I imagine Tourneur arguing with the production executives about showing as little as possible of the underwater "gill men". The most interesting of these semi-human creatures is first seen mostly in the shadows, marked by a long Mohawk hair-do. Subtlety was rarely valued at American-International Pictures, and the film ends with more revealing shots of the monsters, looking mostly like submerged, malevelont Teletubbies. I would like to imagine that what Tourneur and Bennett had in mind were creatures indirectly related to the animal-human hybrids out of the past, the cat people and leopard men.

It is with the same spirit that this tale, told mostly in the dark, reminded me also Berlin Express in which the characters find themselves lost in a maze of ruins. Even the giant, unexplained statues are reminders of Tourneur's previous explorations into men and myths. What does not help is the casting of Tab Hunter and the blandly attractive Susan Hart as the romantic leads. Far better are Vincent Price in a well-modulated performance, and character actor John Le Mesurier in a role orignally pegged for Boris Karloff. Louis Heyward's hand in re-writing the film for the presumed American-International audience is evident in broad comedy with David Tomlinson and a pet chicken named Herbert. There is greater humor in the suggestion that Susan Hart's character, believed by Price to be the reincarnation of his dead wife, has the faintly aquatic last name of Tregillis, as if she could be an unknowing descendent of the ocean creatures.

Certainly one should consider what Fujiwara has said in describing Tourneur in putting his films in context, "Tourneur seems never to have been completely at home in America, and lots of his films are about outsiders, about being 'strange' in a place. They have a similar emotional quality to the books of Marguerite Duras: both are concerned with people remote from each other and themselves, who inhabit weird, distant realms. Yet Tourneur allows us a kind of nostalgic connection with his characters, even to fall in love with them."