Day 1: The Thing From Another World (1951), dir. Christian Nyby
Streaming Availability: Tubi
"All right, fellas, here's your story: North Pole, November 3rd, Ned
Scott reporting. One of the world's greatest battles was fought and won
today by the human race. Here at the top of the world a handful of
American soldiers and civilians met the first invasion from another
planet."
Our ancestors did not fear aliens. Fear of the dead, fear of the demonic, those are ancient primordial terrors, instinctual parts of human experience. But fear of outer space? That's something new. Until the 20th century, mankind had little to fear from above. The heavens were instead imagined as the source of goodness and light, the realm of Gods and angels, the Sun giving us life and warmth.
Flying machines were pure fantasy, as wild and silly as dragons. That is until science granted us awesome powers of destruction. We turned the skies into a vast exposed front, from which modernity could rain down new and unspeakable terrors upon soldiers and civilians alike. Modern war took the skies from us. Instead of light, there was darkness, within which could lurk anything.
It is interesting to me that the UFO phenomenon is so specifically centered in English-speaking countries, especially the United States. Eventually other cultures will catch up (Godzilla will spend most of the Sixties fighting off alien invasions), but the late-40s/1950s UFO fear hit the US specifically hard. The Thing From Another World is the first major alien horror movie, but it was far from alone. In 1951 alone it had tough competition with The Day the Earth Stood Still. Dozens of imitators would follow. But why Roswell, NM specifically? It could have been any random bits of debris anywhere in the world, but only Americans in particular were ready to believe in Martians. We knew our government was up to unimaginable secrets and twisted experiments in those deserts. If the atomic bomb was real, why not flying saucers?
Maybe it hit the US because we had been spared the wartime experiences of the English, Germans, French, Japanese, Poles, and Russians. The worst to happen to our cities was the so-called Battle of Los Angeles, where California air defenses in 1942 spent a night shooting at nothing. In 1951, our boys were still overseas dropping death onto Korea. Our cities had not been melted away into firebombings or mushroom clouds. We had been the ones doing the bombings. This is speculation but maybe we knew we were lucky, and felt a gruesome butcher's bill could be coming due.
The Thing From Another World is a movie that could exist in a world scarred by the atomic bomb. There are two villains here: one is the big lumbering Frankenstein-like alien invader (James Arness), the other, perhaps more disturbing is the voice of modern science, Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite). One of them is just a beast, described as a "form of super carrot", whose motives are never clear. But the other, Carrington, is the proud successor of Los Alamos. Nobody can understand the science that brought The Thing here, how its ship works or even how its body functions. Carrington feels every person at isolated artic military station is expendable to unlock that knowledge.
One sees a predecessor of Ash from the 1979 Alien film - Carrington admires it. He is happy to say of the Thing, "Its development was not handicapped by emotional or sexual factors."
But we are still a long way away from the cynicism of the Seventies. Our cast is full of handsome boys and romantic interests, their conversations are light and full of humor and just racy enough sexual banter. (Our hero gets tied up during a private encounter with his love interest, this sounds a lot juicier than it actually is.) The US Army is at worst ignorant, distant commanders sending orders too late to be of any use. Much of the cast including Kenneth Tobey, Dewy Martin, and James Arness actually served in WWII, and there's an authentic exhaustion at dealing with useless commanders. It is not bitterness, just gallows foxholes humor. The brace is stupid, not yet evil. Every version of this movie post-Vietnam would have the high command deciding these young soldiers and airmen are expendable. Not in 1951.
The Thing From Another World is a 1951 movie in all the ways you would expect. It is a lot of shots of identical-looking interiors and crowds of similar-looking white dudes standing around. You see very little of The Thing, even less of its spaceship. What big special effects moments we get are kept at a minimum - but used effectively. They shot most of the movie in a freezer facility in LA, allowing realistic breaths on the actor's faces. It could not have been a comfortable shoot. Maybe that's why so many shots have the cast crowded together in the middle of the frame.
There is an awesome sequence where the Thing charges into a room and is set on fire, which looks like a terrifyingly dangerous stunt for all involved - and almost certainly was. This is 1951, if you have fire on frame in your movie, that's because you set your studio on fire. The alien actor gets to be in a fire suit, everybody else needs to jump around the flames spreading across the set. It's spectacular and just enough to wake up you from the typical 1950s SciFi movie doldrums. I will not pretend this era of horror cinema is exactly riveting to the modern eye. However, The Thing From Another World has moments.
Obviously, we all know the 1982 John Carpenter remake a lot more. That second The Thing is a legendary movie, an all-timer masterpiece. We'll get there eventually. For now, one can appreciate just how many beats and moments from the remake you can see in this first version. They even keep the dogs, which is a huge content warning. I know nobody in 2024 wants to see dogs die, I'm sorry.
"Watch the skies. Everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies." They did in the Fifties, so will we.
Next Time: Sing along: "Then at a deadly pace, It Came from Outer Space, and this is how the message ran... Science Fiction, Double Feature..."
