Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: The Thing from Another World
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Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema Rewind. This is Rob Lamb. Today's episode originally published September 24th, 2021. Oh, it's a fun one because we are discussing The Thing from Another World. This, of course, was the original adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.'s short story, Who Goes There? And it would, of course, be remade years and years later in John Carpenter's The Thing. But this is a pretty terrific movie in its own right.

from 1951. Let's jump right in. This episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind Radio Hour is brought to you by Thermite. If you need a high temperature burst of heat, then this pyrotechnic composition of metal powder and metal oxide is for you. Metal refining, fireworks, munitions, burning through the ice to retrieve downed spaceships and alien beings. Thermite does it all. Thermite. Ask for it by name.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick. And it's finally time on the Weird House Cinema podcast to cover The Thing. No, not that The Thing. Not the one you're thinking of, the horror classic. The other The Thing, The Thing from Another World.

Yes. This is a film that I had never seen prior to this week. And I think part of it was because John Carpenter's 1982 film, The Thing, is just this masterpiece of science fiction and horror for so many of us. It's visceral, but intelligent. It's

It's well acted. It's effectively scored. It makes great use of sets and locations. And of course, just features a bounty of legendary and grotesque practical effects. Totally. Without a doubt, an absolute masterpiece. One of the best horror movies ever made. Can't say enough good stuff about Carpenter's The Thing. From the effects to the acting to the music, it's pretty much pitch perfect. Mm-hmm.

But of course, one of the things we always have to remind ourselves, especially perhaps if we're becoming getting a little too judgmental about remakes and reboots and so forth, is because I have to remind myself of this, is that John Carpenter's The Thing is also essentially a remake or a reboot, if you will, based on the story Who Goes There by John W. Campbell Jr., an author from like the sci-fi so-called, you know, pulp golden age, and

And Carpenter's film is the second official adaptation of this story. But the first is the film we're talking about here today, 1951's The Thing from Another World.

I had also never seen this movie in full before, though I'd seen some scenes from it, and I had seen it because it is briefly featured on a television in John Carpenter's Halloween. Oh, that's right. I forgot about that. Yeah, one of the kids who's being babysat is watching it. I think maybe he's not quite old enough for this movie.

So this is a film I've always known this was around. You know, at some point after being exposed to Carpenters the Thing, I learned about this older version. And maybe I would even occasionally see it in the schedule or catch part of it on like Turner Classic Movies or something.

But I never sat down and watched it. And we'll get into some of the reasons why. But basically, they all roll down to me thinking, oh, this film is a modern film. I don't want to see this earlier, like, proto-thing vision. I'm going to stick with perfection.

But then I was looking through Michael Weldon's, he's the author of the Psychotronic video and film guides. I was looking at his write-up on first on John Carpenter's The Thing, which was glowing and, you know, and says, oh, you know, this is a wonderful, grotesque, monstrous film. Not surprised that he would love that one.

But of course, Weldon's also a fan of older genre films as well. And I was reading this really high praise for this 1951 film and talking about it having intelligent dialogue and a strong female lead.

And so that really got me thinking, well, maybe I should give this a look. You know, the strong female lead being sort of doubly interesting because on one hand, it's 1951. You don't necessarily think of this being the era of strong female leads. And then also you think about John Carpenter's adaptation in...

And there are no women in it at all. It's an entirely male cast. Yeah, in Carpenter's version, the all-male cast of characters somehow fits the miserable bleakness of the Antarctic base in the movie. But I would say that having watched it now, I know what Michael Weldon is talking about, though...

I think it might be slightly overselling Margaret Sheridan's role in the movie, though she is fantastic and I really like her character. She does a great job with it. But I was expecting her to be the main character of the movie based on this, which she is not. But in her scenes, she is great.

Yeah, and we'll get into this a bit later. It basically comes down to this idea of the Hoxian woman, and you'll find out what that means. But in terms of differences between the thing and the thing from another world, I think we're sort of burying the lead because the one major way is...

in which The Thing from Another World 1951 differs from Carpenter's movie, is that the original film does not involve impersonation. People who are familiar with Carpenter's movie will remember the main thing about it is that the alien can assume the forms of the humans or the animals that it kills. So it is this polymorphous beast

that can sort of sample the tissue of an organism it comes into contact with and then make its own body into a copy of that being, which is a wonderful plot device. The central mechanic of Carpenter's movie gives rise to the paranoia

that doesn't really exist in the original. Maybe there is a kind of sense of paranoia, but it's powered by different factors that I want to discuss in more detail as we go on. But in this movie, the Thing is simply a big, hulking alien that thaws out of a block of ice and then attacks the base where all the characters are stationed.

It doesn't assume the form of anyone. If you're actually able to get a good look at it, which you're not really in the movie, and in fact, that's a really good thing about the movie. The movie obscures the form of the monster for most of the runtime in a highly effective way. But if you were able to get a really good, well-lit gander at it, it just looks kind of like James Arness in a big, creepy Frankenstein makeup and space suit.

Yeah, and this was a huge reason why I had never checked out the film before, because I'd see that famous publicity shot of James Arnaz in the Thing costume. And I would think, well, that looks kind of lame. I don't really want to see a movie about that, especially when John Carpenter's version of it is this amorphous, ultimately formless thing that takes on just a number of just grotesque,

and shifting forms. Yeah. And in fact, I mean, I've said this on the show before. I think

one big mistake a lot of horror movies make is letting you get too much of a look at the monster i mean horror movies should be sparing in in letting you see the monster it's good it's good to heighten the tension and make it more mysterious by usually keeping the monster off screen i'd say carpenters the thing is a movie that breaks that rule to great effect you get tons of of great shots of the monster and it looks fantastic so you know if you're kind of the thing about uh

with artistic media is you have to obey the rule unless it's just really good anyway. Yeah. But yeah, I know what you're talking about with the way the monster looks in this movie. This is a major thing I wanted to talk about. I was shocked how scary the creature was in this movie. And I really mean that. Movies of this era...

I really appreciate them, but they're rarely viscerally disturbing on a visual level to modern audiences. And that's not a knock on them. And in fact, at the time, they might have had people fainting in the aisles or falling out of their cars at the drive-in.

But makeup effects from before roughly the, I don't know, the 70s or so, I think rarely pack a strong punch with audiences today. We've just sort of standards have been updated. And so even if the way Boris Karloff looked in his Frankenstein makeup was terrifying to people at the time, I think it looks beautiful. I think it looks amazing. I love to look at it, but I don't find it really, really terrifying. Right.

Right. And I would say that the baseline monster in this movie is no exception to that rule, that if you just look at the makeup effects of the time, they're usually not going to pack a very strong punch. If you look at well-lit still photographs of James Arness, the actor who plays the

the monster in the thing in his alien makeup and costume for the movie. I think he looks goobery. He just looks kind of like a, like an EGA guy. He looks like a Frankenstein sort of in a, in a, in a space, in a jumpsuit. Um,

And yet somehow on the screen within the narrative, he is so much more than that. This is a movie monster that benefits immensely from really strong staging, lighting, and camera work more so than makeup effects. So most of the time you see the monster in the movie,

His appearance is sudden or brief or obscured in some way. So maybe the characters are looking out at him through frosted glass on a snowfield or he or somebody opens a door and he suddenly reaches out through it as they try to slam it shut. Or he's just a menacing silhouette at the end of a corridor, you know, and his features are covered in shadow.

So really hats off to the team that came up with the staging for all these scenes and the lighting and the framing and all that, because even though the makeup effects kind of fall short, the monster on screen within the narrative looks wonderful. He's really frightening. Absolutely. Like, for instance, in the movie, you never get a sense that this character is wearing partially ragged space pajamas. But if you look at the still, you're like, those are space pajamas, clearly. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So they took a kind of goober Frankenstein and turned him into this truly menacing being a really excellent, excellent filmmaking technique.

Well, I'd like to get into this more. Let's go ahead and just give a basic elevator pitch of the plot, especially for people who, you know, they just know the Carpenter version. They maybe don't know how much in common this one has with that film, aside from the details of the monster. Okay, well, maybe I'll do the straight elevator pitch first, and then we'll see if we have any variations on it. The straight

The straight plot description, I would say, is a mysterious object from space crashes near a remote Arctic research base. When a team of scientists and military men go to investigate, they find a humanoid body frozen in the ice, and they have to bring it back to the base with them. And I guess you just better hope it doesn't thaw out. I like that. Let's go ahead and listen to a little bit of that trailer audio. ♪

The thing from another world. This is the spot where it was first seen. And these are the first people who saw the thing. How did it get here? Where did it come from? What is it? That thing's alive, sir. I saw it. I shot at it. I hit it. I know it. Nothing happened. It just kept coming at me, making a noise like a cat mewing. Captain, it was awful. You could have seen those hands and those eyes. Captain, you've got to do something about it. You've got to. Is it human or inhuman?

Earthly or unearthly? Baffling questions, astounding questions that not even the world's greatest scientific minds can answer. Gentlemen, do you realize what we've found? A being from another world as different from us as one pole from the other. If we can only communicate with it...

All right. So I want to come back to something you were just talking about, and that was the idea of doors opening. So, yes, the research base in this movie feels it's more or less in keeping with the spirit that Carpenter had in his version of the film. You know, there are these a lot of these long corridors. There are doorways separating different sections of it. Everything feels it doesn't feel super modern. It feels very modern.

very rough in places. There's this idea that outside of this compound, there's just frozen death awaiting any creature. And it's inside that we have this slim, artificial version of life-sustaining temperatures.

And that makes actually for a killer twist later in the movie where you haven't even really been thinking about this while they're coming up with all these different ways of battling the thing. The thing is sort of laying siege to the humans in the base. And then at a certain point, they're like, oh, no, somebody turned off the heaters. Hmm.

Yeah. So it's a wonderful set piece in which to engage with this monster. But one of the things that I was really taken by watching it is just how scary all the doors are. There's a lot of characters going in and out of doors in this film, often very quickly.

And even before the monster jumped out from behind a door, I was feeling anxious whenever a door would open. Like it was really effective. And then eventually a monster is coming out from behind the door and there's worry about things jumping out from behind doors.

I don't think doors have ever been quite this scary. A hundred percent agree. Yeah. This movie does something really special with like portals, openings, doors, windows. It's really good. Also lots of scenes where like the door to the outside has been opened and, you know, there's the sense of all that, that crushing cold coming in. So it works on several levels, I think.

Since we're not going to do a scene by scene breakdown on this one, I guess to make more sense for people who haven't seen especially either movie, it might make sense to do a quick fuller rundown on the plot. So the basic cast of characters is that you have a journalist and then a group of military commanders working.

who fly by plane up to a remote Arctic research base where there is some scientific research going on. And then, like I said in the elevator pitch earlier, there is a crash of some kind of object near the base, and the scientists and the soldiers go out to investigate it, and it looks like what they have encountered is a crashed flying saucer, a crashed alien spacecraft, and then they're frozen in the ice on the ice field,

is a humanoid figure. So they chip that, they dig that out of the ice with ice axes and with thermite. This movie is a big fan of thermite, of course. And the thermite thing kind of goes wrong. I think they end up sort of melting the ship by accident while they're trying to get it up out of the ice. But they do get this body out of the ice and they bring it back to the base. And then through a series of mishaps, this body in a chunk of ice is accidentally thawed out.

And what they come to discover is that this is a being from another planet that is not an animal, but is in fact an animate vegetable. They sort of explore the alternative evolutionary history of this creature and say, what if plant life...

had evolved the ability to move quickly and have intelligence and have a mobile body instead of animal life. And so that's sort of what we're dealing with. And there's a lot of discussion about the creature's mindset toward humans. It apparently needs to consume us. It wants to drink our blood.

But it doesn't have any it doesn't really have any remorse for us or understanding of us as fellow creatures. Instead, as one character so eloquently puts it, he regards us the same way we would regard a field of cabbages.

Yeah, yeah. This idea that the dog is just like the short furry blood container and then the humans are just the larger hairless blood containers. Yeah. And it just needs the blood. It's just calories. Yeah. Yeah. But so within this plot, a number of interesting themes emerge and maybe we can talk more about those as we go on.

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But I guess here's where we would typically get into some of the people involved in this and talk about some connections. Now, Rob, you might have read more about the production of this film than I did. I'm to understand. I think there's some disagreement or confusion about what the location.

level of control? Uh, like who, who basically was in charge of making this movie? Who was the director and what was their relative level of control? Yeah, there's, there's kind of, it's kind of an open question or, you know, a matter of debate that'll probably never be fully settled, especially since I think everybody involved with this film or most of them have, have passed on. Um,

But the basic situation, I'm going to talk about who is the credited director first. So the credited director on this is Christian Nyby, who lived 1913 through 1993. He's a TV and film director who served as editor on such films as Howard Hawks' 1946 adaptation of The Big Sleep, which

This had Humphrey Bogart in it. And William Faulkner actually co-scripted this adaptation of the Raymond Chandler Philip Marlowe novel, which is a really good novel, by the way. Interesting. I've actually never read it. However, this film, The Thing from Another World, is Niby's—it was his first directorial credit—

It's easily the biggest film or at least biggest, you know, the most well-remembered film that he did, although he worked an entire career afterwards as a TV director up until the mid 1970s. OK, so Nyby is credited as the director of the film. But for some reason, I've always heard this described as having been directed by Howard Hawks, who, of course, is an acclaimed filmmaker of the time. So what's the deal with that?

Okay, so Howard Hawks, who we just alluded to, had worked with Nyby. Nyby was his editor.

So Hawks was also known as the Silver Fox. And if you look up pictures of him, you can see why, you know, dashing, sort of silver looking hair, I guess. He looks like somebody who would be in like a whiskey, a scotch commercial on TV in the 50s or something. Absolutely. A dashing character. And director of such films as Red River, Rio Bravo, 1932 Scarface, El Dorado, and Hattari, as well as the aforementioned The Big Sleep.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for 1942's Sergeant York, and he received an Honorary Academy Award in 1974. He's considered a legend of the classic Hollywood era. And while he was not the credited director or the credited co-writer on The Thing from Another World, you'll often see, like, for instance, you'll see him listed on IMDb as uncredited director, uncredited writer, but

Basically, various accounts indicate that he was the director and he, for some reason or another, let Christian Nyby take the directing credit, which again would be his first. John Carpenter, among others, have echoed this view. However, various other folks, including some people involved with the actual production of the film, have said otherwise. And they say, no, Nyby was the director.

So ultimately, you know, how can you say one way or the other? It does seem like Hawks greatly valued Nyby and, uh,

and it said that Nivey was an instrumental editor in many of his films. So it's been argued that perhaps Hawks thought that sci-fi was beneath him and didn't want his name on it. And, or he gave the credit to Nivey so that he could get into the director's guild, you know, like, like let's, you go ahead and put your name on this film and this will help your career. Um, he,

It's hard to say what exactly was going on here, but I doubt we're going to get a definite answer on it ever. But it does not say, I want to stress though, I've seen no accounts that indicate that this was some sort of, this was a situation of animosity or like one director being replaced. We often see that in production stories where like, oh, this guy, this guy's on the outs, bring in this guy. No, it seems like something else was going on here. Yeah.

And, you know, if anything, it was probably Hawks helping out Nyby. Or it's just been a situation where Hawks was involved in the production and Nyby was still the director. And maybe people were more inclined to give Hawks more credit than he perhaps deserved for it. I mean, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is here. Sure. I guess we'll have to leave that one sort of unanswered. Yeah.

That being said, folks that are familiar with Hawks, they do point to various things about this film that have his fingerprints on it. And you can, of course, explain that away a bit by saying, well, Hawks and Nyby worked together so much. You know, they had similar interests. They worked together to make these previous films. So who knows? We're not going to reach an answer today. Well, I will emphasize yet again that I think...

pretty much across the board in terms of technical filmmaking. This is an excellently made movie, especially for science fiction films at the time.

I mean, there are definitely things that you can criticize about it and we will as kind of like quaint or products of their era. But a lot of that's in the actual sort of story content in terms of a technical exercise in filmmaking. I think The Thing from Another World just is awesome for 1951. Absolutely. Yeah. If you're hesitant to watch this just because it is an early 1950s film, just know that it is in many ways ahead of its time.

Alright, so we mentioned already that this was based on a short story based on a short story by John W Campbell jr. Who lived 1919 through 1971? Pulp era sci-fi writer and editor of astounding science fiction He wrote numerous short stories in several novels though who goes there the story that this is based on is perhaps his best remembered and I believe it was recently re-released in an expanded form like they went back to an old manuscript and there's there's stuff in

in that original manuscript that in some cases is actually present in the film version, but not in the original story, if I'm correct on that. Now, having read only a little bit about Campbell, it seems to me that his life sort of breaks into a couple of different parts that like early on, it seems like most of what you read about him is that he's just sort of like

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that seems to be the case. Some accounts indicate that he could always be a bit of a blowhard and was prone to just talk a lot. Like if you were going to go in and chat with him about anything, you were going to get a monologue.

But yeah, in life, he apparently increasingly espounded ideas that did not set well with more progressive sci-fi authors of his time, such as Isaac Asimov. Yeah, the main things I've seen picked out are increasing interest in hard right politics and then like belief in like psychic powers and stuff and being into sort of the Dianetics nexus of alternative psychiatry. Yeah, plus I was reading a book.

about him in a 2019 piece in the New York Times by Peter Libby about the renaming of a science fiction writing award that had been named for Campbell and how they changed it because for, and the reason was that like Campbell supported racial segregation during his life. And he espounded numerous racist and inflammatory viewpoints, like the kind of guy who would not only hold

hold racist viewpoints, but also would like seem to go the extra step in just trying to rile people up and shock people with his opinions. So, so yeah, that's that, that is John W. Campbell Jr. Now, do you know if Campbell, does he have any involvement with the film or was it just that he wrote the story and then it was adapted to a screenplay with, without his involvement?

I don't know the details of his involvement, but I know that he's not credited with any screenwriting credits on this. Instead, we have the credited screenwriter is Charles Lederer, who lived 1911 through 1976. This is somebody who's a screenwriter on Hawks' Gentleman Prefer Blondes, as well as the original Ocean's Eleven in 1960. That was not a Hawks film, but just another credit for Lederer here.

There's also an uncredited writer listed on IMDb, Ben Hescht, who lived 1894 through 1964. And this is a guy who'd also worked with Hawks

writer on Scarface, as well as Alfred Hitchcock's film Notorious. Now, I guess we're about to talk about the cast a little bit. And again, I will say as great as this movie is, one of the top criticisms I would lodge about it is it has way, way too many characters, way too many characters. This movie could have had

seven or eight characters at the base, I think, and achieve the same factional dynamics. Instead, it has like 37 characters. That's way too many. I could not keep track of who was who among the minor characters. You know, I could recognize like

like three or four people, and then everybody else I was just getting mixed up. Oh, yeah. Like you're immediately just thrown into a cast of very interchangeable looking, like clean cut white military guys. Yeah. And you're just scrambling to figure out for a little bit, because again, the writing is really tight on this thing. You pretty quickly figure out who your main character is, and you can sort of tell who matters and who doesn't. But there are a lot of, there are a fair number of characters on the screen who ultimately don't matter. And they're

They're not even there to be cannon fodder for the monster or anything. Right. Like most everybody survives this thing. I think the monster only kills like two or three people, right? Yeah. Yeah. So if you see this many people and you're like, oh, it's going to be a bloodbath. No, it's not. Even the smaller teams like Team Science, we'll get into that in a bit, but there were like

three characters that stood out. Well, there were two that were important characters, one who stood out and two that were just interchangeably in the background. Yeah.

So maybe we should talk about the actor playing our hero. All right. This is Kenneth Tobey playing Captain Patrick Hendry. Ooh, Patrick Hendry. This is our hero. This is the all-American lug. He is a handsome, blonde man of action who holds his liquor. He thinks fast and he brooks no sympathy for blood-sucking aliens or any such nonsense. Yeah, yeah. He's...

it doesn't take long to realize this guy's our lead. Um, he's an interesting actor though. 223 acting credits on IMDb. Um,

I'm not sure if I gave his dates yet, 1917 through 2002. He, in his later career, oh, he played air controller Neubauer in 1980s Airplane, the parody film. But back in the day, he was in 1955's It Came From Beneath the Sea. And he has quite a few interesting cameos and uncredited bits.

especially from later in his life, including playing a hologram priest in Hellraiser Bloodline. He was a projectionist in Gremlins 2. He had another cameo in Gremlins playing a different character. He was in Big Top Peewee. He was in The Howling. He was in Inner Space. You know, I'll say, I think he very much fits the mold of a leading man character of these 1950s sci-fi movies where the leading character is often just this kind of lug, this...

macho cigarette ad man. But you know what? He's good. He's good with this role. Yeah, yeah. And it seems to be... He was in a lot of stuff before these more recent films I'm naming here. But what seems to be the case is...

is that he had a long career, so he was still active by the 1980s, but also he was in the thing from another world. He was part of this era of TV that this new generation of directors had grown up on. So you see folks like Joe Dante using him a lot. John Carpenter used him in, I want to say Starman.

So, you know, they look back and they're like, this is the star of the thing from another world. If he's looking for work, I want to put him in my film, have him, just give him a cameo, something. Let's get him on the screen. I just want to be in his presence. Now, we mentioned that in this movie, he's a ruggedly handsome lug. He is also the love interest of Margaret Sheridan in this movie, playing a character named Nikki Nicholson. Is that right? Yep. Yep.

Yeah, so Sheridan's interesting. She lived 1926 through 1982. Hawks apparently discovered her while she was still in college, and Hawks was just convinced that this was gonna be the next big star, that she was like a once-in-a-generation talent.

So he wanted to cast her in 1948's Red River. That's a Hawks film. But apparently she was pregnant at the time. She passed on it. And she ended up being in this film, which, you know, depending on whether Hawks directed it or not, it's still very much a Hawks film, you know. Yeah.

But her career ultimately didn't take off quite like Hawks had imagined it. She was in five more films and she did some TV, but this is the one she's best remembered for. Other credits include 1953's I, the Jury and 1954's The Diamond Wizard. I like that name. It's a cool name. I think I looked at it. I think maybe it's like a diamond heist kind of a film. Oh, okay. So nothing that stands out to modern viewers perhaps so much.

Well, Margaret Sheridan's wonderful in this movie. She has such a wry, jolly energy. I love the way that she, so when Kenneth Tobey's talking and she's got scenes with him, I love the way she's constantly either kind of laughing at him or visibly trying to hold back laughter while he's speaking. There's something kind of powerful and almost kind of threatening about the way she just laughs at him. And I love it. But then also it's very clear that she does like him.

So, yeah, she's got a wonderful screen presence. Yeah, you can see what Hawke saw in her. She has this great energy and the role is really good for a really well written for 1951. You know, she's not a damsel in distress.

She's not a femme fatale. You know, she is this strong, capable, professional woman in this outrageous scenario. And she stands toe to toe with her male counterparts in the film.

And this is where we get to something that was apparently one of Hawks' trademarks. And I have to admit, I haven't seen any other Howard Hawks films, so I can't really speak to this personally. But apparently in film theory, this is known as the Hawksian woman, an archetype of sort, you know, a tough-talking or fast-talking woman that can verbally spar with male counterparts. And that's certainly something we see in this role. His Girl Friday. Yeah, I guess so. Yeah.

Not to say, I want to be clear, it's not like there are no 1950s sensibilities in this character or in the film entirely, but I feel like it's a shockingly strong role for a film from this time period, certainly a genre film. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the really no really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus is

Really? That?

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So far, we've spoken about two characters in depth here. And Nikki is very much on team science. And Toby is one of the military men. You, off mic here, you talked about this film essentially being about jocks versus nerds. Oh, totally. Yeah. This is a jocks versus nerds movie. Though there's some crossover because ultimately I would say that while Margaret Sheridan is playing a scientist –

She, her real loyalties are more on the jock side. She's with the military, military guys in the end. But yeah, this is a, this is a movie in which the jocks, the military represent a tough common sense and the nerds, the scientists represent an unhealthy and ill-advised curiosity and

You know, a mind that is a little too open for its own good. And this brings us to the next character that we wanted to talk about and the actor who plays him. And that's if this movie has a human villain, this is the human villain. This is Dr. Carrington.

I would say he is the main figure in the movie representing the villainous potential of the nerds among us. He's so curious to know more about the life forms from other worlds that he forgets his loyalty to this one.

And I think this is a good jumping off point to talk about some of the historical political context of the film. So I want to be clear. I do not know if it was intended this way by the filmmakers. This could be something that is just an artifact of interpretation, but again,

It's easy to see how this has been interpreted as a Cold War paranoia movie. It was released early during the second Red Scare, and it involves sort of commie-coded intellectuals who betray their loyalty to the home team in a spirit of suicidal interplanetary cosmopolitanism.

So Dr. Carrington, there's something kind of off about him and his aesthetics. He dresses in these strange slacks that look

I'm not sure what they were. They look kind of like pajama pants with a strange pattern on them. And he wears a turtleneck sweater and a double-breasted jacket. And he has a pointy beard. So he looks almost like the classic Looney Tunes caricature of the Freudian psychiatrist. You know what I'm talking about? He looks like the archetype of an untrustworthy, godless intellectual. Like somebody that John Wayne would slug in the mouth in Big Jim McLean. Yeah. Yeah. Like...

almost like a stereotypical communist sympathizer intellectual of the day. Yeah, yeah. There are a number of sci-fi movies of this time interpreted as Cold War paranoia movies, and they tend to feature plot devices of either, one of two mechanisms, either mind control or body snatching. And what this means is that you end up with enemies who look like your friends and neighbors, but secretly they're working for the other side. Yes.

And you can see examples of this in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There was a remake in 78 that I think is absolutely fantastic if you've never seen the 78 version. That's another remake from, I guess, a few years before, but around the same time as Carpenter's Thing remake that is a remake that is

at least as good as the original and probably better. I've never seen the 70s remake. I've only seen the 1956 version, which as a child, like, scared the crap out of me a bit. Something about just the black and white nature of it and just how just...

Kevin McCarthy's character is towards the end. Like he's just completely losing it with, uh, well, it's not even paranoia in the context of the film because people are being replaced by pod people. And he's the, like the only sane man left trying to warn us. Oh, well, you really should see the 78 body snatchers because it's also just fantastic. It's, uh, it's got a great cast, Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, uh,

Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's a wonderful cast and excellently scripted, like really good.

So, but anyway, in those cases, especially the original 56 invasion of the body snatchers, because it's in this sort of red scare period of the fifties after world war two, um, it's, it, it fits into this mold. You've got people who look like your friends, but actually they work for the enemy. And on the hammy or B movie side of things, you've also got movies like it conquered the world, which I think you could say the same thing about also came out in 1956, a Corman special Roger Corman, uh,

And how would you describe It Conquered the World? It's a movie where like a giant communist mind control artichoke from Venus conquers a military base in a nearby town by like making a brain thrall out of Lee Van Cleef. Yeah, it's an interesting film. It has a ridiculous monster in it, but a lot of it revolves around Peter Graves' character,

having these conversations with Lee Van Cleef's character, kind of like just philosophical arguments about how we should be treating the aliens that are invading the world. You know, with Lee Van Cleef, you know, since he tends to play the more villainous roles, though he's not really an outright villain, not an unsympathetic villain in this. He comes through in the end. Yeah, he comes through in the end, but he also seems to be, he has a very logic-based approach to everything into why he is essentially siding with the aliens and

And that's kind of the heart of it. Like the alien threat exists and it's about how are we as a culture responding to it? And are we engaging in dangerous sensibilities and dangerous ideas regarding the treatment of alien beings? Yeah.

Will we learn only too late that man is a feeling creature? Right. And that's a big that's a big theme in all of these. Right. The idea that this this dangerous ideology or, you know, or alien presence, whatever the infection happens to be, it will rob you of your individuality. You're just going to be made into you'll be a pod person. You'll be, you know, whatever the thing is, you're going to be robbed of your individuality and your personality.

And that this alien persuasion, this alien frame of mind or the sympathies to the enemy are not visible from the outside, right? That the enemy, whether it's mind control or body snatching, either way, the effect is the same, which is that the enemy is among us blending in, you know, and this is very much in the political spirit of the age. It's like...

like McCarthy's speech when he stood up in 1950 and he said he had a list of communist spies who were secretly working in the State Department. They're just blending in with everybody else. And so the main mood or theme of these movies is

Yeah.

even though I don't think Carpenter's version has any of that Red Scare political DNA. I don't think it's concerned with that at all. It's just sort of like more free-floating paranoia, and I think it accomplishes that because, specifically, it involves an alien who impersonates people, who can look like your coworkers, and you wouldn't know it was actually an alien until you test their blood, unlike this movie,

Instead of having somebody who's an alien body snatcher or someone under alien mind control, it has just the suspect loyalties of the scientist and the intellectual because they're hungry for knowledge and they're open-minded to a fault.

And because of that, they will flirt with dangerous forces from outside the zone of safety. And that's the role that Dr. Carrington, this character, plays in the movie. And for the record, the actor, Robert Cornthwaite, is great in this role. I love him as the godless, untrustworthy nerd.

Yeah, he's pretty great. Even though at times, I don't know, it feels like they're laying down a bit thick with him. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a little cheesy, yeah. Because everyone else is like, this thing's murdering people and it's drinking blood. And he's like, yes, but I think we should reason with it. There's so much we could learn from this murderous carrot.

Yeah. And even right up there at the end, you know, they're trying to lure it into a high tech trap to shock it to death. And he's like, wait, let me speak to the creature. It must not be heard, you know. And we get to see the nerd get punished for his foolishness. You know, he's so naive that he thinks he can he can form a relationship with the alien. You know, unlike he doesn't have the rough common sense of the of the captain in the army who's like, well, you just got to kill this thing.

Yeah. So he gets swatted. Yeah, he gets smacked down. I think they say that he survives, I think they say, that he just ends up with some broken bones. Yeah, broken bones and a wounded spirit. But perhaps he'll, now he knows that he shouldn't put science first. Right.

So this actor, Cornthwaite, he was born in 1917, died in 2006. He did a lot of TV and film work throughout his long career, including Future World. That was one of the sequels to Westworld. He was in 1953's War of the Worlds, 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. He was in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken.

What is that? You don't know the Ghost of Mr. Chicken? I do not know the Ghost of Mr. Chicken. Oh, it was a Don Knotts comedy. Oh, okay. I think I saw it a lot as a kid for some reason, but...

Anyway, this actor was on he was on tons of famous TV shows from the old days, stuff like Andy Griffith, Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock. This was his first credited film or TV acting gig, though. And he he often played lawyers and scientists because he had that kind of like intellectual air, you know, that intellectual delivery that that lent itself well to those roles. Yeah, maybe a nasal voice and a pointy beard. And you just look at that guy and you're like, I don't know if I can trust him.

Now, we also have a very amusing journalist character who has a lot of screen time. It's our character, Ned Scott. And I enjoyed this character a lot because he's very stereotypical in many ways, but is so well-written, has a lot of snappy dialogue.

Fast talking journalist. It has some extremely cheesy lines. He gives the final speech at the end of the movie. So this movie's version of the he learned too late that man is a feeling creature is instead him like talking over the military radio to, I don't know, some command post and like dictating a news story off the top of his head. It starts off with some line like,

Uh, well, thousands of years ago, a man named Noah saved the earth with an arc made of wood today with a man named, uh, captain, whatever saved the earth with an arc of electricity. Yep. Yep. Great lead. Great lead. Ned. Really, really good. Yeah.

The interesting thing about that ending with the Keep Watching the Skies is I sometime, having never seen it before, but being familiar with that ending line, I kind of combined that knowledge with the ending to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

where there's like a crazed urgency to it. And there's no crazed urgency here. He's not like, for God's sake, keep watching the skies because this is going to happen again and again. He's just kind of like in generally saying, keep watching the skies just in case. I don't know. There might be, who knows? Just keep watching the skies. Yeah. Watch the skies. Keep watching them. Uh, anyway, this, this character though, very amusing. Ned Scott, um,

He was played by Douglas Spencer, who lived 1910 through 1960. So, you know, ultimately didn't have as long a career as he could have, given that his life was a bit cut short there. But he was in, among other things, This Island Earth, The Diary of Anne Frank, and the classic Western Shane. And

And speaking of Westerns, let's talk about Team Monster here. Oh boy. Now you mentioned already that James Arnaz plays the monster and it is indeed James Arnaz who lived 1923 through 2011.

This is the guy that's mostly well-known and well-remembered for one or two things. First of all, he played the lead character, Matt Dillon, on the long-running Gunsmoke Western TV show. That show aired 1955 through 1975 and then was just always...

In syndication afterwards, it seems like. I remember my grandpa would watch it like every day on TV. I've never seen Gunsmoke. I really don't know anything about it. I mean, all I know, I don't think I ever actively watched it because, I mean, I was a kid. I wasn't interested in Gunsmoke so much. But it was on and he was like a cowboy sheriff or whatnot. He's like, let me guess, is he the new sheriff who comes into a lawless town and has to fix everything?

I guess, but it's, I mean, the show ran for like 20 years. So you'd think he'd get into a pattern there after a while. Eventually the people would be like, you've had 15 years to fix this town and it's still lawless. Yeah. Like, does he have to run for reelection? How does it work? I don't know. Gunsmoke fans, let us know.

But it wasn't just westerns for James Arnaz. He was also in 1954's Them, a giant bug movie. Have you seen this one? Actually, shame to say, no, I have not. I know it's a classic. The other interesting thing about James Arnaz is that he was born James King Holmes.

Arness, and he was the older brother of a guy by the name of Peter Dusler Arness, who acted under the name Peter Graves, who we just mentioned. Yeah. So this is Peter Graves' brother. So you could have literally had a brother-to-brother conversation about how you learned too late that man is a feeling creature. Yeah. Yeah.

It's interesting, though. I mean, this is often the case with siblings, right? I mean, this is nothing remarkable, but you don't think of James Arnaz and Peter Graves as being, as playing the same sorts of characters. There's like a, there's a ruggedness to James Arnaz, like he's just always going to be that cowboy. And Peter Graves, on the other hand, often played these more, you know, these thoughtful characters, sometimes villainous characters.

But there's like a sternness to both actors. But I don't know. Peter Graves, different type of roles. I can't imagine them ever competing for the same character and it being the same character if either of them played it. What if it had been Peter Graves as the thing from another world? I don't know. I wonder. I don't know if Peter Graves ever played a monster. He might have early in his career. I'd have to go through his filmography.

I'm Jason Alexander and I'm Peter Tilden and together on the really no really podcast our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor we got the answer will space junk block your cell signal the astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer we talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth plus is

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Now, another, going back to team science, there's one guy that stood out to me. I was just going to skip over all the rest of them, but there's a character by the name of Dr. Stern. Did he stand out to you, Joe? I don't remember which one he was. Oh, wait, was he one of the scientists who had black hair? He was, no, well, he might have had black hair. He was tallish. Okay.

Okay. And had kind of like a subdued, but seemed like thoughtful delivery. It had some good lines here and there. Played by this actor by the name of Edward Franz. He lived 1902 through 1983. Again, not a main character, but his screen presence impressed me. So I thought I'd include him here. A stern-faced character actor whose many credits include The Ten Commandments,

Um, he was in Atari, uh, Johnny got his gun and also he was in Twilight Zone, the movie. So the sequence with the, you know, about the monster on the wing of the plane was John Lithgow. Uh, uh, Edward Franz plays, uh, the old man on the flight. Hmm. Okay. Now I just looked him up. I do remember him, but I, uh, don't remember what he did in the movie. Uh, you know, he's basically some of the, in just in some of the science conversations, he kind of was, uh,

a voice of reason and skepticism. I kind of, I liked his presence there. Okay. Yeah. Again, the dialogue is, is pretty tight in, in this, in this movie. And, and even like bit characters like, like him, he has a chance to shine. Okay. One more actor I want to include, and that's the character, the character Dr. Voorhees was played by this guy, Paul Freese, who lived 1920 through 1986. And I, I'm including him because he had a long career as a voice actor. So yeah,

He played a radio reporter in War of the Worlds. He did several voices in the animated The Last Unicorn. Other credits include The Wind in the Willows, the animated version of The Return of the King and The Hobbit, and also just various Rankin and Bass holiday specials. And then finally, we'll get to the music here. The music was provided by Dimitri Tyomkin, who lived 1894 through 1979, and

The music in this film is largely what you'd expect from the time period, but this Russian-born composer was a major name during this era. He earned 22 Academy Award nominations and won four Oscars. And most notably for this film, again, it's very standard and a lot of brass in it, but you do hear the theremin from time to time to provide a little bit of sci-fi intrigue.

And I've seen this score singled out as one of the works that helped cement the electronic musical instruments place in sci-fi cinema. The other big one was 1951's The Day the Earth Stood Still, scored by Bernard Herrmann. Oh, so that's interesting. I didn't realize that these two movies came out the same year, The Thing from Another World and The Day the Earth Stood Still. And I think it would also be interesting to kind of compare them. I haven't seen...

The Day the Earth Stood Still nearly as recently, but I would say that The Thing from Another World is probably a much better movie just on a technical level in terms of how effective and scary the shots and the horror and everything is in it.

But I think The Day the Earth Stood Still is probably a more thematically interesting movie. Yeah, I think they're both examples of sort of the high-minded early 1950s sci-fi film. And this was in an era where I...

The genre films of this caliber were not generally elevated to that level. They certainly weren't getting nominated for Academy Awards and so forth. But you know what should have been nominated for an Academy Award is the opening title of The Thing from Another World. Oh, goodness, yes. Absolutely ballistic. Best opening title I've ever seen, probably.

Of course it inspired I think some things that came afterward But it's the one where it starts with the black screen And then you just see the word Thing lettered in a large Jagged script that burns Through a black sheet like it's been

like, like spelled in kerosene and then set ablaze. Absolutely amazing. And I love it. And I imagine Carpenter loved it as well because they didn't, they basically recreate the same title card for that. I think so. Yeah. That sounds burning through the screen. Yeah. It's beautiful. I have no idea how they did it. It's beautiful though. There's another thing before we wrap up that I wanted to talk about with this movie, which is that it has a interesting dialogue. So this film has, uh,

What you might call naturalistic dialogue or overlapping dialogue. So maybe there are other examples of movies like this from the time, but if so, I'm not really aware of them. I think filmmaking conventions of the early 50s were...

would have overwhelmingly favored the clear, crisp delivery of stage drama conventions where, you know, one character speaks at a time and you can hear every word they say because the lines are important. They're meant to develop the character or move the plot along. But this movie is transgressive.

trending toward a more naturalistic and atmospheric approach to dialogue where characters sometimes mumble, sometimes talk over each other at the same time. More like you'd get in later movies, like Robert Altman movies, where a lot of the dialogue is, it's clear that you're not supposed to hear and take in every single word, but get a mood or get an atmosphere from the chatter of the characters as they go about their business. Yeah.

Yeah. Like sometimes they're just incomplete thoughts. Like one character is talking about something, they're interrupted or yeah, there's crosstalk and you don't, you don't always make out what some of the characters are saying it. Uh, so it feels, yeah, it has this very natural feel to it. Uh, and also just moves right along. It's like, it's a snap, it's snappy dialogue, you know, it, uh, uh,

It keeps you engaged and it feels relatively real, though, of course, at the same time, it's 1951 real. So, you know, there's going to be a bit of like dames and cigarettes, you know, that sort of thing going on. Another aspect of the dialogue that instantly reminded me, there's one shot in particular of this.

there's a nice walk and talk sequence. Again, we have these long hallways between these rooms in this snowy base. And we got some scenes where like scientists or military men walking down the hallway and the cameras in front of them filming them talk to each other. And of course, this just becomes a staple, especially of like police procedurals and shows like The West Wing. And here it is, President and Thing from Another World. What's that guy who does the, Aaron Sorkin loves the walk and talk. Yeah.

Which I frankly, personally often find irritating. Imagine if Aaron Sorkin did a remake of The Thing. I think I would hate that. All walk and talk. You never even see the monster. I bet it would have a great cast though. Yeah.

Okay, Rob, I know we can't finish without talking about there are a number of scenes in this that are so good, but one that just had my jaw on the floor was the fire attack scene. Oh my God. This scene is so solid and, and terrifying. Uh,

Like afterwards, I was just like... I think I audibly said something like, oh, crap. Like that sequence was... It was literally on fire because it's a scene where the thing busts into a room and they throw some kerosene at it and then they throw some fire at him. They figured out that it's invulnerable to bullets. Yeah, yeah. Shooting it didn't work earlier. So they're using fire against it and it's just...

It's rampaging and it's on fire. Like from an effect standpoint, terrifying, you know, because it's like there's all this visible real fire on the set. There are multiple shots of somebody doing a man on fire stunt. And then within the context of the film, yeah, it's just this intense feeling of,

danger, both the environmental danger of where they are in the world, but also the fact that now things are increasingly on fire and there's a rampaging blood-drinking alien that's also on fire. Tremendous. Yeah, and the fact that something about that

Scene and the way that it's scary heightens something that's a sort of progressive tension throughout the plot, which is that the characters are having to make strategic decisions really fast. You know, they're not given time to like compile everything they know and try and figure out what's going on.

I recalled that the setup to that scene is just like, we think he's attacking the door. Okay. What are we going to do? You know, the bullets don't work. What if we try fire? And so they just like arrange this fire trap for it in real time. Pretty much. It happens really fast. Um,

And then it all goes to hell and it becomes clear that you can't kill this thing with fire or at least maybe you can hurt it with fire. But it like it's not like us. Each of its cells is kind of independent. So you might be able to burn its outer layer, but it's ultimately going to be OK.

Yeah, yeah. And then afterwards, they've lost an entire room of the facility and they have finite resources there, which I thought was also a great touch. You know, it's an old standby, but I got to admit, I'm really a sucker for setting a trap for the monster. That's just a kind of set piece that I always enjoy. Yeah, and that's where we wind up towards the end here. They develop a...

They explain how it's going to work. And so, you know, you know that this is always the case. If a trap is fully explained, something is going to go wrong. Yeah. Or if a plan is fully explained, something is going to go wrong. So, yeah, it doesn't quite go off as they're planning it to. But it also is not doesn't go off the rails disastrously.

I don't think that would have been allowed in 1951. No, I guess not. No, you couldn't. I don't know. At the time, could you have an ending like you have in Carpenter's thing? I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. How would audiences have reacted to that? I don't know the answer to this question. Listeners write in. Are there examples you can think of of sci-fi or genre movies from, say, the 50s?

with a utterly bleak ending just ending where the alien wins and earth loses i mean the main example that comes to mind instantly and perhaps part of it's because we already talked about it is the 56 um body snatchers film like at the end of that film it's like we have one sane man left and everyone thinks he is insane and i guess you could also look to various like short form uh

Twilight Zone. Twilight Zone type stuff where, yeah, you'll definitely have the downer ending and all. But yeah, this one leaves things on a positive note. Humans were tested and they were up to the test. It's easier to end on a downer note, I think, after like a sub 30 minute story than it is to end on a downer note after a 90 minute story.

You know, you've got more investment on a feature length. And so people are going to feel really mad if you get a downer ending at the end of a movie. Yeah, you got to send them home happy. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's what this film does. I was happy with the film after we were done here. It has some terrific sequences, great dialogue, a lot of interesting things about it. So, you know, older films like this are not everybody's cup of tea, but I wouldn't, if you're at all tempted, I encourage you to give The Thing from Another World a chance. I'm

I'm still thinking about this thing I just talked about. Wait a minute. This might be developing into a broader theory. Rob, would you generally agree that when it comes to horror literature, it's way more common to have horror short stories where the monster or the evil entity wins in the end, but horror novels where the hero wins in the end? Yeah. Yeah. I would say by and large, that's the case. You know, I've seen, I've certainly seen examples where

longer works that have dark endings, those dark endings are not always that well received, even if the audience tends to be into darker, grittier stuff. You know, I've seen that time and again. So I think that probably holds true. And I don't know how much of that is, yeah, investment in a longer work or sort of expectations of a longer work.

Or also just like effective storytelling. If you stick with it that long, like you're rooting for the good guys or whoever the protagonist happened to be. Like you want them to overcome the adversary. And generally, I guess in those longer works, you tend to have a protagonist that you're genuinely rooting for.

and not like in short fiction you sometimes have you know very problematic characters and you know something terrible is going to happen to them basically the Tales from the Crypt model short stories bad people bad endings yeah yeah Tales from the Crypt exactly it's short enough that you don't need to like anybody yeah like I hate everybody in this I know something bad is going to happen I'm probably going to celebrate it when it does and it's a short ride to get there

Well, I guess we got kind of sidetracked there, but I'll come back to my original recommendation. I say Thing from Another World. Yeah, this one's really, really good horror filmmaking, especially for 1951. Absolutely. And if you would like to see this film, you're in luck because it, like I think our last one that we covered, is widely available. You can easily pick up a DVD or Blu-ray of it. You can also digitally rent or buy

at pretty much any place you digitally buy or rent films. Watch the skies. I know that there was also a colorized version of this film. I can't imagine watching it colorized again

I feel like the black and white is essential. Yeah, yeah. All right, we're going to go ahead and wrap it up there. But hey, if you would like to listen to other episodes of Weird House Cinema, you'll find it every Friday in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast feed. We have core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We have listener mail on Mondays, Artifact on Wednesday, and a rerun on the weekends. And hey, keep watching the skies out there.

If you've got a sky, keep watching it. But what would that have done? If you'd seen it, you'd just sit, you'd be like, I see something crash landing. Then you alert the scientist. Then I guess you're like, oh, we got to get all the thermite really quick. Yeah.

That is one more thing. It's this terrible time in the episode to remember it, but we have some great sequences too of plotting where the character is, trying to track it with like a Geiger counter. Oh yeah. Inside an enclosed space. Very reminiscent of films to come much later, like Alien and Aliens. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, totally. So yeah, this film feels ahead of its time in a number of ways. Okay, we got to stop gushing about the thing. Okay, okay. Yeah, so what were we saying? Oh yeah, we're ending the episode. All right, well anyway, thanks as always to our wonderful audio producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com.

Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.