Some of you may have read the excerpt from Ken Russell's autobiography in which he talks about how traumatized he was by the 1930s British "quota quickie" THE SECRET OF THE LOCH when he saw it as a child. According to Russell, the film's Loch Ness Monster (which, unusually for its time, is not revealed to be a hoax) was "played" by a live plucked chicken.
"It wasn't until the last reel that we finally got to see what was going on beneath the surface....I knew the monster was going to appear from behind the flowerpot directly the toy diver bounced inside. I prepared to laugh. I'd seen a smudgy picture of ''Nessie'' in a newspaper and was expecting a model dinosaur. What actually appeared scared me stiff. It was a naked chicken, plucked and very much alive. I don't remember being so scared in the cinema ever again and that includes the sight of a dead man sitting up in the bath and plucking his eyes out in Clouzot's Les Diaboliques. That was nothing compared to the naked chicken, with beady eyes and sharp beak, pecking its way with clawed feet over the stones toward the unsuspecting diver in the upturned flowerpot. Beat that, Steven Spielberg!"
This is a terrific story, but of course it isn't true, although I have no doubt that Russell sincerely remembered it this way (he also misremembers LES DIABOLIQUES). In his blog, Steven R. Bissette theorizes that the young Russell, never having seen an iguana, mistook it for a plucked chicken. Bissette also reproduces a still from the film, suggesting that this was the first use of a live lizard to represent a dinosaur or monster in the sound era:
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:TEv2z...clnk&cd=2&gl=usI knew that Russell's memory was mistaken when I first read that quote, long before Bissette debunked it, for while I've never seen THE SECRET OF THE LOCH, I came across a still from it in a book about the Loch Ness Monster that I read as a teenager (although, oddly enough, I recall the Monster in the still as looking more like a marionette-ish model than a common green iguana, a species I was quite familiar with from all the ones I'd had as pets, which shows just how tricky memory can be where these things are concerned).
The thing is, I ALSO remember reading a cryptozoological book of the sort that I devoured as a kid, probably by Ivan T. Sanderson, that mentioned a cinematic adaptation of THE LOST WORLD in which the dinosaurs were played by "cleverly disguised chickens." Of course, no such film exists; at the time I read that quote, there were only two known adaptations of the Doyle novel, the silent one with the animated dinos and the Irwin Allen remake with the lizards.
So, I find it intriquing and a bit baffling that two different writers, one a famous director and the other rather a famous kook (if it wasn't Sanderson, it may have been John Keel, author of THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES), should misrember two different films as using chickens to play reptillian monsters. I wonder where and when this myth originated, and if it's possible if there really IS an obscure film out there somewhere that attempted such a fowl deception. It's not that uncommon for people to remember something that happened in one film as happening in quite a different one -- when I was a kid, I wouldn't watch CAT PEOPLE on Sunrise Theater because I'd read Robert Bloch's vivid description of the stalking and killing of a little girl, and the subsequent flow of blood under a doorway in FAMOUS MONSTER (Bloch was, of course, thinking of THE LEOPARD MAN), and I avoided THE BLOB for a while because I thought there was a gruesome bit at the climax where the Blob engulfed a one-handed bad guy and nasty looking black blood gushed out of his mouth (blood coming out of victims' mouths really freaked me out when I was little), which actually happens in CALTIKI.