- When I told my officemate that I had watched a film called The Thing From Another World, his first question was whether it was an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. That's a completely reasonable query given the title, but The Thing is actually considerably better than the films that normally serve as fodder for MST3K. That said, I initially had some difficulty identifying what sets this film apart from more standard 1950's sci-fi fare. After all, The Thing has a flying saucer, a cheesy mad scientist, and even a creature whose appearance owes a lot to Frankenstein's monster. So how to distinguish between this and, say, the same year's laughably awful Lost Continent, a sci-fi disaster whose interminable rock-climbing sequences were too much even for those seasoned pros stranded on the Satellite of Love?
- After some thought, I realized that the main difference between The Thing and any of a host of b-movie creature features may be how well this film uses its dialogue. Though he is uncredited as a director, the influence of Howard Hawks looms large over the entire production. In The Thing, as in his excellent Rio Bravo, Hawks uses casual conversations as a way of communicating the characters' personalities in ways that expository dialogue never could. Thus, by the time the monster actually shows up, we already know that Air Force Captain Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and civilian reporter Scotty Scott (Douglas Spencer) are good friends, that Hendry is in love with research assistant Nikki Nicholson (Margaret Sheridan), and that Nikki's scientist boss Dr. Carrington (Robert Cornthwaite) can be a real jerk. All that from simply watching them sit around shooting the bull. Moreover, we actually care about what eventually happens to these characters. You'd be surprised how many monster movies don't feature a single recognizable human.
- Putting its interesting people aside for the moment, though, the film is also very smart about how it handles the eponymous Thing itself. At no time do we get a clear look at the monster, even by the film's end. Instead, he is encased in ice, wandering off in the distance, or maybe even lurking in the shadows. This is where the dialogue is the most helpful, as the frightened characters fill in some of the gaps that the special effects department probably couldn't have covered. Interestingly, we never really find out what motivated the monster. Did he attack because humanity attacked first or, as Dr. Carrington hypothesizes, did he have "the same attitude towards us as we have to a field of cabbages"? We never find out, and that's part of what sustains the film's aura of creepiness. Perhaps the only solution is to "keep watching the skies" or, at the very least, to keep watching excellent classic science fiction.
- The film contains some strange Red Scare subtext that I didn't want to get into in the review. Fortunately, you can pretty much ignore it, unless you're a godless, goateed scientist.
