Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 1: Today's episode, originally published September twenty fourth, twenty twenty one. Oh,
Speaker 1: it's a fun one because we are discussing the Thing
Speaker 1: from Another World. This, of course was the original adaptation
Speaker 1: of John W. Campbell Junior's short story Who Goes There,
Speaker 1: and it would of course be remade years and years
Speaker 1: later in John Carpenter's The Thing. But this is a
Speaker 1: pretty terrific movie in its own right from nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: Let's jump right in. This episode of the Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind Radio Hour is brought to you by Thermid.
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Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And I'm Joe McCormick, and it's finally time on the
Speaker 3: Weird House Cinema podcast to cover the Thing No, not
Speaker 3: that The Thing, not the one you're thinking of, the
Speaker 3: horror classic, the other The Thing, the Thing from another world.
Speaker 1: Yes, this is a film that I had never seen
Speaker 1: prior to this week, and I think part of it
Speaker 1: was because John Carpenter's nineteen eighty two film The Thing
Speaker 1: is just this masterpiece of science fiction and horror for
Speaker 1: so many obvious It's visceral but intelligent. It's well acted,
Speaker 1: it's effectively scored, it makes great use of sets and locations,
Speaker 1: and just features a bounty of legendary and grotesque practical effects.
Speaker 3: Totally, without a doubt, an absolute masterpiece, one of the
Speaker 3: best horror movies ever made. Can't say enough good stuff
Speaker 3: about Carpenter's The Thing, from the effects, to the acting
Speaker 3: to the music, it's just it's pretty much pitch perfect.
Speaker 1: But of course, one of the things we always have
Speaker 1: to remind ourselves, especially perhaps if we're becoming getting a
Speaker 1: little too judgmental about remakes and reboots and so forth,
Speaker 1: is because I have to remind myself of this is
Speaker 1: that John Carpenter's The Thing is also essentially a remake
Speaker 1: or a reboot, if you will, based on the story
Speaker 1: who goes there by John W. Campbell Junior, an author
Speaker 1: from like the sci fi so called pulp Golden Age,
Speaker 1: and Carpenter's film is the second official adaptation of this story,
Speaker 1: but the first is the film we're talking about here today,
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty one's The Thing from Another World.
Speaker 3: I had also never seen this movie in full before,
Speaker 3: though I'd seen some scenes from it, and I had
Speaker 3: seen it because it is briefly featured on a television
Speaker 3: in John Carpenter's Halloween.
Speaker 1: Oh that's right, I forgot about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, one of the kids who's being babysat is watching it.
Speaker 3: I think he's I think maybe he's not quite old
Speaker 3: enough for this movie.
Speaker 1: So this is a film I've always known this was around,
Speaker 1: you know. At some point after being exposed to Carpenter's
Speaker 1: The Thing, I learned about this older version, and maybe
Speaker 1: I would even occasionally see it in the schedule or
Speaker 1: catch part of it on like Turner Classic Movies or something.
Speaker 1: But I never sat down and watched it. And we'll
Speaker 1: get into some of the reasons why, but basically they
Speaker 1: all roll down to me thinking, oh, this this film
Speaker 1: is a modern film. I don't want to see this
Speaker 1: earlier like proto Thing Vision I'm going to stick with perfection.
Speaker 1: But then I was looking through Michael Weldon's and the
Speaker 1: author of the Psychotronic video and film Guides, I was
Speaker 1: looking at his ride up on First on John Carpenter's
Speaker 1: The Thing, which was glowing and you know, and says, oh,
Speaker 1: you know this is this is a wonderful, grotesque, monstrous film.
Speaker 1: Not surprised that he would love that one. But of
Speaker 1: course Welden's also a fan of older genre films as well,
Speaker 1: And I was reading this really high praise for this
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty one film, talking about it having intelligent dialogue
Speaker 1: and a strong female lead, and so that that really
Speaker 1: got me thinking, well, maybe I should give this a look.
Speaker 1: You know, the strong female lead being sort of doubly
Speaker 1: interesting because on one hand, it's nineteen fifty one, You
Speaker 1: don't you know that you don't necessarily think of of
Speaker 1: this being the era of strong female leads. And then
Speaker 1: also you think about John Carpenter's adaptation, and there are
Speaker 1: no women in it at all. It's an entirely male cast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And Carpenter's version, the all male cast of characters,
Speaker 3: somehow fits the miserable bleakness of the Antarctic bass in
Speaker 3: the movie, but I would say that having watched it
Speaker 3: now I know what Michael Weldon is talking, though I
Speaker 3: think it might be slightly over selling Margaret Sheridan's role
Speaker 3: in the movie, though she is fantastic and I really
Speaker 3: like her character. She does a great job with it.
Speaker 3: But I was expecting her to be the main character
Speaker 3: of the movie based on this, which she is not.
Speaker 3: But in her scenes she is great.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and we'll get into this a bit later. It
Speaker 1: basically comes down to this idea of the Haxian woman,
Speaker 1: and well you'll find out what that means.
Speaker 3: But in terms of differences between the Thing and the
Speaker 3: Thing from Another World, I think we're sort of burying
Speaker 3: the lead because the one major way in which The
Speaker 3: Thing from Another World nineteen fifty one differs from Carpenter's
Speaker 3: movie is that the original film does not involve impersonation.
Speaker 3: People who are familiar with Carpenter's movie will remember the
Speaker 3: main thing about it is that the alien can assume
Speaker 3: the forms of the humans or the animals that it kills.
Speaker 3: So it is this polymorphous being that can sort of
Speaker 3: sample the tissue of an organism it comes into contact
Speaker 3: with and then make its own body into a copy
Speaker 3: of that being, which is a wonderful plot device. The
Speaker 3: central mechanic of Carpenter's movie gives rise to the paranoia
Speaker 3: that doesn't really exist in the original. Or maybe there
Speaker 3: is a kind of sense of paranoia, but it's powered
Speaker 3: by different factors that I want to discuss in more
Speaker 3: detail as we go on. But in this movie, the
Speaker 3: Thing is simply a big, hulking alien that thaws out
Speaker 3: of a block of ice and then attacks the base
Speaker 3: where all the characters are stationed. It doesn't assume the
Speaker 3: form of anyone if you're actually able to get a
Speaker 3: good look at it, which you're not really in the movie,
Speaker 3: And in fact, that's a really good thing about the movie.
Speaker 3: The movie obscures the form of the monster for most
Speaker 3: of the runtime in a highly effective way. But if
Speaker 3: you were able to get a really good, well lit
Speaker 3: gander at it, it just looks kind of like James
Speaker 3: Arness in a big, creepy Frankenstein makeup and spacesuit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this was a huge reason why I had
Speaker 1: never checked out a film before, because I'd see that
Speaker 1: famous publicity shot of James Arnez in the Thing costume,
Speaker 1: and I would think, well that that looks kind of lame.
Speaker 1: I don't really want to see a movie about that,
Speaker 1: especially when John Carpenter's version of it is this amorphous,
Speaker 1: ultimately formless thing that takes on just a number of
Speaker 1: just grotesque and shifting forms.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And in fact, I mean I've said this on
Speaker 3: the show before, I think one big mistake a lot
Speaker 3: of horror movies make is letting you get too much
Speaker 3: of a look at the monster. I mean, horror movies
Speaker 3: should be sparing in letting you see the monster. It's good,
Speaker 3: it's good to heighten the tension and make it more
Speaker 3: mysterious by usually keeping the monster off screen, I'd say
Speaker 3: Carpenter's The Thing is a movie that breaks that rule
Speaker 3: to great effect. You get tons of great shots of
Speaker 3: the monster and it looks fantastic. So, you know, if
Speaker 3: you're kind of the thing about rules with artistic media
Speaker 3: is you have to obey the rule unless it's just
Speaker 3: really good anyway. Yeah, but yeah, I know what you're
Speaker 3: talking about. With the way the monster looks in this movie.
Speaker 3: This is a major thing I wanted to talk about.
Speaker 3: I was shocked how scary the creature was in this movie,
Speaker 3: and I really mean that like movies of this era
Speaker 3: are I really appreciate them, but they're rarely viscerally disturbing
Speaker 3: on a visual level to modern audiences. And that's not
Speaker 3: a knock on them. And in fact, like at the
Speaker 3: time they might have had people fainting in the aisles
Speaker 3: or falling out of their cars with drive in, but
Speaker 3: makeup effects from before roughly the I don't know, the
Speaker 3: seventies or so, I think, rarely pack a strong punch
Speaker 3: with audiences today. We've just sort of standards have been updated.
Speaker 3: And so even if the way Boris Karloff looked and
Speaker 3: his Frankenstein makeup was terrifying to people at the time,
Speaker 3: I think it looks beautiful. I think it looks amazing.
Speaker 3: I love to look at it, but I don't find
Speaker 3: it really really terrifying. And I would say that the
Speaker 3: baseline monster in this movie is no exception to that
Speaker 3: rule that if you just look at the makeup effects
Speaker 3: of the time, they're usually not going to pack a
Speaker 3: very strong punch. If you look at well lit still
Speaker 3: photographs of James Arnest that the actor who plays the
Speaker 3: monster in the Thing, in his alien makeup and costume
Speaker 3: for the movie, I think he looks goobery. He just
Speaker 3: looks kind of like an EGA guy. He looks like Frankenstein,
Speaker 3: sort of in a space in a jumpsuit, and yet somehow,
Speaker 3: on the screen within the narrative, he is so much
Speaker 3: more than that. This is a movie monster that benefits
Speaker 3: immensely from really strong staging, lighting, and camera work more
Speaker 3: so than makeup effects. So most of the time you
Speaker 3: see the monster in the movie, his appearance is sudden
Speaker 3: or brief or obscured in some way. So maybe the
Speaker 3: characters are looking out at him through frosted glass on
Speaker 3: a snowfield, or he or somebody opens a door and
Speaker 3: he suddenly reaches out through it as they try to
Speaker 3: slam it shut, or he's just a menacing silhouette at
Speaker 3: the end of a corridor, you know, and his features
Speaker 3: are covered in shadow. So really hats off to the
Speaker 3: team that came up with the staging for all these
Speaker 3: scenes and the lighting and the framing and all that,
Speaker 3: because even though the makeup effects kind of fall short,
Speaker 3: the monster on screen within the narrative looks wonderful. He's
Speaker 3: really frightening.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, Like, for instance, in the movie, you never get
Speaker 1: a sense that this character is wearing partially ragged space pajamas.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the still, you're like, those
Speaker 1: are space pajamas, clearly. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So they took a kind of goober Frankenstein and
Speaker 3: turned him into this truly menacing being a really excellent,
Speaker 3: excellent filmmaking technique.
Speaker 1: Well, I'd like to get into this more. Let's go
Speaker 1: ahead and just give the basic elevator pitch of the plot,
Speaker 1: especially for people who, you know, did they just know
Speaker 1: the Carpenter version. They maybe don't know how much in
Speaker 1: common this one has with that film, aside from the
Speaker 1: details of the monster.
Speaker 3: Okay, well, maybe I'll do the straight elevator pitch first
Speaker 3: and then we'll see if we have any variations on it.
Speaker 3: The straight plot description, I would say is a mysterious
Speaker 3: object from space crashes near a remote Arctic research base.
Speaker 3: When a team of scientists and military men go to investigate,
Speaker 3: they find a humanoid body frozen in the ice, and
Speaker 3: they have to bring it back to the base with them,
Speaker 3: and I guess you just better hope it doesn't thaw out.
Speaker 1: I like that. Let's go ahead and listen to a
Speaker 1: little bit of that trailer audio.
Speaker 4: The thing from another world. This is the spot where
Speaker 4: it was first seen, and these are the first people
Speaker 4: who saw the thing. How did it get here? Where
Speaker 4: did it come from? What is it? That being alive?
Speaker 4: So I saw it, I shot it, I hit it,
Speaker 4: I know it. Nothing happened, but just kept coming up me,
Speaker 4: making it noise like codn It was awful, those hands
Speaker 4: and those eyes. So you've got to tell you about it.
Speaker 4: You've got is it human or inhuman? Earthly or unearthly?
Speaker 4: Baffling questions, astounding questions that not even the world's greatest
Speaker 4: scientific minds can answer. Gentlemen, do you realize what we've found?
Speaker 4: A being from another world's different from us, is one
Speaker 4: pole from the other if we can only communicate with it?
Speaker 1: All right? So I want to come back to something
Speaker 1: you were just talking about, and that was the idea
Speaker 1: of doors opening. So yes, the research base in this
Speaker 1: movie feels it's more or less in keeping with the
Speaker 1: spirit that Carpenter had in his version of the film.
Speaker 1: You know, there are these a lot of these long corridors.
Speaker 1: There are doorways separating different sections of it. Everything feel
Speaker 1: doesn't feel super modern. It feels very very rough. In places.
Speaker 1: There's this idea that outside of this compound there's just
Speaker 1: frozen death awaiting any creature, and it's inside that we
Speaker 1: have this slim, artificial version of life, sustaining temperatures.
Speaker 3: And that makes actually for a killer twist later in
Speaker 3: the movie, where you haven't even really been thinking about
Speaker 3: this while they're coming up all these different ways of
Speaker 3: battling the thing. The thing is sort of laying siege
Speaker 3: to the humans in the base, and then at a
Speaker 3: certain point they're like, oh no, somebody turned off the heaters.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it's a wonderful set piece in which to
Speaker 1: engage with this monster. But one of the things that
Speaker 1: I was really taken by watching it is just how
Speaker 1: scary all the doors are. There's a lot of characters
Speaker 1: going in and out of doors in this film, often
Speaker 1: very quickly, and even before a monster the monster jumped
Speaker 1: out from behind a door. I was feeling anxious whenever
Speaker 1: a door would open like it was. It was really effective.
Speaker 1: And then eventually a monster is coming out from behind
Speaker 1: the door, and there's worry about things jumping out behind doors.
Speaker 1: I don't think doors have ever been quite this scary.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent agree, Yeah, this movie does something really
Speaker 3: special with like portals, openings, doors, windows, It's really good.
Speaker 1: Also lots of scenes where like the door to the
Speaker 1: outside has been opened and you know there's the sense
Speaker 1: of that crushing cold coming in. So it works on
Speaker 1: several levels.
Speaker 3: I think since we're not going to do a scene
Speaker 3: by scene breakdown on this one, I guess to make
Speaker 3: more sense for people who haven't seen especially either movie,
Speaker 3: it might make sense to do a quick, fuller rundown
Speaker 3: on the plot. So the basic cast of characters is
Speaker 3: that you have a journalist and then a group of
Speaker 3: military commanders who fly by plane up to a remote
Speaker 3: Arctic research base where there is some scientific research going on.
Speaker 3: And then, like I said in the elevator pitch earlier,
Speaker 3: there is a crash of some kind of object near
Speaker 3: the base, and the scientists and the soldiers go out
Speaker 3: to investigate it, and it looks like what they have
Speaker 3: encountered is a crashed flying saucer, a crash Dailien spacecraft.
Speaker 3: And then they're frozen in the ice. On the ice
Speaker 3: field is a humanoid figure. So they chip that they
Speaker 3: dig that out of the ice with ice axes and
Speaker 3: with thermite. Yes, this movie is a big fan of thermite,
Speaker 3: of course, and the thermite thing kind of goes wrong.
Speaker 3: I think they end up sort of melting the ship
Speaker 3: by accident while they're trying to get it up out
Speaker 3: of the ice. But they do get this body out
Speaker 3: of the ice and they bring it back to the base,
Speaker 3: and then through a series of mishaps, this body in
Speaker 3: a chunk of ice is accidentally thought out, and what
Speaker 3: they come to discover is that this is a being
Speaker 3: from another planet that is not an animal, but is
Speaker 3: in fact an animate of vegetable. They sort of explore
Speaker 3: the alternative evolutionary history of this creature and say, what
Speaker 3: if plant life on Earth had evolved the ability to
Speaker 3: move quickly and have intelligence and have a mobile body
Speaker 3: instead of animal life. And so that's sort of what
Speaker 3: we're dealing with. And there's a lot of discussion about
Speaker 3: the creature's mindset toward humans. It apparently needs to consume us,
Speaker 3: it wants to drink our blood, but it doesn't have
Speaker 3: any It doesn't really have any remorse for us or
Speaker 3: understanding of us as fellow creatures. Instead, as one character
Speaker 3: so eloquently puts it, he regards us the same way
Speaker 3: we would regard a field of cabbages.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, this idea that the dog is just the short,
Speaker 1: furry blood container and then the humans are just the larger,
Speaker 1: hairless blood containers. Yeah, and it just needs the blood.
Speaker 3: It's just calories.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 3: But so within this plot, a number of interesting themes emerge,
Speaker 3: and maybe we can talk more about those as we
Speaker 3: go on. But I guess here's where we would typically
Speaker 3: get into some of the people involved in this and
Speaker 3: talk about some connections. Now, Rob, you might have read
Speaker 3: more about the production of this film than I did.
Speaker 3: I'm to understand. I think there's some disagreement or confusion
Speaker 3: about what the level of control, like who basically was
Speaker 3: in charge of making this movie, who was the director,
Speaker 3: and what was their relative level of control.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's kind it's kind of an open question or
Speaker 1: a matter of debate that'll probably never be fully settled,
Speaker 1: especially since I think everybody involved with this film or
Speaker 1: most of them, have passed on. But the basic situation,
Speaker 1: I'm going to talk about who is the credited director first.
Speaker 1: So the credited director on this is Christian Nibe who
Speaker 1: lived nineteen thirteen through nineteen ninety three, is a TV
Speaker 1: and film director who served as editor on such films
Speaker 1: as Howard Hawke's nineteen forty six adaptation of The Big Sleep.
Speaker 1: This had Humphrey Bogart in it, and William Faulkner actually
Speaker 1: co scripted this adaptation of the Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe novel,
Speaker 1: which is a really good novel by the way.
Speaker 3: Interesting I've actually never read it.
Speaker 1: However, this film, The Thing from Another World is Nibby's.
Speaker 1: It was his first directorial credit. It's easily the biggest film,
Speaker 1: or at least biggest, you know, the most well remembered
Speaker 1: film that he did, although he worked an entire career
Speaker 1: afterwards as a TV director up until the mid nineteen seventies.
Speaker 3: Okay, so Nibee is credited as the director of the film,
Speaker 3: but for some reason, I've always heard this described as
Speaker 3: having been directed by Howard Hawks, who of course is
Speaker 3: an acclaimed filmmaker of the time. So what's the deal
Speaker 3: with that?
Speaker 1: Okay, So Howard Hawks, who we just alluded to, had
Speaker 1: worked with Nibe. Nibe was his editor. So Hawks was
Speaker 1: also known as the Silver Fox, and if you look
Speaker 1: up pictures of it you can see why, you know,
Speaker 1: dashing sort of silver looking hair.
Speaker 3: I guess it looks like somebody who would be in
Speaker 3: like a whiskey a Scotch commercial on TV in the
Speaker 3: fifties or something.
Speaker 1: Absolutely dashing. Character and director of sech films is Red River,
Speaker 1: Rio Bravo, nineteen thirty two, Scarface, El Dorado, and Hatari,
Speaker 1: as well as the aforementioned The Big Sleep. He was
Speaker 1: nominated for an Academy Award for nineteen forty two Sergeant York,
Speaker 1: and he received an Honorary Academy Award in nineteen seventy four.
Speaker 1: He's considered a legend of the classic Hollywood era, and
Speaker 1: while he was not the credited director or the credited
Speaker 1: co writer on The Thing From Another World, you'll often
Speaker 1: see it looks like. For instance, you'll see him listed
Speaker 1: on IMDb as uncredited director, uncredited writer. Basically, various accounts
Speaker 1: indicate that he was the director and he, for some
Speaker 1: reason or another, let Christian Nibe take the directing credit,
Speaker 1: which again would be his first. John Carpenter among others,
Speaker 1: have echoed this view. However, various other folks, including some
Speaker 1: people involved with the actual production of the film, have
Speaker 1: said otherwise, and they say no, Nibe was the director,
Speaker 1: So ultimately, you know how can you say one way
Speaker 1: or the other. It does seem like Hawks greatly valued Nibe,
Speaker 1: and it's said that Nibe was an instrumental editor in
Speaker 1: many of his films. So it's been argued that perhaps
Speaker 1: Hawks thought that sci fi was beneath him and didn't
Speaker 1: want his name on it, and or he gave the
Speaker 1: credit to Niby so that he could get into the
Speaker 1: director's guild, you know, like, let's go ahead and put
Speaker 1: your name on this film and this will help your career.
Speaker 1: It's hard to say what exactly was going on here,
Speaker 1: but I doubt we're going to get a definite answer
Speaker 1: on it ever. But it does not say I want
Speaker 1: to stress though. I've seen no accounts that indicate that
Speaker 1: this was some sort of This was a situation of
Speaker 1: animosity or like one director being replaced. We often see
Speaker 1: that in this in production stories where I this this
Speaker 1: guy's out on the outs, bring in this guy. No,
Speaker 1: it seems like something else was going on here, and
Speaker 1: you know, if anything, it was probably Hawk's helping out Naiby,
Speaker 1: or it's just been a situation where Hawks was involved
Speaker 1: in the production and Nibee was still the director, and
Speaker 1: maybe people were more inclined to give Hawks more credit
Speaker 1: than he perhaps deserved for it. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: know what the answer is here.
Speaker 3: Sure, I guess we'll have to leave that one sort
Speaker 3: of unanswered.
Speaker 1: That being said, folks that are familiar with Hawks, they
Speaker 1: do point to various things about this film that have
Speaker 1: his fingerprints on it. So and you put you can
Speaker 1: of course explain that, explain. You can explain that away
Speaker 1: a bit by saying, well, Hawks and Nibe worked together
Speaker 1: so much. You know, they had similar interests, they worked
Speaker 1: together to make these previous films. So who knows. We're
Speaker 1: not going to reach an answer today.
Speaker 3: Well, I will emphasize yet again that I think pretty
Speaker 3: much across the board in terms of technical filmmaking, this
Speaker 3: is an excellently made movie, especially for science fiction films
Speaker 3: at the time. I mean, there are definitely things that
Speaker 3: you can criticize about it, and we will as kind
Speaker 3: of kind of like quaint or product of their era.
Speaker 3: But a lot of that's in the actual sort of
Speaker 3: story content. In terms of a technical exercise in filmmaking,
Speaker 3: I think the Thing from Another World just is awesome
Speaker 3: for nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah, if you're hesitant to watch this just because
Speaker 1: it is an early nineteen fifties film. Just know that
Speaker 1: it is in many ways ahead of its time. All Right,
Speaker 1: So we mentioned already that this was based on a
Speaker 1: short story based on a short story by John W.
Speaker 1: Campbell Junior, who lived nineteen nineteen through nineteen seventy one.
Speaker 1: Pulp era sci fi writer and editor of Astounding Science Fiction.
Speaker 1: He wrote numerous short stories in several novels, though Who
Speaker 1: Goes There? The story that this is based on is
Speaker 1: perhaps his best remembered, and I believe it was recently
Speaker 1: re released in an expanded form, like they went back
Speaker 1: to an old manuscript, and there's stuff in that original
Speaker 1: manuscript that in some cases is actually present in the
Speaker 1: film version, but not in the original story, if I'm
Speaker 1: correct on that.
Speaker 3: Now, having read only a little bit about Campbell, it
Speaker 3: seems to me that his life sort of breaks into
Speaker 3: a couple of different parts that like early on, it
Speaker 3: seems like most of what you read about him is
Speaker 3: that he's just sort of like an output machine, Like
Speaker 3: he's just writing tons and tons of very influential science
Speaker 3: fiction and editing tons of people and like cultivating the
Speaker 3: early careers of a lot of people who would become
Speaker 3: later science fiction writers. And then it seems like the
Speaker 3: other half is that he descends into increasingly bizarre interest
Speaker 3: in pseudoscience and right wing politics.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that seems to be the case.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 1: Some accounts indicate that he could always be a bit
Speaker 1: of a blowhard and would was prone to just talk
Speaker 1: a lot, like if you were going to go in
Speaker 1: and chat with them about anything, you were going to
Speaker 1: get a monologue. But yeah, in life, he apparently increasingly
Speaker 1: espounded ideas that did not set well with more progressive
Speaker 1: sci fi authors of his time, such as Isaac Asimov.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the main things I've seen picked out are increasing
Speaker 3: interest in hard right politics, and then like belief in
Speaker 3: psychic powers and stuff, and being into sort of the
Speaker 3: Dianetics nexus of alternative psychiatry.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Plus, I was reading about him in a twenty
Speaker 1: nineteen piece in The New York Times by Peter Libby
Speaker 1: about the renaming of a science fiction writing award that
Speaker 1: had been named for Campbell and how they changed it
Speaker 1: because the reason was it like Campbell supported racial segregation
Speaker 1: during his life, and he has founded numerous racist and
Speaker 1: inflammatory viewpoints, like the kind of guy who would not
Speaker 1: only hold hold racist viewpoints, but also would like seem
Speaker 1: to go the extra step in just trying to rile
Speaker 1: people up and shock people with his opinions. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that is John W. Campbell Jr.
Speaker 3: Now do you know if Campbell does he have any
Speaker 3: involvement with the film or was it just that he
Speaker 3: wrote the story and then it was adapted to a
Speaker 3: screenplay with without his involvement.
Speaker 1: I don't know the details of his involvement, but I
Speaker 1: know that he's not credited with any screenwriting credits on this. Instead,
Speaker 1: we have the credited screenwriter is Charles Letterer, who lived
Speaker 1: nineteen eleven through nineteen seventy six. This is somebody who's
Speaker 1: a screenwriter on Hawks's Gentleman Preferred Blondes as well as
Speaker 1: the original Oceans eleven in nineteen sixty that was not
Speaker 1: a Hawks film, but just another credit for a Letterer here.
Speaker 1: There's also an uncredited writer listed on IMDb, Ben Hesched,
Speaker 1: who lives lived eighteen ninety four through nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 1: And this is a guy who'd also worked with Hawks
Speaker 1: writer on Scarface as well as Alfred Hitchcock's film Notorious.
Speaker 3: Now I guess we're about to talk about the cast
Speaker 3: a little bit, and again I will say, as great
Speaker 3: as this movie is, one of the top criticisms I
Speaker 3: would lodge about it is it has way way too
Speaker 3: many characters, way too many characters. This movie could have
Speaker 3: had seven or eight characters at the base, I think,
Speaker 3: and achieve the same factional dynamics. Instead it has like
Speaker 3: thirty seven characters. There's way too many. I could not
Speaker 3: keep track of who was who among the minor characters,
Speaker 3: you know, I could recognize like like three or four people,
Speaker 3: and then everybody else. I was just getting mixed up.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, Like you're immediately just thrown into a cast
Speaker 1: of a very interchangeable looking like clean cut white military
Speaker 1: guys yea, and you're just scrambling to figure out for
Speaker 1: a little bit, because again, the writing is really tight
Speaker 1: on this thing. You pretty quickly figure out who your
Speaker 1: main character is, and you can sort of tell who
Speaker 1: matters and who doesn't. But there are a lot of
Speaker 1: They are a fair number of characters on the screen
Speaker 1: who ultimately don't matter, and they're not even there to
Speaker 1: be cannon fodder for the monster or anything. Right, Like,
Speaker 1: most everybody survives this thing.
Speaker 3: I think the monster only kills like two or three people.
Speaker 1: Right, yeah. Yeah, So if you see this many people
Speaker 1: and you're like, oh, it's gonna be a blood bath. No, no,
Speaker 1: it's it's not. Even the smaller teams like Team Science
Speaker 1: get into that in a bit. But there were like
Speaker 1: three characters that stood out. Well, there were two that
Speaker 1: were important characters, one who stood out, and two that
Speaker 1: were just interchangeably in the background.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so maybe we should talk about the actor playing
Speaker 3: our hero.
Speaker 1: All right, this is Kenneth Toby playing Captain Patrick Hendry.
Speaker 3: Ooh, Patrick Hendry, this is our hero. This is the
Speaker 3: all American lug. He is a handsome, blonde man of
Speaker 3: action who holds his liquor. He thinks fast, and he brooks.
Speaker 3: No sympathy for bloodsucking aliens or any such nonsense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, he's It doesn't take long to realize this
Speaker 1: guy's our lead. He's an interesting actor, though two hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty three acting credits on IMDb. I'm not sure
Speaker 1: if I gave his dates yet, nineteen seventeen through two
Speaker 1: thousand and two. He in his later career, Oh, he
Speaker 1: played air controller Newbauer in nineteen eighties Airplane, the parody film,
Speaker 1: but back in the day. He was in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: five's That Came From Beneath the Sea, and he has
Speaker 1: quite a few interesting cameos and uncredited bits, especially from
Speaker 1: later in his life, including playing a hologram priest and
Speaker 1: hell Raiser Bloodline. He was a projectionist in Grimlins two.
Speaker 1: He had another cameo in Grimlins playing a different character.
Speaker 1: He was in Big Top Peewee, he was in The Howling,
Speaker 1: he was in Inner Space.
Speaker 3: You know, I'll say, I think he very much fits
Speaker 3: the mold of a leading man character of these nineteen
Speaker 3: fifties sci fi movies where the leading character is often
Speaker 3: just this kind of lug this you know, macho cigarette
Speaker 3: ad man. But you know what, he's good. He's good
Speaker 3: with this role.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And it seems to be the like he
Speaker 1: was in a lot of stuff before these more recent films.
Speaker 1: I'm naming here. But what seems to be the case
Speaker 1: is that he had a long career, so he was
Speaker 1: still active by the nineteen eighties. But also he was
Speaker 1: in the Thing from Another World. He was part of
Speaker 1: this era of TV that this new generation of directors
Speaker 1: had grown up on. So you see folks like Joe
Speaker 1: Dante using him a lot. John Carpenter used him in
Speaker 1: I Want to Say Starman. So you know, they look
Speaker 1: back and they're like, this is the star of the
Speaker 1: thing from another world. If he's looking for work, I
Speaker 1: want to put him in my film. Have him. I'll
Speaker 1: just give hi him a cameo something. Let's get him
Speaker 1: on the screen. I just want to be in his presence.
Speaker 3: Now we mentioned that in this movie he's a ruggedly
Speaker 3: handsome lug. He is also the love interest of Margaret
Speaker 3: Sheridan in this movie, playing a character named Nicky Nicholson.
Speaker 1: Is that right, yep, Yeah, So Sheridan's interesting. She lived
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty six through nineteen eighty two. Hawks apparently discovered
Speaker 1: her while she was still in college, and Hawks was
Speaker 1: just convinced that this was going to be the next
Speaker 1: big star, that she was like a once in a
Speaker 1: generation talent. So he wanted to cast her in nineteen
Speaker 1: forty eighth Red River. That's the Hawks film, but apparently
Speaker 1: she was pregnant at the time. She passed on it,
Speaker 1: and she ended up being in this film, which, you know,
Speaker 1: depending you know, whether Hawks directed it or not, it's
Speaker 1: still very much a Hawks film, you know, but her
Speaker 1: career ultimately didn't take off quite like Hawks had imagined it.
Speaker 1: She was in five more films and she did some TV,
Speaker 1: but this is the one she's best remembered for. Other
Speaker 1: credits include nineteen fifty three's I've a Jury in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty four's The Diamond Wizard.
Speaker 3: I'd like that name.
Speaker 1: It's a cool name. I think I looked at it.
Speaker 1: I think maybe it's like a diamond heist kind of
Speaker 1: a film. Oh so, nothing that stands out to modern
Speaker 1: viewers perhaps so much.
Speaker 3: Well, Margaret Sheridan's wonderful in this movie. She has such
Speaker 3: a ry, jolly energy. I love the way that she
Speaker 3: was a win Kenneth Toby's talking and she's got scenes
Speaker 3: with him. I love the way she's constantly either kind
Speaker 3: of laughing at him or visibly trying to hold back
Speaker 3: laughter while he's There's something kind of powerful and almost
Speaker 3: kind of threatening about the way she just laughs at him,
Speaker 3: and I love it. But then also it's very clear
Speaker 3: that she does like him. So yeah, she's got a
Speaker 3: wonderful screen presence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can see what Hawks saw in her. She
Speaker 1: has this great energy and the role is really good
Speaker 1: for really well written for nineteen fifty one. You know,
Speaker 1: she's not a damsel in distress, she's not a fem fatale.
Speaker 1: You know, she is this this strong, capable professional woman
Speaker 1: in this you know, outrageous scenario, and she you know,
Speaker 1: stands toe to toe with her male counterparts in the film.
Speaker 1: And this is where we get to something that was
Speaker 1: apparently one of Hawk's trademarks. And I have to admit
Speaker 1: I haven't seen any other Howard Hawks film, so I
Speaker 1: can't really speak to this personally, but apparently in film
Speaker 1: theory this is known as the hawksy and woman, an
Speaker 1: archetype of sort, you know, a tough talking or fast
Speaker 1: talking woman that converbally spar with male care on her parts.
Speaker 1: And that's certainly something we see in.
Speaker 3: This role his girl Friday.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess so, you know, not to say, I
Speaker 1: want to be clear, it's not like there are no
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty sensibilities in this character or in the film entirely,
Speaker 1: but I feel like it's it's a shockingly strong role
Speaker 1: for a film from this time period, certainly a genre film. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so far we've spoken about two characters in depth here,
Speaker 1: and Nikki is very much on team Science and and
Speaker 1: Toby is one of the military men. You off, Mike here,
Speaker 1: you talked about this film essentially being about jocks versus nerds.
Speaker 3: Oh, totally. Yeah, this is a jocks versus nerds movie,
Speaker 3: though there's some crossover because ultimately, I will I would
Speaker 3: say that while Margaret Sheridan is playing a scientist, her
Speaker 3: real loyal are more on the jock side. She's with
Speaker 3: the military guys in the end. But yeah, this is
Speaker 3: a movie in which the jocks the military represent a
Speaker 3: tough common sense and the nerds the scientists represent an
Speaker 3: unhealthy and ill advised curiosity, you know, a mind that
Speaker 3: is a little too open for its own good. And
Speaker 3: this brings us to the next character that we wanted
Speaker 3: to talk about and the actor who plays him, and
Speaker 3: that's if this movie has a human villain, this is
Speaker 3: the human villain. This is doctor Carrington. I would say
Speaker 3: he is the main figure in the movie representing the
Speaker 3: villainous potential of the nerds among us. He's so curious
Speaker 3: to know more about the life forms from other worlds
Speaker 3: that he forgets his loyalty to this one. And I
Speaker 3: think this is a good jumping off point to talk
Speaker 3: about some of the historical political context of the film.
Speaker 3: So I want to be clear, I do not know
Speaker 3: if it is intended this way by the filmmakers. This
Speaker 3: could be something that is just an artifact of interpretation.
Speaker 3: But it's easy to see how this has been interpreted
Speaker 3: as a Cold War paranoia movie. You know, it was
Speaker 3: released early during the Second Red Scare, and it involves
Speaker 3: sort of commie coded intellectuals who betray their loyalty to
Speaker 3: the home team in a spirit of suicidal interplanetary cosmopolitanism.
Speaker 3: So doctor Carrington, there's something kind of off about him
Speaker 3: in his esthetics. He dresses in these strange slacks that
Speaker 3: look I'm not sure what they were. They look kind
Speaker 3: of like pajama pants with a strange pattern on them.
Speaker 3: And he wears a turtleneck sweater and a double breasted jacket,
Speaker 3: and he has a pointy beard. So he looks almost
Speaker 3: like the classic Looney Tunes caricature of the Freudian psychiatrist,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm talking about. He looks like the
Speaker 3: archetype of an untrustworthy godless in a li actual like
Speaker 3: somebody that John Wayne would slug in the mouth in
Speaker 3: Big chim McLean.
Speaker 1: Yeah, almost like like a stereotypical communist sympathizer intellectual of
Speaker 1: the day.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: There are a number of sci fi movies of this
Speaker 3: time interpreted as Cold War paranoia movies, and they tend
Speaker 3: to feature plot devices of either or one of two mechanisms,
Speaker 3: either mind control or body snatching. And what this means
Speaker 3: is that you end up with enemies who look like
Speaker 3: your friends and neighbors, but secretly they're working for the
Speaker 3: other side. And you can see examples of this in
Speaker 3: the nineteen fifty six Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the
Speaker 3: original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There was a remake
Speaker 3: in seventy eight that I think is absolutely fantastic. If
Speaker 3: you've never seen the seventy eight version, that's another remake
Speaker 3: from I guess a few years before, but around the
Speaker 3: same time as Carpenter's Thing remake.
Speaker 1: That is a.
Speaker 3: Remake that is at least as good as the original,
Speaker 3: and probably better.
Speaker 1: I've never seen the seven remake. I've only seen the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty six version, which, as a child like scared
Speaker 1: the crap out of me. A bet like something about
Speaker 1: just the black and white nature of it and just
Speaker 1: how just frenzied Kevin McCarthy's character is towards the end
Speaker 1: like he's just completely losing it with well, it's not
Speaker 1: even paranoia in the context of the film, because people
Speaker 1: are being replaced by pod people and he's the like
Speaker 1: the only sane man left trying to warn us.
Speaker 3: Oh, well, you really should see The seventy eight Body
Speaker 3: Snatchers because it's also just fantastic. It's it's got a
Speaker 3: great cast, Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum,
Speaker 3: Leonard Nimoy.
Speaker 1: There.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a wonderful cast and excellently scripted, like really good.
Speaker 4: So.
Speaker 3: But anyway, in those cases, especially the original fifty six
Speaker 3: Invasion of the Body Snatchers, because it's in this sort
Speaker 3: of red scare period of the fifties after World War Two,
Speaker 3: it's it fits into this mold. You've got people who
Speaker 3: look like your friends, but actually they work for the enemy.
Speaker 3: And on the Hammy or b movie side of things,
Speaker 3: you've also got movies like It Conquered the World, which
Speaker 3: I think you could say the same thing about also
Speaker 3: came out in nineteen fifty six, a Korman special Roger Korman,
Speaker 3: And how would you describe it? Conquered the world. It's
Speaker 3: a movie where like a giant communist mind control arto
Speaker 3: Choke from Venus conquers a military base in a nearby
Speaker 3: town by like making a brain thrall out of Lee
Speaker 3: van Cleef.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an interesting film. It has a ridiculous monster
Speaker 1: in it, but a lot of it revolves around around
Speaker 1: Peter Graves's character having these conversations with Lee van Cleef's
Speaker 1: character kind of like it just a philosophical arguments about
Speaker 1: how we should be treating the aliens that are invading
Speaker 1: the world, you know, with Lee van Cleef, you know,
Speaker 1: since he tends to play the more villainous role as
Speaker 1: though he's not really an outright villain, not an unsympathetic
Speaker 1: villain in.
Speaker 3: This he comes through in the end.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he comes through in the end, but he also
Speaker 1: seems to be he has a very logic based approach
Speaker 1: to everything into why he is essentially with the aliens,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of the heart of it. Like the
Speaker 1: alien threat exists, and it's about how are we as
Speaker 1: a as a as a as a culture responding to
Speaker 1: it and are we engaging in dangerous sensibilities and dangerous
Speaker 1: ideas regarding the treatment of alien beings.
Speaker 3: Will we learn only too late that man is a
Speaker 3: feeling creature.
Speaker 1: Right, And that's a big that's a big theme in
Speaker 1: all of these right, the idea that this this dangerous
Speaker 1: ideology or you know, or or alien presence, whatever the
Speaker 1: infection happens to be, it will rob you of your individuality.
Speaker 1: You're just going to be made into you'll be a
Speaker 1: pod person, you'll be a you know, whatever the thing is.
Speaker 1: You're going to be robbed of your individuality and your personality.
Speaker 3: And that this alien persuasion, this alien frame of mind,
Speaker 3: or the sympathies to the enemy are not visible from
Speaker 3: the outside, right, that the enemy, whether it's mind control
Speaker 3: or body snatching, either way, the effect is the same,
Speaker 3: which is that the enemy is among us, blending in,
Speaker 3: you know. And this is very much in the political
Speaker 3: spirit of the age. It's like, you know Mcarthy's speech
Speaker 3: when he stood up in nineteen fifty and he said
Speaker 3: he had a list of Communist spies who were secretly
Speaker 3: working in the state departments. They're just blending in with
Speaker 3: everybody else. And so the main mood or theme of
Speaker 3: these movies a little bit less than outright terror is
Speaker 3: instead paranoia, right, It's this thing of like who can
Speaker 3: I trust? Who is not what they seem? And there's
Speaker 3: an irony here because I think Carpenter's adaptation of the
Speaker 3: Thing accomplishes this theme of paranoia much more powerfully than
Speaker 3: the original Thing from Another World, even though I don't
Speaker 3: think Carpenter's version has any of that red scare political DNA.
Speaker 3: I don't think that's it's concerned with that at all.
Speaker 3: It's just sort of like more free floating paranoia, and
Speaker 3: I think it accomplishes that because specifically it involves an
Speaker 3: alien who impersonates people who can look like your co workers,
Speaker 3: and you wouldn't know it was actually an alien until
Speaker 3: you test their blood. Unlike this movie, instead of having
Speaker 3: somebody who's an alien body snatcher or someone under alien
Speaker 3: mind control, it has just the suspect loyalties of the
Speaker 3: scientists and the intellectual because they're hungry for knowledge and
Speaker 3: they're open minded to a fault, and because of that,
Speaker 3: they will flirt with dangerous forces from outside the zone
Speaker 3: of safety. And that's who that's the role that doctor Carrington,
Speaker 3: this character plays in the movie. And for the record,
Speaker 3: the actor Robert Cornthwaite is great in this role. I
Speaker 3: love him as the godless, untrustworthy nerd.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's pretty great, even though at times it feels
Speaker 1: like they're laying on a bit thick with him.
Speaker 3: But oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a little cheesy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, cause he says, he's like everyone else is like this,
Speaker 1: this thing's murdering people and it's drinking blood. And he's like, yes,
Speaker 1: but I think we should reason with it. There's so
Speaker 1: much we could learn from this murderous carrot.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And even right up there at the end, you know,
Speaker 1: they're trying to lure it into a high tech track
Speaker 1: to shock it to death, and he's like, wait, let
Speaker 1: me speak to the creature. It must not be hurt,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 3: And we get to see the nerd get punished for
Speaker 3: his foolishness. You know, he's so naive that he thinks
Speaker 3: he can he can form a relationship with the alien,
Speaker 3: you know, Unlike he doesn't have the rough common sense
Speaker 3: of the of the captain and the army, who's like, well,
Speaker 3: you just got to kill this thing. Yeah, So he
Speaker 3: goes squatted. Yeah, he gets smacked down. I think they
Speaker 3: say he survives. I think they say that he does
Speaker 3: just ends up with some broken bones.
Speaker 1: Yeah, broken bones in a wounded spirit. But perhaps he'll
Speaker 1: he'll now he knows that he shouldn't, he shouldn't put
Speaker 1: science first, right. So this actor, cornth Waite, he was
Speaker 1: born in nineteen seventeen died in two thousand and six.
Speaker 1: He did a lot of TV and film work throughout
Speaker 1: his long career, including Future World that was the one
Speaker 1: of the sequels to Westworld. He was in nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: three's War of the Worlds. Nineteen sixty two is whatever
Speaker 1: Happened to Baby Jane? He was in The Ghost Mister Chicken?
Speaker 1: And is that we don't know to ghost? To mister Chicken?
Speaker 1: I do not know the ghost just like it was
Speaker 1: a Don Notts comedy. Oh okay, I think I saw
Speaker 1: it a lot as a kid for some reason. But anyway,
Speaker 1: this actor was on a He was on tons of
Speaker 1: famous TV shows from the old day, stuff like Andy Griffith,
Speaker 1: Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock. This was his first credited film
Speaker 1: or TV acting gig, though, and he often played lawyers
Speaker 1: and scientists because he had that kind of like intellectual air,
Speaker 1: you know, that intellectual delivery that lent itself well to
Speaker 1: those roles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe a nasal voice and a pointy beard, and
Speaker 3: you just look at that guy and you're like, I
Speaker 3: don't know if I can trust him.
Speaker 1: Now. We also have a very amusing journalist character who
Speaker 1: has a lot of screen time. That's our character, Ned Scott,
Speaker 1: and I enjoyed this character a lot because he's He's
Speaker 1: very stereotypical in many ways, but is so well written,
Speaker 1: has a lot of snappy.
Speaker 3: Dialogue, fast talking journalist, has some extremely cheesy lines. He
Speaker 3: gives the final the final speech at the end of
Speaker 3: the movie. So this movie's version of the he learned
Speaker 3: too late that man is a feeling creature is instead
Speaker 3: him like talking over the military radio to I don't know,
Speaker 3: some command post and like dictating a news story off
Speaker 3: the top of his head.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It starts off with some line like, thousands of years ago,
Speaker 3: a man named Noah saved the earth with an arc
Speaker 3: made of wood. Today a man named Captain Whatever saved
Speaker 3: the earth with an arc of electricity.
Speaker 1: Yep, yeap, great lead, great lead.
Speaker 3: Ned, really really good.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing about that ending with the keep watching
Speaker 1: the skies is I sometime having never seen it before,
Speaker 1: but being familiar with that ending line. I kind of
Speaker 1: combined that knowledge with the ending to Invasion of the
Speaker 1: Body Snatchers, where there's like a crazed urgency to it,
Speaker 1: and there's no crazed urgency here. He's not like, for
Speaker 1: God's sake, keep watching the skies because this is gonna
Speaker 1: happen again and again. And he's just kind of like
Speaker 1: in generally saying, keep watching the skies just in case.
Speaker 1: I don't know, there might be who knows, Just keep
Speaker 1: watching the skies.
Speaker 3: Yeah, watch those guys, keep watching them.
Speaker 1: Anyway, This character though very amusing Ned Scott. He was
Speaker 1: played by Douglas Spencer, who lived nineteen ten through nineteen sixty,
Speaker 1: so you know, ultimately didn't it didn't have as long
Speaker 1: ago a career as as he could have, given that
Speaker 1: his life was a bit cut short there. But he
Speaker 1: was in, among other things, This Island Earth, The Diary
Speaker 1: of Anne Frank, and the classic Western Shane. And speaking
Speaker 1: of westerns, let's talk about Team Monster here. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: now you mentioned already the James Arnez plays the Monster,
Speaker 1: and it is indeed James Arnez lived nineteen twenty three
Speaker 1: through twenty eleven. This is the guy that's mostly mostly
Speaker 1: well known and well remembered for one or two things.
Speaker 1: First of all, he played the lead character Matt Dillon
Speaker 1: on the long running gun Smoke Western TV show. That
Speaker 1: show aired nineteen fifty five through nineteen seventy five and
Speaker 1: then was just always in syndication afterwards. It seems like,
Speaker 1: I remember my grandpa would watch it like every day
Speaker 1: on TV.
Speaker 3: I've never seen gun Smoke. I really don't know anything
Speaker 3: about it.
Speaker 1: I mean, all I know, I don't think I ever
Speaker 1: actively watched it, because I mean I was a kid.
Speaker 1: I wasn't interested in gun Smoke so much, but it
Speaker 1: was on and he was like a you know, cowboy
Speaker 1: sheriff or whatnot in it.
Speaker 3: He's like, let me guess. Is he the new sheriff
Speaker 3: who comes into a lawless town and has to fix everything?
Speaker 1: I guess, But it's I mean, the show ran for
Speaker 1: like twenty years, so you'd think he'd get into a
Speaker 1: pattern there after.
Speaker 3: Eventually the people would be like, you've had fifteen years
Speaker 3: to fix this town and it's still lawless.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like does he have to run for reelection? How
Speaker 1: does it work? I don't know. Gunsmoke fans, let us
Speaker 1: know but it wasn't just Westerns for James Arnez. He
Speaker 1: was also in nineteen fifty four's Them, a Giant bug movie.
Speaker 1: Have you seen this one?
Speaker 3: Actually a shamed to say no, I have not. I
Speaker 3: know it's a classic.
Speaker 1: The other interesting thing about James Arnez is that he
Speaker 1: was born James King of Arness, and he was the
Speaker 1: older brother of a guy by the name of Peter
Speaker 1: Duesler Arness who acted under the name Peter Graves. I
Speaker 1: just mentioned, Yeah, so this is Peter Graves brother.
Speaker 3: So you could have literally had a brother to brother
Speaker 3: conversation about how you learn too late that man is
Speaker 3: a feeling creature.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting though, I mean this is often
Speaker 1: the case with siblings, right, I mean, this is nothing remarkable,
Speaker 1: but you don't think of James Arness and Peter Graves
Speaker 1: as being is playing the same sorts of characters. There's
Speaker 1: like a there's a ruggedness to James Arnest, like he's
Speaker 1: just always going to be that cowboy. And Peter Graves,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, often played these more you know,
Speaker 1: these thoughtful characters, sometimes villainous, but there's like a sternness
Speaker 1: today it's just sternness to both actors, but I don't
Speaker 1: know Peter Peter Graves different type of roles. I can't
Speaker 1: imagine them ever, like competing for the same character and
Speaker 1: in being like the same character. If either of them
Speaker 1: played it, well, if.
Speaker 3: It's been Peter Graves as the thing from another world.
Speaker 1: I don't know, you know, I wonder. I don't know
Speaker 1: if Peter Graves ever played a monster. He might have
Speaker 1: early in his career. I'd have to go through his filmography.
Speaker 1: Now another going back to Team Science, there's one guy
Speaker 1: that stood out to me. I was just gonna skip
Speaker 1: over all the rest of them, but there's a character
Speaker 1: by the name of doctor Stern. Did he stand out
Speaker 1: to you, Joe.
Speaker 3: I don't remember which one he was. Oh wait, was
Speaker 3: he one of the scientists who had black hair?
Speaker 1: He was, no, well, he might have had black hair.
Speaker 1: He was tallish and was had kind of like a
Speaker 1: subdued but seeming like thoughtful delivery. He had some good
Speaker 1: lines here and there. Played by this actor by the
Speaker 1: name of Edward Franz. He lived nineteen oh two through
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three. Again not a main character, but his
Speaker 1: screen presence impressed me, so I thought i'd include him here,
Speaker 1: a stern faced character actor whose many credits include The
Speaker 1: Ten Commandments. He was in Hatari Johnny Got his Gun,
Speaker 1: and also he was in Twilight Zone the movie. So
Speaker 1: the sequence with the you know about the monster on
Speaker 1: the wing of the plane was John lithcow Edward Franz
Speaker 1: plays the old man on the flight.
Speaker 3: Okay, now I just looked him up. I do remember him,
Speaker 3: but I don't remember what he did in the movie,
Speaker 3: you know.
Speaker 1: Sorry, Doctor ser in some of the science conversations, he
Speaker 1: kind of was a voice of reason and skepticism. I
Speaker 1: kind of I liked his presence there. Okay, again, the
Speaker 1: dialogue is pretty tight and in this in this movie,
Speaker 1: and even like bit characters like him, he has a
Speaker 1: chance to shine. Okay, one more actor I want to include,
Speaker 1: and that's the character the character doctor Vorhees was played
Speaker 1: by this guy, Paul Freese, who lived nineteen twenty through
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty six. And I'm including him because he had
Speaker 1: a long career as of voice actors. So he played
Speaker 1: a radio reporter in War of the Worlds. He did
Speaker 1: several voices in the animated The Last Unicorn. Other credits
Speaker 1: include The Wind and the Willows, The animated version of
Speaker 1: the Return of the King and the Hobbit. Then also
Speaker 1: just various Rankin and Bass holiday specials, and then finally
Speaker 1: we'll get to the music here. The music was provided
Speaker 1: by Dimitri Tiompkin, who lived eighteen ninety four through nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine. The music in this film is largely what
Speaker 1: you'd expect from the time period, but this Russian born composer,
Speaker 1: it was a major name during this era. Here in
Speaker 1: twenty two Academy Award nominations and won four Oscars, and
Speaker 1: most notably for this film. Again, it's very standard in
Speaker 1: a lot of brass in it, but you do hear
Speaker 1: the theremen from time to time to provide a little
Speaker 1: bit of sci fi intrigue. And I've seen this score
Speaker 1: singled out as one of the works that helped cement
Speaker 1: the electronic music instruments placed in sci fi cinema. The
Speaker 1: other big one was nineteen fifty one's The Day the
Speaker 1: Earth Stood Still, scored by Bernard Hermann.
Speaker 3: Oh, so that's interesting. I didn't realize that these two
Speaker 3: movies came out the same year. The Thing from Another
Speaker 3: World and The Day the Earth Stood Still, And I
Speaker 3: think it would also be interesting to kind of compare them.
Speaker 3: I haven't seen The Day the Earth Stood Still nearly
Speaker 3: as recently, but I would say that The Thing from
Speaker 3: Another World is probably a much better movie, just on
Speaker 3: a technical level in terms of like how effective and scary,
Speaker 3: like the shots and the horror and everything is in it.
Speaker 3: But I think The Day the Earth Stood Still is
Speaker 3: probably a more thematically interesting movie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think they're both examples of sort of
Speaker 1: you know, the high minded early nineteen fifties sci fi film. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this was in an era where I the genre
Speaker 1: films of this caliber were not generally elevated to that level.
Speaker 1: They certainly weren't getting nominated for Academy Awards and so forth.
Speaker 3: But you know what should have been nominated for an
Speaker 3: Academy Award is the opening title of The Thing. For goodness, Yeah,
Speaker 3: absolutely ballistic, best opening title I've ever seen. Probably, of
Speaker 3: course it inspired I think some things that came afterward,
Speaker 3: but it's the one where it starts with, you know,
Speaker 3: the black screen, and then you just see the word
Speaker 3: thing lettered in a large, jagged script that burns through
Speaker 3: a black sheet like it's been like like spelled in kerosene.
Speaker 3: And then set ablaze absolutely amazing.
Speaker 1: I love it, and I imagine Carpenter loved it as well,
Speaker 1: because they didn't they basically recreate the same title card
Speaker 1: for that kind asssion. Yeah, where it sounds burning through
Speaker 1: the screen. It's beautiful. I have no idea how they
Speaker 1: did it. It's beautiful.
Speaker 4: Though.
Speaker 3: There's another thing before we wrap up that I wanted
Speaker 3: to talk about with this movie, which is that it
Speaker 3: has an interesting dialogue. So this film has what you
Speaker 3: might call naturalistic dialogue or overlapping dialogue. So maybe there
Speaker 3: are other examples of movies like this from the time,
Speaker 3: but if so, I'm not really aware of them. I
Speaker 3: think filmmaking conventions of the early fifties would have overwhelmingly
Speaker 3: favored the clear, crisp delivery of stage drama conventions, where
Speaker 3: you know one character speaks at a time and you
Speaker 3: can hear every word they say because the lines are important.
Speaker 3: They're meant to develop the character or move the plot along.
Speaker 3: But this movie is trending toward a more naturalistic and
Speaker 3: atmospheric approach to dialogue, where characters sometimes mumble, sometimes talk
Speaker 3: over each other at the same time, more like you'd
Speaker 3: get in a later movie like Robert Daltman movies, where
Speaker 3: a lot of the dialogue is it's clear that you're
Speaker 3: not supposed to hear and take in every single word,
Speaker 3: but get a mood or get an atmosphere from the
Speaker 3: chatter of the characters as they go about their business.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like sometimes they are just incomplete thoughts, like one
Speaker 1: character is talking about something they're interrupted, or yeah, there's
Speaker 1: crow talk and you don't you don't always make out
Speaker 1: what some of the characters are saying it. So it feels, yeah,
Speaker 1: it has this very natural feel to it and also
Speaker 1: just moves right along like it's a snap. It's snappy dialogue.
Speaker 1: You know, it keeps you engaged, and it feels relatively real.
Speaker 1: Though of course, at the same time, it's nineteen fifty
Speaker 1: one reel, so you know there's gonna be a bit
Speaker 1: of like dames and cigarettes, you know, that's sort of
Speaker 1: thing going on. Another aspect of the dialogue that instantly
Speaker 1: reminded me, there's one shot in particular of this there's
Speaker 1: there's a nice walk and talk sequence. Again, we have
Speaker 1: these long hallways between these rooms and this and this
Speaker 1: snowy base, and we got some scenes where like scientists
Speaker 1: or military men walking down the hallway and the cameras
Speaker 1: in front of them filming them talk to each other,
Speaker 1: and of course this would this just becomes a staple,
Speaker 1: especially of like police procedurals and it shows like the
Speaker 1: West Wing and here it is present the thing from
Speaker 1: another world?
Speaker 3: What's that guy who does the way Aaron Sorkin loves
Speaker 3: the walk can talk, which I, frankly personally often find irritating.
Speaker 1: Imagine if Aaron Sorkin did a remake of the Thing.
Speaker 3: I think I would hate that all walk.
Speaker 1: And talk, you never even see the monster. I bet
Speaker 1: it would have a great cast.
Speaker 4: Though.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, Rob, I know we can't finish without talking
Speaker 3: about There are a number of scenes in this that
Speaker 3: are so good, but one that just had my jaw
Speaker 3: on the floor was the fire attack scene.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, this scene is so solid and terrifying.
Speaker 1: Like afterwards, I'm just I was just like, like, I
Speaker 1: think I audibly said something like, oh crap, Like that
Speaker 1: sequence was. It was literally on fire because it's a
Speaker 1: scene where the thing busts into a room and they
Speaker 1: what They throw some kerosene at it, and they then
Speaker 1: they throw some fire at him.
Speaker 3: They figured out that it's in vulnerable to bullets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that shooting it didn't work earlier, so they're
Speaker 1: using fire against it, and it's just it's rampaging and
Speaker 1: it's on fire. There's like, from an effects standpoint, terrifying,
Speaker 1: you know, because it's like there's all this visible, real
Speaker 1: fire on the set. There are multiple shots of somebody
Speaker 1: doing a man on fire stunt. And then within the
Speaker 1: context of the film, Yeah, it's just this intense feeling
Speaker 1: of danger, both the environmental danger of of their of
Speaker 1: of where they are in the world, but also the
Speaker 1: fact that now things are increasingly on fire and there's
Speaker 1: a rampaging, you know, blood drinking alien that's also on fire. Tremendous.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the fact that it something about that scene
Speaker 3: and the way that it's scary heightens something that's a
Speaker 3: sort of progressive tension throughout the plot, which is that
Speaker 3: the characters are having to make strategic decisions really fast
Speaker 3: that you know, they're not given time to like compile
Speaker 3: everything they know and try and figure out what's going on.
Speaker 3: I recall that the set up to that scene is
Speaker 3: just like we think he's attacking the door, Okay, what
Speaker 3: are we going to do?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: The bullets don't work, what if we try fire? And
Speaker 3: so they just like arranged this fire trap for it
Speaker 3: in real time pretty much. It happens really fast, and
Speaker 3: then it all goes to hell and it becomes clear
Speaker 3: that you can't kill this thing with fire, or at
Speaker 3: least maybe you heard it with fire, but it like,
Speaker 3: it's not like us. Each of it sells is kind
Speaker 3: of independent, so you might be able to burn its
Speaker 3: outer layer, but it's ultimately going to be okay.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And then afterwards they've lost an entire room
Speaker 1: of the facility and they have finite resources there, which
Speaker 1: I thought was also a great touch.
Speaker 3: You know, it's an old standby, but I gotta admit
Speaker 3: I'm really a sucker for setting a trap for the monster.
Speaker 3: That's just a kind of set piece that I always enjoy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's where we wind up towards the end. Here,
Speaker 1: they develop a trap, they explain how it's going to work,
Speaker 1: and so you know that this is always the case.
Speaker 1: If a trap is fully explained, something is going to
Speaker 1: go wrong, or if a plan is fully explained, something
Speaker 1: is going to go wrong. So, yeah, it doesn't quite
Speaker 1: go off as they're planning it to. But it also
Speaker 1: is not doesn't go off the rails disastrously. I don't
Speaker 1: think that would have been allowed in nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 3: No, I guess not. No, you couldn't. I don't know
Speaker 3: at the time. Could you have an ending like you
Speaker 3: have in Carpenter's Thing?
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. How would audiences
Speaker 1: have reacted to that.
Speaker 3: I don't know the answer to this question, Listeners right in.
Speaker 3: Are there examples you can think of of sci fi
Speaker 3: or genre movies from say the fifties with an utterly
Speaker 3: bleak ending, just ending where the alien wins and Earth loses.
Speaker 1: I mean the main example that comes to mind instantly,
Speaker 1: and perhaps part of it because we already talked about it,
Speaker 1: is the fifty six Body Snatcher's film. Like at the
Speaker 1: end of that film, it's like, we have one sane
Speaker 1: man left and everyone thinks he is insane. And I
Speaker 1: guess you could also have looked to various like short
Speaker 1: form of Twilight zones Twilight Zone type stuff where yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll definitely have the downer ending and all, but yeah,
Speaker 1: this one, this one does not. This one leaves things
Speaker 1: on a positive note. Humans were tested and they were
Speaker 1: they were up to the test.
Speaker 3: It's easier to end on a downer note. I think
Speaker 3: after like a sub thirty minute story than it is
Speaker 3: to end on a downer note after a ninety minute story.
Speaker 3: You know, you've got more investment on a feature length
Speaker 3: and so people are going to feel really mad if
Speaker 3: you get a downer ending at the end.
Speaker 1: Of a movie. Yeah, you got to send them home happy. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's what this film does.
Speaker 4: I was.
Speaker 1: I was happy with the film after we were done here.
Speaker 1: It has some terrific sequences, you know, great dialogue, a
Speaker 1: lot of interesting things about it. So you know, older
Speaker 1: films like this are not everybody's cup of tea, but
Speaker 1: I wouldn't. If you're all tempted, I encourage you to
Speaker 1: give the Thing from Another World a chance.
Speaker 3: I'm still thinking about this thing I just talked about.
Speaker 3: Wait a minute, this might be developing into a broader theory,
Speaker 3: Rob would you generally agree then? When it comes to
Speaker 3: horror literature, it's way more common to have horror short
Speaker 3: stories where the monster or the evil entity wins in
Speaker 3: the end, but horror novels where the hero wins in
Speaker 3: the end.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah, I would say, by and large, that's the case.
Speaker 1: You know, I've seen, I've certainly seen examples where longer
Speaker 1: works that have dark endings, those dark endings are not
Speaker 1: always that well received, even if the audience tends to
Speaker 1: be into darker, grittier stuff. You know, I've seen. I've
Speaker 1: seen that time and again. So I think that probably
Speaker 1: holds true. And I don't know how much of that
Speaker 1: is yet investment in a longer work, or sort of
Speaker 1: expectations of a longer work, or or also just like
Speaker 1: effective storytelling, if you stick with it that long, like
Speaker 1: you you're rooting for the good guys or what whoever is,
Speaker 1: you know, the protagonists happen to be like you want
Speaker 1: them to overcome the adversary, and generally, I guess in
Speaker 1: those longer works you to have a protagonist that you're
Speaker 1: genuinely rooting for and not like in short fiction you
Speaker 1: sometimes have, you know, very problematic characters and you know
Speaker 1: something terrible is going to happen to them. Basically the
Speaker 1: Tales from the Crypt model short stories, bad people, bad endings.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, Tales from the Crypt exactly. It is short
Speaker 3: enough that you don't need to like anybody.
Speaker 1: Yeah, like I hate everybody in this I know something
Speaker 1: bad is going to happen. I'm probably going to celebrate
Speaker 1: it when it does. And it's a short ride to
Speaker 1: get there.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess we got kind of sidetracked there, but
Speaker 3: I'll come back to my original recommendation. I say, thing
Speaker 3: from another world. Yeah, this one's really really good horror filmmaking,
Speaker 3: especially for nineteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and if you would like to see this film,
Speaker 1: you're in luck because it I think our last one
Speaker 1: that we covered, is widely available. You can easily pick
Speaker 1: up a DVD or Blu ray of it. You can
Speaker 1: also digitally rent or buy it pretty much any place
Speaker 1: you you digitally buy or rent films.
Speaker 3: Watch the Skies.
Speaker 1: I know that there was also a colorized version of
Speaker 1: this film. I can't imagine watching it colorized. I feel
Speaker 1: like the black and white is essential. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna go ahead and wrap it up there. But hey,
Speaker 1: if you would like to listen to other episodes of
Speaker 1: Weird House Cinema, you'll find it every Friday in the
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed. We have core
Speaker 1: episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have a listener mail
Speaker 1: on Monday's Artifact on Wednesday, and a rerun on the weekends,
Speaker 1: and hey, keep watching the skies out there. If you've
Speaker 1: got a sky keep watching it.
Speaker 3: But what would that have done if you've seen it,
Speaker 3: you just you'd be like, I see something crash landing
Speaker 3: you at.
Speaker 1: Alert the sight.
Speaker 3: I guess you're like, oh, we got to get all
Speaker 3: the thermite really quick.
Speaker 1: That is one more thing. It's this terrible time in
Speaker 1: the episode to remember it. But we have some great
Speaker 1: sequences too of plotting where the character is trying to
Speaker 1: track it with like a Geiger counter. Oh yes, an
Speaker 1: enclosed space. Very reminiscent of films to come much later,
Speaker 1: like like Alien and Aliens.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: So. Yeah, this film feels ahead of its time in
Speaker 1: a number of ways.
Speaker 3: Okay, we got a stop gushion about the thing. Okay, okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: so what we're were saying, Oh yeah, we're ending the
Speaker 3: episode all right. Well anyway, thanks as always to our
Speaker 3: wonderful audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like
Speaker 3: to get in touch with us with feedback on this
Speaker 3: episode or any other to suggest topic for the future,
Speaker 3: just to say hello, you can email us at contact
Speaker 3: at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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