There's actually been plenty of info on this l'il wonder over the years. Beverly Garland has been interviewed innumberable times about it (I did her for 100 Years of Horror; Tom Weaver did an extensive Fango interview & reprinted it, etc.). She says he was a pusssycat. Bill W (above) does a good chapter on it in KWTS.

Don't know where you're getting the Warners connection; nothing to that. F'er goodness' sake, it opens with the 20th Fox Fanfare and the CinemaScope extension, in glorious black and white.

It was a Lippert production, I'm pretty sure. Theater chain owner/ producer Robert Lippert ground out mostly 2nd features for Fox because he was pals with Spyros Skorous, owner of Fox. Lippert could make them cheaper. In the case of ALLIGATOR PEOPLE, I think Fox gave them access to the Fox back lot and stages, which enhanced the production value.

Eight film historians and a hungry armadillo will jump on me if I'm wrong, but I believe THE FLY was a Lippert picture, too. ALLIGATOR PEOPLE has a lot of parallels structure-wise to it, and I don't think that's accidental. Of course, you had a prize-winning short story for THE FLY, adapted by James Clavell; with ALLIGATOR you had Orville Hampton. That's like getting a haute cuissine meal from Le Dome heated up and deep-fried by the guy at Mel's Diner. Whatever.

I wouldn't be surprised if Vincent Price influenced George MacCready to take the part of the scientist. They were pals and partners in an art gallery, and MacCready hadn't done anything like it before this, very little afterward (a one-scene bit for his son in RETURN OF COUNT YORGA being the exception).

I think the Karl Strauss widescreen images are neat. Roy del Ruth clearly did more prestigeous work, but there's nothing wrong with this. Frieda Innescourt is good as the grande dame with a secret, Chaney's terrific drunken Cajun. Actually, I'll bet he liked this, since it really is a part like his old man woulda done-- grizzled, physically handicapped, bitter ("I hate gators."), a societal reject, gets to have a big fight, jumps Beverly Garland, and he's in the film a lot.

A lot of people have put the knock to the final transformation image, the guy in the alligator head. Those stills with him and Garland always spooked me as a kid. There's something mythic about them, a half-man half-animal thing, evocative of Egyptian or Greek mythology. OK, yeah, when he's on screen he looks silly, but what the heck.

However, my film critic pal Mark Berger sent me a dvd of this movie a year ago and I try to watch it every couple of nights. Can't do it. Even when I chapter stop to the point a fell asleep last time, I'm zonked in two minutes.