I recently added a bunch of black and white movies to my Kanopy watchlist, and a lot of them are super short.
Take the 76-minute The Thing From Another World, which seems like required viewing for anyone who likes John Carpenter's The Thing. And since most people don't like Carpenter's film, they love it, it seems like required viewing for everyone.
Well, The Thing From Another World may have value for providing us the raw materials for Carpenter's movie. But I'm not sure if it has any other value.
There are a lot of angles of attack on this film, but I'll start with this one:
I'm not sure I would have thrown this movie on if I'd seen this poster first.
Now I get it, this is 1951. They didn't have the great practical effects or the not-so-great CGI effects to make an alien creature look really good. In a minute I'm going to talk about a movie where the alien creature is biologically indistinguishable from a human being.
But in what exact way is this a thing?
Don't you describe something as a "thing" when it so deviates from your ordinary vocabulary that the only word you can think of to describe it is a word that contains no descriptive qualities whatsoever? Example: "What is this ... this ... this ... THING?"
When the "thing" in questions has two arms, two legs, a head, a torso, and is only a little bit taller than a regular man, it's more of a "man" than a "thing." But The Man from Another World just doesn't sound quite as ... repulsive.
I will say that I got a small chill from the creature the first time it was introduced to me in its two primary forms: once in a frozen block of ice, and once awake and creating havoc.
Any other time it was on the screen, it was just silly.
And oh so not menacing. The thing basically goes "grrrr!" and then just stands there blinking for long periods of time so that way too many characters can engage in way too lengthy discussions about how to stop it.
Let's get to the "way too many characters" part, and of course I have to use Carpenter's film as a point of contrast. In 1982's The Thing, if memory serves, there are maybe eight to ten characters in total, fewer and fewer as they get picked off and/or assimilated by the creature. In this film, there are no less than 27 people walking around in large groups within the Arctic station where they're all headquartered. Among them, absurdly, is a newspaper reporter, who dresses in a suit and tie even though he's in one of the most extreme environments on the face of the planet.
These 27 people shuffle around and argue about whether to kill the creature or study it for science, and there was a whole digression that I didn't quite follow about how the creature's blood could make flowers grow more quickly. I may not have been fully paying attention at that point because I had already sort of written the movie off, waiting for "the good stuff" -- which was sorely disappointing as well.
And let's get to the direction by Christian Nyby because that factors into the failure of this movie. Not only are these performances wooden -- it's just one actor after another waiting for their turn to talk -- but the scenes are directed with a discordant approach that involves characters talking over each other and cutting each other off. I'm not talking about the good kind of talking over, favored by someone like Robert Altman. This is actors stepping on each other's dialogue and no one knowing that they should do another take rather stick with the garbled mess they just filmed.
You might be able to guess that the military man and the scientist butt heads, the military man wanting to kill the alien and the scientist wanting to communicate with it. The scientist is right, right? Not in this film, where the scientist is made out to be a megalomaniac who is needlessly putting innocent people in harm's way while twirling his moustache (he actually does have a moustache). The events of the film prove that the military was right and that we need to "Watch the skies!"
It was 1951, but even in 1951 it didn't have to be this way.
That year also saw the release of what was my dad's favorite when he was a kid, Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still. Not only was that the same year, but it had the same style pulpy title that could have appeared on the cover of a magazine called Tales of Interest! if it were The Simpsons. (Actually, googling it now I see I don't have that quite right -- it was Anthology of Interest on Futurama. But I think you get the idea.)
But Day returns quite a different verdict about its human-looking alien visitor named Klaatu, and his ominous robot Gort. Sure, Klaatu and Gort have the technology and the ability to turn Earth into a barren wasteland, but they don't have the will. That's not why they are there. In fact, they are there to quell Earth's own violent tendencies -- as exemplified by people like the military man in The Thing From Another World.
I suppose The Day the Earth Stood Still is a bit quaint by modern standards, as it barely has anything resembling an action scene. There's a lot of talking and there's a middle passage of the film where Klaatu is visiting sites around Washington D.C. with a little boy, which could be mistaken for the corniness of someone like Frank Capra at his most Capra-esque.
But by being thoughtful and well made, and having a message that genuinely tries to promote understanding and to squelch aggression, my goodness is it a more useful piece of art. I suppose they were wise (ha ha) to select Wise to direct the original Star Trek movie, since this film has the same non-interventionist politics of the Starship Enterprise.
The Thing From Another World has a screaming creature and bullets and guns and torn alien limbs and attempts to both burn and electrocute the alien, and it doesn't have a single bit of nuance on its mind.
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