The Thing from Another World (1951)

This was another movie that I first became aware of when I read about it in an old book at my school library, with this one being about classic alien invasion films. It sounded intriguing from the start: a team of military people and scientists at the North Pole finds a plant-like alien frozen in ice and they bring it back to their base. However, it ends up getting thawed out and goes on a rampage. Sounded like a movie I would absolutely love. But, like many old sci-fi and monster flicks that I read about around that time, I wouldn't see it for many years to come. An interesting note is how when I read that the thing itself was a plant-like monster, I imagined something in my head like the Triffids; however, some time later I bought a book about monsters which had a picture of the thing himself and that was the first time I saw James Arness in his makeup. I was very surprised that the thing was humanoid and only had traits that hinted at him being plant-like in nature, with the veins under his skin and the rose-like thorns on his knuckles. In any case, I was about 13 when I saw the movie for the first time and I instantly loved it. The following Christmas, I got my own copy of it and was once again blown away by it when I watched it. I liked how skillfully made it was, how well it used atmosphere and the fear of the unknown, and, best of all, how likable the characters were. For a kid who loved monsters, I should have hated this movie because the thing itself is largely unseen but the cast was so good and the suspense so well done that I enjoyed every minute of it. Not being a fan of westerns, I'd never heard of Howard Hawks before but, even though this technically isn't his film, it didn't take me long to understand why he was so well loved as a filmmaker.

The very idea behind this movie and how it's carried out is one of its greatest aspects. Horror films are always great when they take place in an isolated, claustrophobic setting and this movie is certainly no exception. The Air Force team that heads to the base where the scientists are is expected, at first, to come back the following night. They do know that there's a front moving in but they think they can manage regardless. However, a strong snowstorm quickly moves in and they're stuck at the base. They keep trying to reach their general but the storm makes it difficult for them to send clear messages to him, with the responses they get from him hinting that he's indeed not getting half of what they're sending him. Once the thing gets loose, they try to radio for more weapons and equipment they can fight the monster with but it ultimately proves to be futile and they're forced to fight it with whatever they can get a hold of there. While I ultimately don't find the sense of isolation and the thought of no help coming to be as prevalent in this film as it is in John Carpenter's version (which is my personal favorite horror film of all time, I might add), it does become clear that these guys are in a battle they might not win and desperately need reinforcements.

The characters, though, are what really make this film work: they're well-developed, likable, and feel like the kind of people you'd want to hang out with. Among the Air Force members, you get a real sense of friendship, that these are guys who've known each other for years, have been on dozens of missions together, and have developed a real bond. They're good enough friends that they can tease their captain and not get severely reprimanded for it, although he often gives them fair warning not to press their luck. Also, the dialogue in this movie is very well written and fast. It comes thick and fast, often with two or three people talking at once and with one interrupting another, making it feel very natural and like a real conversation. (This is a trademark of Hawks, from what I hear.) It gives the film a sense of realism and, as a result, an edge that many horror and science fiction films of the period don't.

Kenneth Tobey plays Captain Pat Hendry, the commanding officer of the group, and he comes across as the type of captain you'd want to lead your team. He's instantly likable when you first see him, casually playing cards with his lieutenants and joking with them. Even when they bring up his relationship with Nikki and tease him, he doesn't get angry and simply says that he hopes that one day he'll have subordinates who, "are dry behind the ears." He's often bantering back and forth with his men in that sense of good-natured ribbing. That said, though, he does make his authority known when the situation calls for it. When they find the thing and bring it back to the base, he doesn't allow the scientists to examine it until the general radios them and gives them go-ahead to do so. He's a man who follows orders whenever it's necessary and feels that it's his duty to go by standard operating procedure. Another thing I like about him is that he's a guy who can really take charge when things get hairy. Once the thing is loose, he does everything he can to find it. and while at first he seems willing to simply contain it, once it proves itself to be extremely dangerous, he disobeys orders from the general to keep it alive. As I said, he follows orders when he feels it's necessary but it's also clear that keeping everyone at the base safe is more important to him than the thing's importance to the military or science. And he does admit to Carrington that he's frightened but that doesn't stop him from taking action. He's the best kind of commanding officer one could ask for.

Pat has a rather interesting relationship with Nikki, the woman who acts as Dr. Carrington's assistant. They apparently had a fling some time before, which ended with Nikki playing a practical joke on him that Pat didn't find at all amusing, although he doesn't get as an angry about it as he could have. There aren't a lot of details about what happened exactly but apparently, Pat got more than a little drunk and went wild. It's never made clear if they had sex or not but since Pat later says he hasn't even kissed her, I'm going to say he probably just passed out in the end. (But then again, he says she wrote a note that said his legs aren't very pretty and pinned it on his chest. How does she know how his legs look? Maybe she was just fooling around in general but, still...) After meeting back up at the base, they slowly rekindle their romance throughout the film, eventually leading to one scene that was apparently removed from subsequent re-releases: Nikki ties Pat's hands behind his back and feeds him some drinks, leading to them kissing for the first time and making it obvious that their attraction has built back up considerably. By the end of the film, it's hinted that the two of them will probably settle down together.

Speaking of the character herself, Margaret Sheridan plays Nikki as a pretty strong, slightly sassy woman. (another trademark of Hawks'), although in the end, there's not much else to say about her since she's not one of the most important characters in the film. She certainly come across as likable, though. One amazing thing about her is that, unlike most women in these types of films, she never screams once. Even in the scene where they set the thing on fire and she gets caught in the middle of the chaos, she never screams. For that matter, she doesn't run from danger either. Near the end of the film when Pat and the others realize they have to bait the thing to their trap, she wants to come with them but Pat refuses to let her and only then does she retreat. She also has enough sense to know that what Dr. Carrington is doing is wrong and that he has to be stopped, which leads her to let Pat see his confidential notes. She's even the one that fundamentally gives them the idea of how to destroy the thing: when they're wondering what you do to a vegetable, she suggests, "Boil it, stew it, bake it, fry it." That eventually leads to them first using kerosene and ultimately electricity, the latter of which destroys the monster.

Dr. Arthur Carrington comes across as probably the worst type of scientist: one who would let innocent people die as long as he can study something unique. Robert Cornthwaite plays him as cold and analytical, caring more for science than human life. From his first appearance, he comes across as somewhat eccentric. When Nikki walks in to introduce Pat to him, he's busy looking at some odd machine and doesn't seem to notice. When Nikki says that Pat is here, he coldly says, "Yes, I know." He's cordial enough to say, "How do you do, captain?" but it's obvious that other people mean little to him. The relationship between him and Pat is nothing out of the ordinary at first but once Pat refuses to allow him to thaw out the thing until he hears from his superiors, you can detect a feeling of animosity building. Once the thing is set free and he's able to examine a piece of it, he becomes intent on keeping the creature alive to try to communicate with it and see what can be learned from. Even before they come across the thing, he's sure that the spaceship it arrived in would be of great benefit to science, and when he realizes that he has another golden discovery within his reach, he becomes intent on not letting anyone or anything stand in his way. To that end, he doesn't tell Pat that he and two other scientists found a dead dog that was killed by the thing in the greenhouse, which eventually leads to the death of two men; he uses blood plasma to grow the young of the thing in his laboratory; and near the end when they've set their trap, he temporarily turns off the electricity used to power it and threatens Pat and the others with a gun! A lot of that latter part could be due to extreme fatigue as he's barely slept but as I've said before, nothing matters to him but science. He made that clear when he didn't seem to care about two fellow scientists being killed in the greenhouse and he even says at one point that he feels knowledge is more important than life. In a rather dumb last ditch effort, he tries to reason with the thing but the creature makes it clear he's not interested in sharing knowledge and effortlessly swats Carrington aside. You later hear that he wasn't killed, only injured, but hopefully, that smack knocked some sense into him as well!

The funniest character in the film is Douglas Spencer in the role of Ned Scott, better known as Scotty, a reporter who happens to be friends with Lt. Eddie Dykes and is in Anchorage when Pat and the others get the call to head farther north. He tags along, hoping it leads to a story. He makes his dislike towards General Fogarty and air force superiors at large pretty clear at the beginning and when Pat refuses to let him send out his story until they get official word, he becomes more than a little annoyed. He never becomes hateful towards Pat, mind you, but makes his frustration very well known. One funny scene is when they hear that there's been a leak in the press about the spaceship and Scotty thinks that his editor is probably so frustrated by this point that he'll shoot himself! When the thing disappears after it's thawed out, he jokes, "So many people can boast they've lost a flying saucer and a man from Mars all in the same day!" And when they encounter the thing in the doorway of the greenhouse and barricade it inside, he's asked if he was able to get a picture of it. When he says he couldn't because Pat was in the way and the door wasn't open long enough, Pat asks, "Want us to open it again?", to which Scotty replies, "No!" And after the thing is destroyed and he can at least get a picture of the remains, poor Scotty can't take it and faints! But, for all of his comedic moments, Scotty is the one who delivers the chilling final lines of the film:"Watch the skies, everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!", suggesting that they may be more aliens to come. (I like to think of it as a prelude to all the alien movies that would follow in the 1950's, the same way I like to think of the ending of Them! as a lead-in to the original Godzilla and all of the other atomic age monster movies that followed.)

Even the supporting and minor characters here are very likable. James Young at Lt. Dykes, Robert Nichols at Lt. MacPherson, or Mac as everyone calls him, William Self as Corporal Barnes, and Dewey Martin as Bob the crew chief are all very funny and likable. Eddie in particular is a real wise-cracker, whereas Nichols is much more deadpan in every sense of the world, and both of them give Pat a teasingly hard time over his fling with Nikki. Barnes ends up being the one who inadvertently puts everyone in danger after he puts an electric blanket on the thing and thaws it out. He's very frightened by the thing when he sees it for the first time and has a very believable breakdown in front of Pat when he describes it. Some of the uncredited parts are also memorable in their own way. Nicholas Byron as Tex Richards, the radio operator, is memorable for his Texan accent and dry sense of humor. None of the other scientists are very memorable (although, if you're a big fan of anything from the 50's on, you should recognize veteran voice actor Paul Frees as Prof. Voorhees) but, that said, it's interesting how you see the worm turn here. At first, most of them are with Carrington when it comes to the fact that they feel the thing should be examined as soon as possible but when it becomes clear that Carrington's actions are becoming unreasonable and downright dangerous, they side with the air force men and decide that the creature should be destroyed.

The primary source of terror in the film is, of course, the thing himself but that feeling  is primarily ethereal and atmospheric nature. Because the makeup and black jumpsuit that James Arness wears isn't all that impressive honestly (I mean, look at it), the thing is kept off-camera for, I would say, 97% of the film. Even when he does appear, you're unable to get a very clear look at him since there are no closeups of him and the camera is either very far away, the glimpse of him is extremely quick, or he's obscured in some way, mostly in the shadows. The main fear of the creature comes from simply knowing that he's lurking in the base or outside somewhere and that he could attack at any moment. This method works quite effectively and gives the thing a very mysterious and frightening quality he wouldn't have had if he kept appearing over and over in brightly lit close-ups.

Even before they become aware of the thing's existence and bring him back to the base, the spacecraft he arrives in is rather mysterious in and of itself. Pictures taken of the craft before it crashed show it as nothing more than a bright dot in the sky but they're enough to reveal that it moved upward at one point before dropping down, tipping Dr. Carrington and the others off that it wasn't a meteorite. Its arrival also causes some slight Cold War paranoia, as Pat suggests at one point that it could be Russians, as well as some major interference with any electronic equipment nearby. The best scene involving the ship, as well as one of

the best in the entire film, is when they find it buried in a field of ice. A truly amazing moment, made even more dramatic and effective by the score, occurs when they spread out to determine the size and shape of the craft and discover it's perfectly round; they've found an actual flying saucer. Unfortunately, their plan to uncover the ship with thermite goes awry when the ship is destroyed by accident, leading to them discovering the thing's frozen body nearby. When they chop out a block of the ice containing him and bring it back to the base, they put it in a storeroom and break the windows in order to keep it frozen until they can figure out what to do with it. Even before he's released, you hear that the men having to stand guard over the thing are spooked by what they can see through the ice, with the eyes, which are open and look like they can see, freaking them out in particular.

A really frightening moment is when the thing is thawed out of the ice and awakens. You see his shadow fall across Barnes, who's sitting in a chair with his back turned to him. Sensing what's going on, Barnes drops his coffee cup in absolute terror and spins around. Upon seeing the thing, Barnes proceeds to fire several shots at him before fleeing the room in a panic. You don't see the thing but you hear him making bizarre growls and howls that sound a little bit like a cat. Another frightening moment is when they open the door to the greenhouse later on and come face-to-face with the thing. It's a real shock moment that you don't often

get in movies made around this time, which will probably help in making it all the more effective (it scared me to death when I first saw it). Speaking of which, the filmmakers came up with an ingenious method of making his presence known even when you don't see him. He's apparently radioactive from the explosion of his ship and Bob is able to use his Geiger counter to track him throughout the base. It makes for great suspense when the Geiger counter's clicking becomes steadily faster, indicating that the creature is nearby. One particularly creepy scene to me comes after the entire team investigates the greenhouse. Dr. Carrington notices that some molds have been wilted, most likely from a blast of icy air, meaning that the backdoor was opened briefly. That leads to him and a couple of his colleagues, who stay behind after the others leave, discovering the body of a sled dog in a cabinet; the thing drained its blood for nourishment. What's more, they'd missed the thing by mere seconds since he'd heard them coming and escaped out the backdoor, an idea that has always given me the chills.

After the thing is thawed out, one of his arms is torn off by the sled dogs that attack him when he escapes outside (although he's obscured by the blizzard, you can tell that James Arness is wearing a sweater and gray pants rather than his black jumpsuit). When the scientists later examine the arm, they discover that, while he may have a humanoid appearance, the thing is actually a plant-like creature that feeds on blood, a fact that's made clear when the severed arm comes to life when it ingests the dog blood it's covered in. They also later discover that the thing has holed itself up in the greenhouse and, after killing two of the
scientists, is using their blood to create a progeny, hanging their bodies upside down with their throats cut open like pieces of meat in a slaughterhouse (obviously you don't see this but hearing about it is effective enough). Carrington does something similar when he takes some seed pods found in the hand's flesh and uses plasma from their blood supply to grow the flower-like young of the creature. It makes for another eerie scene. The bulbs are pulsating slowly as they feed on the plasma and when a professor listens to one with a stethoscope, he says the sound he heard sounded like a hungry newborn child, which I've always found to be very disturbing. The idea of something as innocent as a newborn baby wailing for nourishment being made sinister since, in this instance, what said "child" wants is blood really gets to me and makes my skin crawl. Even scarier is when Prof. Voorhees suggests that the thing could have come to Earth to conquer it and use the human race as a food source for an army he was intending to breed. Very creepy stuff.

As I've described in great detail, this movie proves that you don't need to really see the monster to be terrified of it and understand what it's capable of. But, that said, the scene where the thing bursts into the room and they set him on fire is very exciting, with a lot of great stuntwork and action, as is the climax where they bait him into an electrical trap. I like how Carrington's devotion to science almost gets him killed when he tries in vain to communicate with the thing. The thing just stares at him at first, appearing somewhat curious about him, but he eventually bats him aside, showing that he simply sees humans as either food, as Carrington himself mentioned earlier, or annoyances. And again, these brief but detailed enough glimpses of the thing you get here are made even more powerful by the fact that you haven't seen him much but are still perfectly aware of what he can do, something that typical monster movies are unable to accomplish when they keep showing the monster again and again.

One big controversy about the film is whether Howard Hawks himself actually directed it or if it was the credited director, Christian Nyby. James Arness always maintained that it was Nyby, whereas Kenneth Tobey said in interviews that Hawks himself was in charge. There may be some truth to that since Nyby maintained that Hawks was a guiding force throughout the filming and lovers of Hawks' films, including John Carpenter, say the style here is most definitely his. But, at the same time, since Nyby was apparently an editor for Hawks before becoming a director, I feel it's possible he could have understood Hawks' style enough to duplicate it very well. In the end, whoever was in the director's chair on this film is irrelevant because it's a great movie either way.

As always, the last thing I want to address is the music score, which in this case is provided by Dimitri Tiomkin. Along with Bernard Herrmann's score for The Day The Earth Stood Still, it was one of the first to make use of the bizarre instrument known as the theremin. While Tiomkin doesn't use it as extensively as Herrmann, it's quite prevalent when the characters come upon the frozen spaceship, as well here and there as an eerie theme for the thing. This is also one of the first movies to use sudden loud music cues to frighten the audience, the biggest one being when Prof. Voorhees open the cabinet in the greenhouse and the dog's body falls out. Another one is the aforementioned scene when Pat opens the door to the greenhouse and the thing is standing in the doorway. Both of those moments are very effective in causing unsuspecting people to jump right out of their seats (I know from personal experience.) Of course, jump scares are used far too much nowadays, but this movie earns its jump scares since it has a lot of suspense leading up to them.

While I do think John Carpenter's version is superior and is a true classic of its genre, there's no denying that The Thing from Another World is an undisputed sci-fi classic as well. Not only is it a well-told story with great characters, crisp direction, snappy, realistic dialogue, and superb use of an ideal setting, it's also, above everything else, an absolute masterpiece of suspense and one that I think filmmakers today should take a lesson from. While I do indeed enjoy a lot of science fiction and horror movies where the monster and havoc that it causes right out there in the open, which can also be an effective way to go in and of itself (the Carpenter version being a prime example), this film is a true testament to how the unseen is sometimes more frightening than anything we actually do see. Along with The Day The Earth Stood Still the same year, it kick-started the science fiction/horror boom of the 1950's (which remains one of my favorite sub-genres to this day) and for good reason. I highly recommend this flick for any fan of 50's science fiction and horror or, for that matter, to any fan of movies period. A true classic.