The Thing from Another World
Christian Nyby (and maybe Howard Hawks)
Initial release: April 7, 1951 (USA)
In the summer of 1947, two incidents occurred that would change pop culture forever. The first was a private pilot, Kenneth Arnold, making public claims that he had seen several unidentified flying objects in the vicinity of Mount Rainier, Washington. He became an overnight sensation, triggering a wave of UFO sightings that would last through the 1950s. Coinciding with the initial flying disc craze of 1947 was a mysterious crash of a flying craft, explained by authorities to be a weather balloon, near Roswell, New Mexico. Conspiracy theories immediately sprang to life about it being the crash of an alien craft.
Now, 1947 was a pretty scary year for most people, as the formal start of the Cold War obviously would be. Tensions between the US and the USSR were on the upward bound at the time. As always in times of global tension, so-called "invasion literature" of one style or another becomes popular, and in the 1950s that took the form of stories of little green men with sinister designs. It wasn't the first time America had dreamed of otherworldly invaders: a radio play adaptation of War of the Worlds had triggered mass panic across the east coast on the eve of World War II. But UFOs took on a new dimension in the 1950s, coinciding with science fiction finally coming into its own as a popular genre. Early into the milieu of flying saucer movies came The Thing from Another World, one of the finest entries in a rather exclusive genre of arctic or antarctic horror, a genre it shares with the likes of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness and which goes all the way back to Frankenstein and its terrifying chase across the ice.
Adapted from John W. Campbell's classic 1938 novella Who Goes There?, The Thing from Another World takes a lot of liberties with the plot, but the premise is broadly similar: an Arctic research base (Antarctic in the novella) comes under threat by an alien force that crash-landed in the ice. In the film, the alien ship crashed only very recently; in the novella, it had been in the ice for millions of years. Either way, in the film, a team of soldiers, airmen and scientists try to dig up the ship only to accidentally destroy it, but they find a body, thrown clear of the vessel and also frozen into the ice. Digging it out and flying it back to base, they argue about what to do with the creature, unaware that the ice is melting, the creature soon coming to life.
As the creature lurks around the base, the Air Force captain who serves as the primary protagonist argues with the station's lead scientist, who foolishly believes that the thing in the ice is possessed of great knowledge and has much to teach insignificant Earthlings. The fact that the alien seems more interested in destroying all life and creating more of itself doesn't seem to register. It's an interesting element to the story, know-it-all scientists vs action-oriented military leadership, seeming to reflect a nation at the outset of the Cold War with the terror of nuclear warfare looming over everyone's heads. (The fact that the lead scientist was also apparently present at the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests probably means something too.)
While the legendary Howard Hawks is only named as producer, his influence is all over the film. Charles Lederer's screenplay has numerous uncredited rewrites from Hawks, and either way the script has incredibly punchy (and sometimes overlapping!) dialogue characteristic of Hawks. And despite Christian Nyby being credited as the director, there's been some debate on just how much of the film was his versus Hawks'. It's not for nothing that the film's directing is often misattributed to Hawks, and even Nyby said that his directorial style is more or less Hawks'. So who knows?
The Thing from Another World is by any real metric a classic. While today some elements might seem silly, with James Arness doing his best Boris Karloff impression as a lantern-jawed plant alien bent on destruction, it can still be surprisingly terrifying after nearly 75 years, with scenes like the Thing bursting into the room and being set on fire (the very first instance of a full-body flame stunt) or the way the characters' use of a Geiger counter to determine how close the Thing is not only reflects the nuclear jitters of the era but anticipates the famous motion detector from Aliens in 1986. And how about that iconic title sequence, later lifted wholesale by John Carpenter for his own take on the novella?
While on balance I think I prefer Carpenter's 1982 film, there's no denying that the '51 classic deserves its high position as one of the greats of 1950s sci-fi.