He hoped to become a professional actor and in his late teens he enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where his classmates included Hume Cronyn, Betty Field and Garson Kanin.

[3]: 53 While Arnold intended to become a pilot, a shortage of planes meant he was temporarily placed in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, where he took a crash course in cinematography.

The best known of these, It Came from Outer Space (1953), Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Tarantula (1955), and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) are noted for their atmospheric black-and-white cinematography and sophisticated scripts.

The Incredible Shrinking Man is considered his "masterpiece," a fantasy film with few equals in intelligence and sophistication, notes author John Baxter.

The film was shot in color and CinemaScope and was later restored from the original negative for airing on the "Grit" digital broadcast channel.

He also worked in England as the director of the influential anti-nuke satire, The Mouse That Roared (1959), in which Peter Sellers played three roles, one of them in drag.

He also directed episodes of such television shows as Nanny and the Professor, Alias Smith and Jones, The Fall Guy, The Brady Bunch, Gilligan's Island, Wonder Woman, Ellery Queen, Mr.