In Bride of Frankenstein, Dr. Pretorius, played by the inimitable Ernest Thesiger, raises his glass and proposes a toast to Colin Clive’s Henry Frankenstein—“to a new world of Gods and Monsters.” I invite you to join me in exploring this world, focusing on horror films from the dawn of the Universal Monster movies in 1931 to the collapse of the studio system and the rise of the new Hollywood rebels in the late 1960’s. With this period as our focus, and occasional ventures beyond, we will explore this magnificent world of classic horror. So, I raise my glass to you and invite you to join me in the toast.
By the early 1950’s, flying saucer fever was in full swing. An explosion of widely reported UFO sightings throughout the United States in the late 1940’s ignited the collective imagination and paranoia of the nation. That paranoia, based in post-war fears of the advanced science and technology that led to the atomic bomb and foreign invaders, became fodder for thousands of science fiction and horror stories for the next decade. The first major motion picture to draw so many of these elements together is the 1951 Howard Hawks production The Thing from Another World.
The film is based on John W. Campbell, Jr.’s novella Who Goes There?—widely considered one of the greatest science fiction stories ever written. The screenplay, written by Charles Lederer, reportedly with uncredited rewrites from Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht (one of the all-time great Hollywood screenwriters), bears very little resemblance to the original story. Fans of Who Goes There? will notice major differences right away. It takes place at the North Pole rather than Antarctica. It boasts a much larger cast of characters that includes Air Force personnel as well as scientists, a news reporter, and women, which are completely absent from the original story. The discovered craft has only recently crashed, rather than been buried below the ice for many thousands of years, and the creature itself is humanoid rather than a shapeshifting enigma.
All these changes to the story are used to create the kinds of situations that Howard Hawks reveled in as a filmmaker. His fingerprints are all over this film to such an extent that, since the time of its release, many believe that he is the true director of the film rather than Christian Nyby, the credited director. Besides several very Hawksian stylistic elements, Nyby was paid only a fraction of the director’s fee that RKO budgeted, with Hawks taking almost 90 percent of it for himself. Furthermore, lead actor Kenneth Tobey and co-star Dewey Martin are both on record saying that Hawks did most of the directing.
However, several other cast members disagree. Actor George Fenneman said in an interview for a 1997 Los Angeles Times article, “Hawks would once in a while direct, but it was Chris’ show.” Robert Cornthwaite (Dr. Carrington in the film) in the same article says, “Chris always deferred to Hawks, as well he should…maybe because he did defer to him, people misinterpreted it.” He went on to say, “When people ask me I say, ‘Chris was the director, Hawks was the producer.’” As actor William Self said, “Chris was the director in our eyes, but Howard was the boss in our eyes.”
Personally, I do believe that Christian Nyby is properly credited as director but worked under the very influential hand of his producer and mentor. Nyby had been Hawks’ editor on several films in the 1940’s including the Bogie-Bacall team-ups To Have and Have Not (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946). Because of the stellar work Nyby did salvaging Red River (1948) after its original editors botched it in Hawks’ eyes, the great filmmaker gave Nyby the directing opportunity he had been seeking. As an editor, Nyby knew Hawks’ work as intimately as anybody and absolutely revered him as a master of his craft. As Nyby himself said, “This is a man I studied and wanted to be like. You would certainly emulate and copy the master you’re sitting under, which I did.” This seems entirely plausible to me. Though it appears that Hawks helped to rehearse the overlapping dialogue and would make suggestions when Nyby asked, he had full confidence in his protégé and his abilities. In his ever-understated style, Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich, “I thought Chris did a good job.”
The greater influence of the Hawks style is written into the screenplay. One of the most often cited is the use of quick, snappy, overlapping dialogue throughout the film. Another is the dynamic between Air Force Captain Pat Hendry (Kenneth Tobey) and Margaret Sheridan’s character Nikki Nicholson. The scene in which Hendry pretends to be tied up as Nikki pours drinks plays very much like something out of a classic Hawks comedy. Beyond that, Hawks was less interested in villains and more in how characters deal with difficulties. The Thing itself is more of a force of nature or a problem to be solved than a villain. All of the characters are flawed but attempt to do what they believe is right. What makes this dynamic interesting is that they have conflicting views on the correct way to deal with their common problem. This is illustrated through a trifecta of characters, each representing a different element of authority in American life: Captain Hendry as the military and government, Dr. Carrington as the voice of science and the intellectual establishment, and Ned “Scotty” Scott as the press and voice of the common man.
The film is filled with a mixture of heroics and ineptitude. The military characters are not played for laughs, but they make an awful lot of stupid mistakes. In an attempt to remove the ice around the crashed spacecraft by using a thermite bomb (a plan that Carrington calls “excellent”), they inadvertently destroy the ship. While left to guard the block of ice that encases the huge humanoid creature, the Crew Chief (Dewey Martin) throws a blanket over it because he is disturbed by its eyes. What he doesn’t realize is that it is an electric blanket which quickly thaws the ice and unleashes The Thing on the base. Still, Captain Hendry is a strong and effective leader and the men under his command are generally capable and duty bound—another important element of characters in Hawks’ films.
Perhaps the most interesting character in the film is Dr. Carrington played by Robert Cornthwaite. He resists that The Thing is a danger and insists that it is important to seek to understand it. When the creature is wounded by the sled dogs that the Air Force has brought to the base and one of its arms severed, he immediately begins to study the disembodied limb. He is at constant odds with Hendry, who first commands that the creature be left in the ice when Carrington feels it should be thawed and examined. After the creature escapes, Hendry is single minded that it should be captured and destroyed before it harms anyone. Carrington feels it can be reasoned with. Even after several men and animals have been killed and drained of blood by the creature, Carrington pleads for its life, putting himself in harms way as he attempts to befriend it. This is met with an attack from the creature.
Scotty (Douglas Spencer) in many ways represents the audience. He is the observer who doesn’t entirely understand the worlds of either the military or science but feels that everyone deserves to know the truth about what is happening. He is the voice of all those who feel that government holds back too much information from everyday people. He often invokes the First Amendment, particularly freedom of the press, throughout the film. Scotty also has the honor of delivering one of the most famous closing lines in film history, “keep watching the skies.”
These three characters provide the major human conflicts throughout the film, but never see each other as villains. Despite the antagonism between them, Hendry refuses to dishonor Carrington. He sees that Carrington is fulfilling his duty much as he is fulfilling his own. Scotty is constantly at odds with both Captain Hendry and Dr. Carrington but only in his mission to discover and report the truth. Each man sees the others as men of honor and duty even in the midst of great disagreement over the best course of action. This is a very Hawksian dynamic, not entirely dissimilar from John Wayne and Montgomery Clift’s characters in Red River or Wayne, Dean Martin, and Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo (1959).
Balancing these strong personalities are two more characters who act as intermediaries, particularly between Hendry and Carrington. The first is Dr. Chapman (John Dierkes), who is certainly as devoted to science as Carrington, but also acknowledges that the creature could be dangerous. The other is Dr. Carrington’s assistant, the afore-mentioned Miss Nicholson, who has had previous dealings with Captain Hendry. Nikki is a person of warmth and humor who tries to keep Hendry from taking himself too seriously. The interplay between the two has a wonderful His Girl Friday (another Hawks film from 1940) quality to it. Hendry may think he’s in control, but it’s only because Nikki lets him think that. She is part of a long tradition of confident and independent women in Howard Hawks films.
Apart from its ice-bound setting, The Thing from Another World bears little resemblance to either John W. Campbell’s novella or John Carpenter’s 1982 remake. The biggest difference of all is The Thing itself. In the novella and remake, the creature takes on the form of its victims. Because of that, those versions are largely about suspicion and paranoia. They are about the idea that our greatest enemy is us. This film is more in the tradition of the “fear of the outsider” story. While the original novella and Carpenter’s film are more like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing from Another World has more in common with movies like Alien. This is not surprising considering Dan O’Bannon’s famous quote that he didn’t steal from anybody when creating Alien, but from everybody. The Thing was surely an influence.
The Thing in this version, played by future Gunsmoke star James Arness, is something entirely different. Though completely humanoid and highly evolved, the creature is of a plant-based cellular structure. The barbs on its hands are something akin to rose thorns and its ability to heal itself is remarkable. After one of its arms is severed in the clash with the sled dogs, it regenerates quickly. Seed pods found in its hands are used to plant a veritable garden of new lifeforms just like it. Its method of invasion would be simply through reproduction of itself. The look of the creature is obviously very much inspired by the look of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster, with its built-up head and prominent brows. In action, it is akin to a vampire, feeding off the blood of dogs and humans to survive.
One of the most interesting details of the film is the constant opening and closing of doors. For the most part, this is set up as an activity to simply keep out the freezing elements, but it also sets up the film’s best scare. Throughout the movie, doors are opened to reveal just another human character or simply nothing. But finally, a door is opened to reveal the huge, looming form of The Thing standing directly behind it, poised for attack. It is a moment as effective as the first appearance of the shark at the stern of the Orca in Jaws (1975) or Captain Dallas turning his light onto the xenomorph in the ducts in Alien—and this moment surely inspired both of those.
The Thing from Another World may not be exactly scary today, but it remains entertaining and engaging. It has been noted as a favorite film among horror directors of a certain generation including John Carpenter and George Romero, and its influence can be strongly felt throughout many films of the “New Hollywood” era of the 70’s and 80’s. When Scotty delivers his closing line, he might as well be referring to the onslaught of alien invasion films that were to come in the 1950’s and beyond. For seventy years we have heeded his call, which has led to some of the most imaginative and exciting science fiction and horror ever created. They are words that fill us with wonder and fear. It is my sincere hope that filmmakers and audiences will only continue to listen to those urgent words and “watch the skies.”
Sources:
Bogdanovich, Peter. Who the Devil Made It? Ivy Moon Company. Ballantine Publishing Group, A Division of Random House. New York, NY. 1997
Fuhrmann, Hentry (1997, May 25). A ‘Thing’ to His Credit. Los Angeles Times. Retrieved from www.latimes.com