NFR Project: “The Thing (from Another World)”
Dir: Christian Nyby
Scr: Charles Lederer, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht
Pho: Russell Harlan
Ed: Roland Gross
Premiere: April 7, 1951
87 min.
The idea of alien conquest was as old as H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel The
War of the Worlds, but this was an onslaught. The positive and negative
poles of that speculative subgenre were released in the same year, 1951 —
Robert Wise’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, about a Christlike
ambassador from outer space, and Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby’s paranoid The
Thing from Another World.
Thing was based on John
W. Campbell’s scarier original 1938 story “Who Goes There?” (done justice years
later by director John Carpenter). Despite Christian Nyby’s directorial credit,
Thing is a Hawks film, containing many Hawks touches — the culture of
manliness, the fast, overlapping, wisecracking dialogue, the idealization of
teamwork, and the achievement of a definite mission. But Thing also
contains all the hallmarks of ‘50s horror — aliens with unknown powers,
pervasive paranoia, and a slam-bang violent conclusion.
A military crew and scientists examine a crashed alien starship in the
Arctic. They seek to free it from the ice with “thermite” bombs, but succeed
only in destroying it completely (and looking like a bunch of idiots as they do
it). They do find a eight-foot-tall . . . something . . . frozen in the ice
beside the ship. They chop out the giant ice cube and bring it back to their
research station and military base. The scientists want to thaw it out and study
it. The leader decides to keep it on ice. An idiot covers the icy slab with a
ELECTRIC blanket, unleashing a blood-drinking vegetable being bent on
destroying them all, the possible harbinger of a future invasion.
All the archetypes are present. Robert Cornthwaite plays to perfection
the egotistical, dour intellectual, the Nobel-winning “egghead” scientist with
well-formed vowels who insists on endangering all humanity in the name of
knowledge (a more well-behaved but no less mad scientist type). In this movie,
the pointy-headed intellectuals are the fools and villains who endanger the
Earth.
Kenneth Tobey plays the hypermasculine leader, fond of following orders
and sticking to practical solutions. There is a chauvinist cast to the whole
enterprise — the Arctic research station’s greenhouse door is locked because
“the Eskimos are too fond of our strawberries.” Someone says at one point, “You
look like a lynch mob.”
Margaret Sheridan is simultaneously the scientist’s secretary and the
leader’s love interest — the typical Hawksian tough girl, who can drink and
smoke and banter with the best of them — a prehistoric predecessor of the
fabled “Final Girl” in horror film. (As the decade progressed, this female
archetype, mirroring the culture’s swing toward sexism, devolved rapidly back
into the archetype of Helpless Female Victim. To kill monsters during the
1950s, you needed a penis, and were preferably white, American, and Christian:
in that order.)
The film is taut, fast-moving. The creature starts draining the
personnel; it lurks in the freezing cold, defying bullets and flames. Finally,
Sheridan comes up with the solution. “What do you do with a vegetable? You cook
it!” The men set up an electrical trap for the monster. The mad scientist runs
to the creature, trying to communicate, praising it as superior to Earth men.
It promptly decimates him with a blow to the clavicle. The men fry the
creature.
Hawks legitimized the science-fiction genre simply by making a good,
solid film within its strictures, filming the unreal in a ho-hum, every-day,
deadpan style. Hawks showed that the new gimmicks could fit into a standard
Hollywood template.
The heart of Thing is not science-fiction but horror — the
threat of destruction, the fear of what’s on the other side of the door. In
fact, the Cold War subtext comes right to the surface in the final line — “Keep
watching the skies!” The price of freedom in the America of the 1950s was
eternal paranoia.
The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all
the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Bad and the Beautiful.
