Creature.”
He must’ve made an impression on its director, Jack Arnold, because Arnold cast him again the same year, in his sci-fi creature-feature, “Tarantula.” At 25, Eastwood was playing a jet squadron leader — totally unrecognizable due to the pilot helmet and mask he had to wear — leading the aerial attack against the kaiju monster wreaking havoc on Arizona.
Tarantula is a mostly well-regarded monster flick
Penned by Robert M. Fresco and Martin Berkeley (based on a story from director Jack Arnold), “Tarantula” is about a science experiment gone wrong (like this one where researchers created gene-edited hamsters full of rage). In a lab somewhere in Arizona, scientist Dr. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll) is experimenting with a newly developed nutrient that causes rapid growth in humans. It’s still unperfected, leaving test subjects deformed and eventually causing death. After Deemer’s assistant attacks him, a fire breaks out in the lab, and one of the animal test subjects (the titular tarantula) escapes and becomes a (literally) huge threat to the population of the nearby town. It must be stopped at all costs.
According to Variety (via Archive.org), “Tarantula” was a box office success, and the fourth-biggest feature of December 1955, earning over $1.1 million. Critics generally praised it, and the film currently has a 93% rating based on 15 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.
It’s one of those giant bug horrors from the ’50s that look silly and unserious in retrospect, but for viewers into these kinds of classics, it might be a fun retrospective watch. For the rest of us, it’s a movie Clint Eastwood briefly appeared in before he was, well, the Clint Eastwood.
