NFR Project: 'The Thing (from Another World)' (1951)

 

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.

NFR Project: 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1951)

 

NFR Project: “A Streetcar Named Desire”

Dir: Elia Kazan

Scr: Tennessee Williams, Oscar Saul

Pho: Harry Stradling

Ed: David Weisbart

Premiere: Sept. 19, 1951

125 min.

It’s one of the best film adaptations of a great American play – until it blows the ending.

This film features three actors – Marlon Brando, Him Hunter, and Karl Malden -- in the roles they originated in this play on Broadway in 1947. Tennessee Williams’ landmark drama was a huge hit, and soon spawned a British production starring Vivian Leigh as the tragic heroine Blanche DuBois.

When the time came to make the film, the eminent director who opened the play, Elia Kazan, was behind the camera. Jessica Tandy, who originated the role of Blanche on stage, was out of the running as the producers wanted more of a name in the title role. Fortunately, they engaged Vivian Leigh, who is iconic here. Together with the three original actors, she staged the definitive interpretation of a stunning and savagely beautiful drama. Leigh, Malden, and Hunter won Oscars for their roles (Brando lost out to Bogart that year).

The film is largely stagebound, barring a few attempts to take the audience out of the seedy New Orleans flat inhabited by crude, working-class Stanley (Brando) and his wife Stella (Hunter). Along comes Stella’s sister, ex-teacher Blanche (Leigh), who is at the end of her rope. A self-styled delicate Southern belle, she is penniless – having lost the family home and been fired for a dalliance with a young student.

She camps out in Stella and Stanley’s place, infuriating Stanley, who begins to poke into her past. Meanwhile, Blanche sparks a courtship from Stanley’s buddy Mitch (Malden). As Blanche becomes more and more delusional, Stanley reveals Blanche’s indiscretions to Mitch, who rejects her. At the same time, Stella has her baby. The night she’s at the hospital, Blanche and Stanley clash for the final time, which ends in him raping her (it is implied – his famous line, “We had this date with each other from the beginning,” is absent here).

Soon after, Blanche is committed to a mental asylum. The doctors come for her; she leaves tentatively, now completely mad. “Whoever you are,” she says, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Then the movie blows it. In the play, nothing changes between Stanley and Stella at the end. Due to the consideration of the film censors, Stanley could not be seen as getting away with doing evil, as he does in the play. Therefore, in the film Stella walks out on Stanley. Finis.

Despite this, it’s an extraordinary film document. The quartet of primary characters – Blanche, Stanley, Stella, and Mitch – are expertly embodied. Leigh is masterful. Her Blanche is like a ravaged, unstable Scarlett O’Hara, living feebly on the remnants of her charm. Her world is gone; she drifts aimlessly in the present, one step above homelessness. Her belief in the illusion of grace and propriety is belied by her alcoholic, slatternly behavior – a division of personality she resolves by losing her mind.

And Brando. He blew the door wide open with this performance. If he had done nothing else in his decades-long career, he would be remembered for his Stanley. He is a force of nature – completely immersed in the scene, violently unable to do otherwise than to inhabit this frustrated, angry dynamo of a character. Williams intended Blanche to be the heroine, but Stanley is played with such a raw edge of energy and unpredictability that it almost becomes Brando’s film. This performance would codify and popularize the acting discipline known as “the Method.” The Oscars they won are a tribute to the other three actors that they stand up to Brando and acquit themselves honorably.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Thing from Another World.

NFR Project: 'A Place in the Sun' (1951)

 

NFR Project: “A Place in the Sun”

Dir: George Stevens

Scr: Michael Wilson, Harry Brown

Pho: William C. Mellor

Ed: William Hornbeck

Premiere: Aug. 14, 1951

122 min.

It’s derived from Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy – and it certainly is. It’s a profound critique of capitalism garbed in a true-crime plot. Grace Brown fell in love with Chester Gillette, who was the nephew of the factory owner for whom Brown worked. In 1906, Grace Brown was murdered by her lover by drowning after she revealed to him that she was pregnant. Her love letters to him, which he kept, damned him. He was executed in the electric chair.

In the film, George Eastman (Montgomery Clift) is an ambitious young man without any education or connections. He falls in with his rich uncle, who hires him to work at his factory. George agrees, and while working there falls into a relationship with shopgirl Alice (Shelley Winters) – which is forbidden by company policy.

George meets and falls in love with Angela (Elizabeth Taylor), a beautiful and wealthy young socialite. Suddenly, Alice announces she is pregnant. George puts her off, keeping their relationship secret while he sucks up to and hangs around with Angela, her parents, and her rich friends. He explains to Alice that he is just trying to better their lot in life by being promoted.

Finally, Alice gives him an ultimatum. He must marry her. They go to the Justice of the Peace, but his office is closed due to Labor Day. George proposes that they spend the night at a nearby lodge. He pretends the car is out of gas, then rents a boat for the two of them under a false name.

They row far out onto the lake and Alice tries to reason with him, telling him how they will be happy, if poor; and finally wonders if he wants her dead. He denies it angrily; she stands up and capsizes the boat. She drowns; he swims to shore.

George tries to cover his tracks, but he does so poorly, and is soon apprehended. Raymond Burr has a fine turn as an intrepid prosecuting attorney; George is promptly found guilty.

In an improbable coda, Angela visits George on Death Row, proclaims her undying love for him and kisses him. As he is marched to the site of execution, his mind goes back to a vision of Angela’s rapturous face.

Poor George. His social, romantic, and economic ambitions completely dull him to compassion and good sense. His desire to be with Angela and be a big shot turns him into a murderer, in thought if not in deed. Clift plays George as a person devoid of character; thinking only in terms of the immediate future. Clift and Winters were nominated for Oscars. The film won six Oscars, including Best Director for George Stevens.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: A Streetcar Named Desire.