The THING

1. Film (1951; vt The Thing from Another World). Winchester Pictures/RKO. Dir Christian Nyby (but see below), starring Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, Robert Cornthwaite, Douglas Spencer, James Arness. Screenplay Charles Lederer, based on "Who Goes There?" (1938) by Don A. Stuart (John W. CAMPBELL Jr). 86 mins. B/w.

   TT was by far the most influential of the films that sparked off the sf/ MONSTER-MOVIE boom of the 1950s, and remains one of the most powerful of that decade. The film was actually dir Howard Hawks, who arranged as a favour that Nyby (an editor on previousHawks films) should receive the directing credit. It is full of Hawks's trademarks: fast pace, overlapping dialogue and an ability to elicit relaxed, naturalistic performances from the cast. It describes the discovery of a UFO in the Arctic ice, its retrieval, and the subsequent series of attacks on a military/scientific base by its thawed-out occupant, a humanoid, vegetable ALIEN, searching for blood. Hawks wisely kept the Thing (Arness) off the screen for most of the film; when seen it is disappointing - and not at all like an "intellectual carrot", as it has been described. The best things in TT are the increasing tension (every time a door is opened the audience jumps) and claustrophobia; the gutsy performance by Sheridan as the wisecracking woman who gives as good as she gets, especially in the astonishing bondage scene; and the convincing sense of a nervous group under siege. Typical of adventure films made during the Cold War, there is a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later morality (the scientists who want to communicate with the Thing are seen as fools); the Cold-War feeling is heightened by the famous last line, "Keep watching the skies!"

   PN/JB

2. Film (1982). Turman-Foster/Universal. Dir John CARPENTER, starring Kurt Russell, A. Wilford Brimley, T.K. Carter, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Richard Masur. Screenplay Bill Lancaster, based on the Stuart/Campbell story. 109 mins. Colour.

   Not so much a remake as a return to the original story, this film reinstates Campbell's shapeshifting alien that can kill and duplicate the baseworkers one by one, with all the PARANOIA that that engenders. It was not very successful commercially, and was widely criticized as being merely a string of curiously disgusting special effects (designed by Rob Bottin, an uncredited Stan Winston and others) without any of the subtlety of the Hawks version. But the Hawks version, though vivid, was itself not verysubtle, and Carpenter carries his beleaguered working men much further in extremis emotionally than Hawks would have cared to. Only 2 survive, and either or both may in fact be alien. There is a case for arguing that the Carpenter version goes as far as genre movies normally dare, if notfurther, in questioning not just the nature of humanity under stress but its value. Faced by the alien, the humans themselves become inhuman in every possible way. It is a black, memorable film, and may yet be seen as a classic. The novelization is The Thing * (1982) by Alan Dean FOSTER.

   PN

   See also: CINEMA.