The Age of Aquariums

We admit it –we’ve had tanks on our mind in the Moviehouse. Maybe a little too much. Well, a funny thing happened at the local water hole when a fellow elbow-bender suggested one more opus about tanks…fish tanks, he said. So we said, why not?

For thousands of years, the mere contemplation of fish in a contained, human-made environment has had a profound effect in lowering stress levels and anxiety. The earliest known aquarists were Sumerians, who kept fish in artificial ponds 4500 years ago. Records of fish-keeping also date back to ancient Assyrians and Egyptians, who displayed fish in rectangular pools.

Ancient Romans constructed ponds supplied with fresh seawater and kept fish for food and enjoyment. In the Roman Empire, the carp-like sea barbell was one of the first fish to be kept indoors, in small marble tanks under guest beds. The introduction of crude glass panes around 50 AD allowed Romans to replace one side of the tank, improving their view of the fish.

In 1369, Chinese Emperor Hongwu established a porcelain company that produced tubs for maintaining goldfish. Over time, these tubs resembled modern fishbowls.

Although goldfish were successfully exhibited in glass vessels in England during the 1700s, the keeping of fish did not become established until the relationship between oxygen, fish, and plants became known a century later.

In 1836, shortly after inventing the Wardian case (above) – a sealed protective container for plants that was a forerunner of the modern terrarium – British surgeon Dr. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward displayed aquatic plants and toy fish in his tanks before he started housing living fish.

A Victorian era illustration depicts a coldwater fish tank.

Nineteenth century British naturalist Philip Henry Gosse, regarded as the inventor of the seawater aquarium, actually coined the word “aquarium,” instead of the oft-used “aquatic vivarium” (or “aqua-vivarium” for short). The keeping and displaying of fish in aquariums became a popular pastime and spread rapidly in Victorian England after aquariums in ornate, cast-iron frames were featured at London’s Great Exhibition of 1851. In 1853, the first large public aquarium opened in the London Zoo and came to be known as the Fish House (below).

Around 1908, a pivotal moment in the expansion of aquariums as a hobby occurred when the mechanical, water-powered air pump was developed. Electricity provided lighting, aeration, filtration, and heating. By the late 20^th century, aquarium-keeping was the second most popular hobby, after stamp-collecting.

These days, in feng shui, moving water is considered beneficial in balancing a home’s chi (natural energy), and a properly maintained aquarium in the right location can increase luck and wealth. Aquariums have also been shown to pacify Alzheimer’s patients. Overall, the calming effect and feelings of serenity created by aquariums cannot be denied. But it has to be the real thing; watching a video of a virtual aquarium does not result in the reduced muscle tension and pulse rate evoked  by observing a real aquarium.

On the other hand, we’ve found that watching cinematic aquariums has stirred emotions, laughs, thrills, and chills in the Moviehouse.

Having survived a seemingly fatal fusillade of bullets at the end of “Creature from the Black Lagoon” (1954), the half-human, half-fish Gill-man is captured alive in 1955’s “Revenge of the Creature,” a monster movie remarkable for two things: over a number of decades, it stood out as the only 3D sequel to a 3D film, and Clint Eastwood made his motion picture debut in the picture as an absentminded lab tech with an errant rat in his pocket (below).

"It is my considered opinion that rat number four is sitting inside that cat."

Shortly after being transported to an aquarium at Florida’s Ocean Harbor Oceanarium (actually, Marineland of Florida) for rehab and study by animal psychologist John Agar and ichthyology student Lori Nelson, the ill-used Gill-man makes a gory escape from his fish tank.

"You call this lunch?!" Behind the scenes, a sea turtle in the aquarium bit off the
prosthetic foot of the Gill-man's costume worn by swimmer Ricou Browning.

“Where the Boys Are” (1960) was a female coming-of-age comedy-drama about four friends – Dolores Hart, Paula Prentiss, Yvette Mimieux, Connie Francis – from a women’s college who spend spring break in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Platinum blonde Barbara Nichols, a popular cheesecake model and a poor man’s Marilyn Monroe in films, portrays Lola Fandango the Sea Nymph, who performs in a mermaid costume inside the large aquarium of a nightclub called the Tropical Isle.

In the picture’s comic highlight, a soused Jim Hutton becomes so enraptured by Nichols’ underwater act that he joins her in the tank, inevitably followed by Prentiss, Hart, Francis, George Hamilton, and Frank Gorshin, along with several besotted barflies (below).

At the young age of 32, Sean Connery was already wearing a toupee as James Bond (although the eyebrows, thick as a Scottish hedgerow, were genuine), in the first big-screen 007 adventure, “Dr. No” (1962). Joseph Wiseman, a respected stage actor once called “the spookiest actor in the American theater” who later portrayed Meyer Lansky-like crime boss Manny Weisbord in the cult 1980s series “Crime Story,” played the screen’s first Bond villain, an agent of SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, Extortion), who plans to disrupt a Project Mercury space launch from Cape Canaveral with an atomic-powered radio beam.

Dr. No welcomes 007 and the screen’s first Bond Girl, Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress), to his suboceanic lair as they stand in awe before a wall-sized aquarium filled with seemingly oversized sea life. Dr. No calls the million-dollar fish tank “a unique feat of engineering, if I may say so. I designed it myself. The glass is convex, ten inches thick, which accounts for the magnifying effect.” In typical Bondian repartee, 007 cracks wise, “Minnows pretending they’re whales, just like you, Dr. No?” Not to be outdone, Dr. No retorts, “It depends, Mr. Bond, on which of the glass you are.”

A fish tank was again prominently featured in Sean Connery’s second rollout as James Bond in 1963’s “From Russia with Love,” widely revered by genre fans as Connery’s best 007 outing. For the first time in the enduring film franchise, SPECTRE CEO Ernst Stavro Blofeld appeared onscreen, sort of, as a faceless figure stroking a contented white Persian cat as he explains SPECTRE’s strategy for world domination, demonstrated by a trio of Siamese fighting fish sharing an aquarium.

Scottish actor Anthony Dawson, who played the ill-fated Professor Dent in "Dr. No,"
portrayed the faceless Blofeld in "From Russia with Love" and "Thunderball,"
while Viennese-born actor Eric Pohlmann supplied the voice.

As two fish, figuratively representing the U.S. and the Soviet Union, fight to the death, Blofeld observes, “Siamese fighting fish, fascinating creatures. Brave but of the whole, stupid. Except for the occasional one such as we have here who lets the other two fight. While he waits. Waits until the survivor is so exhausted that he cannot defend himself, and then, like SPECTRE, he strikes!”

Number 3 (Lotte Lenya) observes Blofeld's Siamese fighting fish in action.

Twenty years later, Siamese fighting fish returned to the screen in “Rumble Fish,” based on the novel by S.E. (Susan Eloise) Hinton, the author of young adult novels describing teen angst in the unique environs of suburban and rural Oklahoma. In 1983, Francis Ford Coppola directed back-to-back film versions of Hinton’s The Outsiders (featuring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, and Diane Lane) and Rumble Fish (with Matt Dillon, Mickey Rourke, Diane Lane, Dennis Hopper, Diana Scarwid, Vincent Spano, Nicolas Cage, Chris Penn, Laurence Fishburne, and Tom Waits).

Mickey Rourke (right) keeps a close eye on kid brother Matt Dillon in "Rumble Fish."
Dillon also had the title role in 1982's "Tex," based on another novel by S.E. Hinton.

Photographed in stark black and white with skewed camera angles and eye-catching shadow-play inspired by German Expressionist cinema like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” “Rumble Fish” depicts the tenuous relationship between legendary former gang leader Motorcycle Boy (played by a comparatively handsome Mickey Rourke, in his pre-boxing, pre-reconstructive surgery days), his hero-worshipping kid brother, a pathetic, listless hoodlum named Rusty James (portrayed by Matt Dillon), and their alcoholic, welfare-milking father (Dennis Hopper).

In the film’s most allusory scene, Motorcycle Boy is entranced with the Siamese fighting fish kept in a partitioned aquarium in a pet store. “These are rumble fish,” he tells his brother. “They’d kill each other if they could…They try to kill themselves fighting their own reflection.” In the black-and-white movie, only the fish are shown in vibrant colors of red, blue, and green; ironically, Motorcycle Boy is colorblind.  “They belong in the river,” Motorcycle Boy mutters, and you know he’s not talking about the fish. “I don’t think they would fight if they were in the river, if they had room to live. Somebody ought to put the fish in the river.”

Motorcycle Boy: "Kinda makes me sad I can't see the colors."

An aqua-vivarium of the most surrealistic variety provided a curious Greek chorus for the 1983 comedy “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.” The Pythons would be – and, in fact, were – the first to admit that the title was a lame excuse to tie together a bunch of disjointed ideas in what is ultimately a sketch comedy show, not at all unlike their 1971 breakthrough film “And Now for Something Completely Different.”

Eric Idle, Michael Palin, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Terry Jones
pose in a publicity photo for "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life."

The last, almost desperate film to feature all six Python members before Graham Chapman’s death in 1989 “has a little something to offend everybody,” in the words of Roger Ebert. “And I mean really offend them.” Early on, there’s a show-stopping “Oliver!”-inspired musical extravaganza titled “Every Sperm Is Sacred,” followed by other tunes like “Oh Lord Please Don’t Burn Us” and “Penis Song,” along with scenes of a blood-soaked live organ transplant and a gargantuan gourmand who can’t stop vomiting before he literally explodes. Ebert remarked, “It’s a barbed, uncompromising attack on generally observed community standards.” And it won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.

"Every sperm is sacred, every sperm is great!
If a sperm is wasted, God gets quite irate!"

Popping in and out of the picture is a sequence depicting the Pythons as chattering fish in a restaurant aquarium. The fish, in fact, set the tone of the film at the onset when they witness a friend being dined on in the restaurant, and one of them says, “Makes you think, doesn’t it? I mean, what’s it all about?” Midway through, another wryly observes, “They haven’t said much about the meaning of life so far, have they?”

According to Terry Jones, the Pythons had to wear uncomfortable head-pieces
and dress in blue for the blue-screen chroma key effects.

Terry Jones, who directed “The Meaning of Life,” admitted that the movie’s working title was “A Fish Film.” That might explain this otherwise inexplicable onscreen message after the end credits: “The producers would like to thank all the fish who have taken part in this film. We hope that other fish will follow the example of those who have participated so that, in future, fish all over the world will live together in harmony and understanding, and put aside their petty differences, cease pursuing and eating each other and live for a brighter, better future for fish, and those who love them.”  We couldn’t help but be reminded of the opening titles for 1975’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” which were hilariously obsessed with moose (“A moose once bit my sister”).

One of the most bizarre sketches in "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life" is
the nightmarish "Find the Fish" ("And it went wherever I did go!").
Terry Gilliam declared, "I do think this is Python at its surreal best."

In 1988, two Pythons reunited for a close encounter with another aquarium in “A Fish Called Wanda,” a heist comedy stocked with double- and triple-crosses and rampant havoc, scripted by John Cleese, who also portrays a British barrister seduced into larceny by gorgeous jewel thief Jamie Lee Curtis, costarring Michael Palin as a stammering, inept hitman with a soft spot for animals, particularly tropical fish, and directed by Charles Crichton, a 78-year-old comedy pro responsible for such classic English comic capers as 1951’s “The Lavender Hill Mob,” starring Alec Guinness.

Kevin Kline surprisingly nabbed a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for his full-tilt bullgoose-loony performance as the astoundingly stupid, vocabulary-challenged, vulgar Anglophobe who attempts to coerce Palin into revealing the location of stashed diamonds from the earlier robbery.

“You really like animals, don’t you?” Kline asks Palin. “What’s the attraction?” Palin hesitantly responds, “You can t-t-trust them, and they don’r sh-sh-sh-sh-“ “Shit on you?” Kline offers. “Show off all the t-time.”

In real life, Michael Palin's father stuttered, and after "A Fish Called Wanda,"
Palin founded the London Centre for Stammering Children when a group of
stutterers approached him and praised the sensibility and sympathy with which
he addressed his charachter's speech impediment.

Unleashed in a scene of deliriously hilarious cruelty, Kline shoves French fries up the nose of a trussed Palin before, in a demented twist on fish-and-chips, tormenting his captive by swallowing, one by one, Palin’s prized fish from the aquarium.  “Nice fish,” Kline offers. “You know what Nietzsche said about animals? They were God’s second blunder.” Although Kline was so dedicated to his art that he offered to down real, live fish, the filmmakers fed him fish made out of Jell-O. In a Danish cinema, an audiologist literally laughed himself to death during the French fries scene. Although initially dismissed as an urban legend, the poor victim’s son confirmed the story.

Kevin Kline eyeballs his next snack in "A Fish Called Wanda."

The 1996 film “Mission: Impossible,” flamboyant director Brian De Palma’s bloated, big-screen reboot of the 60s espionage series, opens with a team of agents of the Impossible Missions Force (IMF) decimated on an assignment gone horribly wrong, leaving field agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) the sole survivor, suspected as a mole who had been selling secrets to a Czech arms dealer. Cornered by IMF director Eugene Kittridge (played by Henry Czerny) in a posh Prague restaurant, Hunt ominously intones, “Kittridge, you’ve never seen me very upset,” before slapping an explosive on the restaurant’s large lobster aquarium.

The glass-walled restaurant with a big lobster tank in the middle and three huge fish tanks overhead – sixteen tons of water in all the tanks - was the brainstorm of Tom Cruise, as the film’s producer. Director De Palma tested the scene with a stuntman, but it didn’t look convincing, and Cruise was selected to perform the stunt himself.

The spectacular aquarium explosion and Hunt’s leap through the shattered restaurant window were filmed at Paramount Studios. The shots of Hunt dashing into the streets of Prague with water flooding behind him were shot on location in the Czech Republic.

Rob Schneider marvels at a Chinese Tailbar Lionfish (actually, a common red lionfish)
in a hand-assembled custom living-color anti-glare retractable-top tank.

Speaking of fish out of water, Rob Schneider (above), a comedian who has carved out a meager film career from his association with “Saturday Night Live” pal Adam Sandler, starred as just that, almost literally, playing a hapless but good-hearted fish tank cleaner in dire need of cash who finds himself earning money as a “man-whore” in 1999’s “Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo,” a scattershot comedy executive-produced by Sandler and directed by Mike Mitchell, a former animator whose credits as a director include “Shrek Forever After” and the upcoming “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water."

"Ball sweat!...Anus licker!...Nipple biter!...Sperm face!"

Among Schneider’s grab bag of oddball customers is Deborah Lemen as a narcoleptic whose face-plant in a bowling alley is a laugh-out-loud gem and a hilarious Amy Poehler as a woman afflicted with Tourette syndrome (above) whom Schneider takes to a baseball game, where her rants of profanity fit right in with the crowd. At age 62, Marlo Thomas (below) looks positively ravishing in an uncredited role as an oversexed client with an over-protective hound.

The cast also features Oded Fehr (the Israeli-born actor best known for his heartthrob role as the dashing warrior Ardeth Bay in “The Mummy”) as a professional gigolo, comedian Eddie Griffin as Schneider’s “he-pimp” (“Don’t make me he-bitch man-slap you!”), and scene-stealing character actor William Forsythe as a manic vice detective with a dick fixation (below). Actress Arija Bareikis (best known as LAPD officer Chickie Brown on the TV series “Southland”) gives the otherwise crass proceedings some heart and unaffected charm as Schneider’s true love.

Norm Macdonald has an amusing cameo as a no-nonsense bartender who tells Schneider, “If you don’t pay me now, I’m gonna take this swizzle stick, and I’ll be shoving that right up your pee hole.” He’s not listed in the cast, but the end credits state, “Norm Macdonald only worked on this movie for one day.” The end titles also claim, “Only one fish was harmed in the making of this film…but he’s better now.”

A running gag in "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" has Rob Schneider asking
local pet store "Fish Girl" Bree Turner for sea snails to get her T-shirt wet.

There are tasteless jokes aplenty, including potshots at blindness, but Roger Ebert admitted, “I laughed, yes, I did, several times during ‘Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo.’ That’s proof, if any is required, that I still possess streaks of immaturity and vulgarity. May I never lose them.”

Into every aquarium a little tragedy must fall, a hard lesson of life Fred Rogers once learned in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” For years, Fred Rogers would pause to feed the fish in the kitchen aquarium with a “Hello, fish,” and a smile. Until that one day, when he suddenly blurted, “Oh! What’s that, right down there?...Do you see a dead fish? A dead fish would be one that isn’t swimming or breathing or anything at all.” Death came to the fish tank in the neighborhood as Fred solemnly intoned, “Guess we better bury it.”

Something else equally unsettling fell into the aquarium in a pair of films from the late 1970s. “The Silent Partner” (1978) was a heist thriller produced in Toronto. Remember when, a few years ago, lovable octogenarian Christopher Plummer cuddled his Best Supporting Actor statuette for his role in 2010’s “Beginners” and cooed, “You’re only two years older than me, darling. Where have you been all my life?” Well, he was anything but lovable in “The Silent Partner” as a ruthless, sadistic bank robber cheated out of his haul by unassuming bank teller Elliott Gould, who secretly stashes $50,000 for himself. Gould’s character, incidentally, collects tropical fish.

Christopher Plummer masquerades as Santa Claus
and dresses in drag to get what he wants in "The Silent Partner."

Co-scripted by Curtis Hanson (who later wrote and directed “L.A. Confidential”), “The Silent Partner” is noted for its rare music score by jazz great Oscar Peterson and for an early screen role for John Candy (who was appearing on “Second City Television” at the time) as a comic-relief co-worker of Gould’s (below).

The cast also includes Susannah York and Celine Lomez, a Canadian pop singer (Celine must be a popular name for Canadian pop singers) who portrays, first, Plummer’s lover, then Gould’s accomplice, and finally, Plummer’s victim as she meets a gruesome end on the jagged glass of a broken aquarium.

Celine Lomez before and after her grisly demise

Roger Ebert praised the picture as “a small but wonderful gem of a thriller,” commenting, “’Silent Partner’s’ plot, indeed, has such ironies and reversals and neatly inevitable triple-crosses that it’s worthy of Hitchcock.”

“He Knows You’re Alone” (1980) was one of the first movies churned out as a rip-off of 1978’s “Halloween.” Filmed “on-location” on Staten Island in New York City over a two-week period by a director named Armand Mastroianni, who is sometimes passed off as Marcello Mastroianni’s American cousin, the relatively gore-less slasher flick about a maniac who kills brides-to-be on the eve of their weddings was originally called “Blood Wedding” before the studio insisted on “He Knows You’re Alone,” which makes no sense since the victims are rarely alone.

In his first screen appearance, Tom Hanks has a small role as a psychology major who blathers on about his fascination with fear. “People pay to be scared,” he declares. “When you think about it, it’s ridiculous.” All that’s missing is a neon subtitle blinking, “Author’s Message” as Hanks pontificates, “Most people like to be scared. It’s something primal, something basic. Horror movies and the roller coasters and the house-of-horror rides…You can face death without any real fear of dying. It’s safe, you can leave the movie or get off the ride with the vicarious thrill of the feeling that you’ve just conquered death. One hell of a first-classs rush.”

Elizabeth Kemp looks unimpressed by Tom Hanks' psychobabble
in "He Knows You're Alone."

Supposedly, Hanks’ character was scripted to be killed off, but because the filmmakers grew fond of the 24-year-old actor (after all, who doesn’t like Tom Hanks?) they kept him alive. Not so lucky was Hanks’ screen girlfriend, played by Elizabeth Kemp (who became a major executive in New York’s The Actors Studio), whose severed head ends up in a fish tank.

The film costars Don Scardino (who, best known to horror buffs as the hero of the 1976 sandworms-on-the-rampage chiller “Squirm,” went on to become an Emmy Award-winning producer-director of “30 Rock”) and features Paul Gleason (best known for his boneheaded appearances as the assistant principal in “The Breakfast Club” and the blowhard deputy police chief in “Die Hard”) in a small role as a detective. Along with Hanks, 14-year-old Dana Barron (best known as the original Audrey Griswold in “National Lampoon’s Vacation”), made her film debut in “He Knows You’re Alone.”

Afterword

Frank Gorshin in "Where the Boys Are"

“The best way to observe a fish is to become a fish.” – Jacques Yves Cousteau…That about sums it up. Tanks for reading!