The Thing from Another World (

1951

)

Now we know that the Korean War was nothing more than a monumental waste of resources and lives, with millions dying over the course of four years to shift an arbitrary borders couple miles here and there. But history is a funny thing: the closer you are to the events as they unfold the more difficult it is to make sense of them. This explains why so many mid-century Americans saw the war in Korea as the first salvo in a global communist crusade. For Americans, the perceived stakes were much higher than the actual stakes. So when the North Korean invaders initially beat the snot out of the American forces defending South Korea there was a cataclysmic meltdown back in the US. In their haste to contain the problem, the Truman administration allocated vast amounts of men and equipment to the distant peninsula. Even after that though, it looked like the Americans would be driven from their last stronghold in the southernmost port of Pusan. The United States, one of the two most powerful nations in the world, had nearly been beaten by a third-rate communist power. Sure the Russians had given them a few tanks and the Chinese had provided training but the North Korean army should have been a soft target. The Korean War exposed just how poorly the US might fare in an out-and-out war with their Eastern rivals. The Red Scare, which had already begun, was ratcheted up to absurd levels as opportunistic politicians searched for a convenient traitor to pin the mess on. Visions of apocalypse and treason dominated the cultural landscape. It suffices to say that it was far from America’s finest hour.

Howard Hawks and Christian Nyby’s The Thing From Another World can best be understood in the context of this time, not as a reflection of the attitudes of its day but as a shot in the arm to boost the nation’s flagging spirits. Here we see brave Americans, soldiers, scientists, civilians, and the press all working together harmoniously to combat an alien menace. The group doing battle with the invader is no communist collective; it’s a free conglomeration of individuals each with their own personality, goals, and mannerism. They’re working together out of common respect and self-interest, not slavish obedience to authority. Tellingly, the fighting takes place as far from the warm comforts of American civilization as possible, in the Arctic Circle. A more remote outpost wouldn’t be technically possible on earth. “We fight the alien menace in the artic so we don’t have to fight them on the streets of Wichita,” or so goes the reasoning. As an adaptation of John W. Campbell’s novella “Who Goes There”, it is unquestionably a failure. It ditches the novella’s most striking aspect, the alien’s ability to perfectly imitate the humans it terrorizes (indeed, in this regard The Thing (1982) is a far more faithful adaptation). But such an ability would undermine the heroic group’s trust and confidence in one another, and more importantly, would remind the audience of the witch hunts being carried out in the halls of Congress back in the real world. Hawks and Nyby were making a work of patriotic escapism, and the object of patriotic escapism is to reassure the viewers about their own world, not remind them constantly of the troubles lurking outside the movie theater.

The action kicks off when Captain Patrick Hendry and his crew are sent to a remote research base near the North Pole that is reporting some curious findings. Accompanying him and his crew is an old journalist friend of his from WWII, one Ned ‘Scotty’ Scott. Scotty is having trouble drumming up a story in the Arctic wastelands, but he has a hunch that whatever’s going on at the North pole will be a real humdinger of a story. He’s not wrong, when the crew gets to the research base they are told by the base’s chief scientist, Dr. Carrington, that they were tracking a mysterious object in the sky. The UFO has the size, weight, and speed of a meteorite, but is able to switch directions on a dime. The only logical conclusion is that they’re dealing with a bonafide flying saucer. The UFO has crashed into the ice not far from Carrington’s research base and both scientists and soldiers are eager to go out and find it. The problem is, between the skilled cast of B-movie actors, the impressive sets and the location shooting in an arctic wasteland, The Thing From Another World doesn’t have much in the way of a budget for practical effects. Consequently, Hawks contrives a reason for the soldiers to accidentally destroy the spaceship before they can get it out of the ice. Fortunately, the saucer’s occupant was thrown clear of his vehicle in the crash. Hendry and the others content themselves with digging out the alien and bringing it back to the base.

Tensions are a bit high back at base, thanks in no small part to Scotty’s constant mockery of everyone involved in the spaceship debacle. The real conflict though is between the soldiers as represented by Hendry and the scientists as represented by Dr. Carrington. Carrington and the other scientists want to defrost the alien visitor and dissect him right away, and while Hendry isn’t opposed to the idea he’s not gonna do anything that rash without orders. Those orders will not be coming in a hurry, as the approaching blizzard has severed all communications with the outside world. There’s nothing for Hendry to do but post his least competent subaltern on monster-guard duty and spend some time flirting with the base’s receptionist, Nikki. Normally I’d leave out the details of the unnecessary romantic subplot, but this one comes with a surprisingly seedy twist. You see, Nikki and Hendry have met before, and their last encountered ended with a drunken Hendry grouping Nikki shamelessly. Now, Nikki is a woman of the previous decade and seems to have enjoyed the encounter more than she let on but she teases Hendry that she won’t let him near her again unless he agrees to be tied up. Surprisingly Hendry seems game for this, so in the middle of an otherwise wholesome monster movie, we get some quasi-bondage.

Meanwhile, the clueless guard has succeeded in accidentally defrosting the alien monster (by covering the block of ice with an electric blanket and not noticing the puddles of water lapping around his ankles). This display of idiocy is the most the film will ask you to suspend your disbelief, and while it is pretty unremarkable given the genre and epoch, it’s fairly galling in the context of an otherwise intelligently scripted film. I’d prefer it if Hawks and Nyby pinned it all of the scientists thawing the alien out in their eagerness to experiment on it, that would at least be consistent with their characterization. Still, I suppose I’ve got to accept some strain on my belief-suspenders when I go into one of these movies. As luck would have it once the alien is back to room temperature it spontaneously reanimates. The guard unloads his sidearm at the monster with apparently no effect before running off to inform Hendry and the scientists about the alien on the loose. At first, both Hendry and Carrington are united in the opinion that the alien should be found and negotiated with, though Carrington is, of course, more insistent about that. Once Hendry finds out that the alien wants to use human blood to feed its offspring, he quickly and reasonably changes his mind. Killing the alien becomes his top priority. Not so with Carrington, the scientist believes that peaceful contact must be made with the alien at any cost, which includes the lives of both himself and his men.

Carrington’s fascination with The Thing goes far beyond just simple scientific curiosity. It’s one thing to admire the alien for its presumably advanced technology and cunning mind, but Carrington seems to eroticize the creature as well. When explaining that the alien visitor is a vegetative life form, Carrington notes: “Its development was not handicapped by emotional or sexual factors.” In a tone that sounds eerily close to affectionate. If we look at the alien as a right-wing allegory for communism it starts to make sense. Carrington is the typical American communist dupe, seduced by the apparent superiority of an inhuman philosophy. American conservatives like Howard Hawks saw communism as an effectively inhuman religion that transformed normal men and women into mindless automata that resemble the alien creature. Had he visited the USSR of his day, the population of cynical survivors he’d encounter would have no doubt surprised Hawks. Communism, like all failed ideologies, produces brutes and rogues far more often than it makes robots or super-men.

The Thing From Another World handles the harmonious patriotic collective of soliders, scientists, and journalists with a great deal more skill and depth than its imitators. Scotty clashes openly with Hendry over his desire to report on the story of the alien visitor. Hendry sympathizes with him, and even wants to allow Scotty to tell the world, but refuses to budge an inch until he gets the proper authorization from the Air Force brass. Scotty pleads with him to “Think of what it means to the world!” to which Hendry replied: “I'm not working for the world. I'm working for the Air Force.” As much as Hendry values his friendship with Scotty, he cares more for his career and his duty to his superior officers. It’s a deft bit of characterization that shows these men as real human beings, rather than hollow archetypes, of the kind we’ll see in The Deadly Mantis (1957) and Beginning of the End (1957). Obviously, the scientists spend most of the movie locked in conflict with Hendry, but tellingly only Carrington is a true fanatic that cannot be reasoned with even when his own life is put in jeopardy. In fact, one of the scientists, Dr. Chapman, quietly supports Hendry throughout the film, never once siding with Carrington or his peers. Mislead as they are, all the scientists eventually fall into line and by the end of the film, leaving Carrington as the only holdout. Truth wins out in the end, well at least when you’re not dealing with a raving lunatic. Of course, this dynamic is an old hat for Howard Hawks; it’s a tried and true method of his for creating a film with an ensemble cast. See his earlier Red River (1948) for the wild-west equivalent.

Above I mentioned that there was no money left over for a spaceship, this is also true for the all-important monster suit. To be fair, 1951 was the early days of monster movie rubber suits, but even with that in mind, the alien is pretty poor looking. I can understand why Hawks and Nyby almost never opt to have the monster on screen and when they do they always contrive some reason to turn off the diegetic lighting. If the audience actually got a good look at this thing it would probably evaporate all the tension they’d been working so hard to build. Fortunately, The Thing from Another World is the kind of movie that can actually pull off the unseen menace style of horror without putting the audience to sleep. What’s more, when the monster shows up the action scenes are genuinely tense and exciting, particularly the first battle between the soldiers and the aliens that ends with the invader being set on fire and escaping by vaulting out a window. That in-and-of-itself is a real achievement, as the number of mid-century American movies with decent action scenes is vanishingly small in comparison with the hours of dull, poorly choreographed fistfights.