The Thing From Another World (1951)
TCM, 2:15 p.m.
From its famous opening title sequence — featuring the letters of the title slowly burning through the background and accompanied by Dimitri Tiomkin’s ominous score, which not only established its own story’s eerie ambience very well but also added to the terror in John Carpenter’s Halloween nearly 30 years later when the sequence was featured in a scene — to its final scene, which trails off with an insistent warning to “Keep watching the skies,” this 1951 Howard Hawks production is a sci-fi/horror classic.
That is despite the fact that it is not as close to its original source material, the novella “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, as Carpenter’s superb 1982 remake, simply titled The Thing, was. Although the titular threat is not a shapeshifter here, it is still memorably and menacingly portrayed by James Arness in an early, pre-fame role. Director Christian Nyby (with Hawks contributing, to a degree; the realistic, fast-paced and overlapping dialogue heard in this movie is certainly one of his trademarks) effectively creates suspense with the claustrophobic conditions surrounding the group of military and scientific minds trapped with the Thing at an Arctic base (even as they are also at odds with each other on how to deal with the situation), and there are some moments that still have the ability to surprise viewers. The cast works well together and is led by Kenneth Tobey, who would become familiar as a similar military character type in other ‘50s sci-fi classics like The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955).