Sunday Cinema: The Thing from Another World (1951)
By John DeNardo |
Sunday, April 5th, 2009 at
12:20 am
Not that we don’t love John Carpenter and Kurt Russell — or decapitated heads with spidery legs — but it seems like a good time to post the original adaptation of John W. Campbell Jr.’s classic story “Who Goes There?” before the third adaptations appears in theaters.
Related posts:
- Sunday Cinema: John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’
- Sunday Cinema: World Builder
- Sunday Cinema: A Boy and His Dog
- Sunday Cinema: The Lathe of Heaven (1980)
- Sunday Cinema: The Last Woman On Earth (1960)
Filed under: Movies
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I LOVE this movie. I bought the VHS and then DVD. Dewey Martin – Squee! Kenneth Tobery – Squee! Just a wonderful movie — scifi, comedy, witty, scary, romantic…sigh. It was the first scifi movie I ever saw in the theaters. My dad took me — I was 7. One of the few movies I saw with my father (my parents were divorced when I was 3). I started reading scifi after I saw this movie. My first scifi fi book, Robert Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo.
I, too, love this film and consider it one of the best SF films of the 50s. Best thing about it was the claustrophic nature of the film. And, to think that the entire film is available online whenever we want to watch it. Incredible.
I love the scene where they nail the door close with planks but it opens outwards so the creature just opens it and walks in.
That scene is at around 1:19:00.
Also good is the scene at around 1:10 where they throw a bucket of kerosine over the monster and the woman behind him.
Howard Hawks rules. King of fast-paced, overlapping dialog and snappy banter! His Girl Friday, anyone? (The only one coming close today is Joss Whedon.) I love how characters on different parts of the screen don’t always pay attention to the main dialog, say things you can’t always hear and have their own business going on at the same time. These are people with lives beyond what is happening at the moment. They have dimension.
Oh, my, bondage!
I watched the movie for the first time tonight, and I was laughing myself silly for most of it!
One glaring mistake I noted was that this movie was set in the North Pole, where night lasts for the entire winter and daylight the entire summer.
Unfortunately, somebody forgot to tell the movie makers, who filmed day and night sequences! My, the months just fly by when you’re being monstered by a giant carrot!
I also enjoyed the part where one of the actors said of the popsical-alien “Some creatures here on earth come back to life after they die.” Zombies and vampires, presumably! He may have meant “some creatures, after being frozen, go into a type of hibernation, but revive after being thawed”. But I was laughing too hard to translate it that far until after the credits rolled.
It was a hoot of a picture, but I don’t think it was supposed to be funny when it was made. Still, gave me a good laugh!
Alison