The Thing from Another World, and a few more movies

THE NEVERENDING
FILM FESTIVAL
#168  [archive]

The Thing from Another World (1951)
Streaming free on Tubi

Six months or so ago, I reviewed the latest remake of The Thing, liked it, and said it was the best film version of the story yet. Claude Reigns, who knows more about movies than I do, thought my take was hyperbolic and dunderheaded, so I've challenged myself to re-watch the other two versions of The Thing, to assess things properly.

This is the first thing, the original, based on John W Campbell Jr's classic short novel, Who Goes There? I hadn't seen the movie in thirty years, and remembered it as serviceable but hokey, but here's the thing: This movie is frozen nitroglycerin, gently shaken, an excellent 1950s science fiction.

At an Army Air Force station near the North Pole, a magnetic disturbance is discovered under the ice. Some officers are sent to investigate, with a scientist and a reporter looking over their shoulders. The clues are assembled, and soon it's decided that what's frozen beneath their feet is a vessel from… somewhere, and as given away in the movie's title, there's something or someone aboard.

Charles Lederer wrote the screenplay, and it's very natural — everyone except the monster talks the way real people talk, with jokes and disagreements. They have different perspectives and personalities, but none of them are nincompoops or particularly profound, and none of them are plot devices. I have rarely seen movies where every conversation seems like what you or I would say, not like the work of a writer — which is, of course, a mark of a great writer.

Lederer also wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, His Girl Friday, Mutiny on the Bounty (1962, the Marlon Brando version), and the original Ocean's Eleven. Dude could write.

Directed by Christian Nyby, this was his first film, and after this he worked almost exclusively in television. His work here is a wonder, and you'll wonder if it's his — for 70 years, insiders have whispered that the film's producer, Howard Hawks, did most of the directing. It certainly smacks of Hawks' style, with rat-a-tat delivery and male bonding and a woman who's tough enough to be accepted by the guys but also, of course, beautiful.

Whoever was calling the shots, Nyby or Hawks, everything works well, and the cast is very much an ensemble, with no character ever really bubbling up to the point where you'd say he's the star of the story.

One of the first lines is, "Cold enough for ya?", and it actually is cold. The outside shots were filmed in Montana's Glacier National Park, and cold-weather interiors were filmed on sets inside an ice storage facility near Hollywood. These actors aren't simply saying it's cold; it really is cold. You can see their breath and feel their goose bumps.

Having a military man in charge of Earth's first contact with unearthly life would worry me, but here everyone's competent and reasonable. The nominal bad guy isn't really all that bad; he's a scientist who wants to try communicating with the space alien, and understandably doesn't want the military men to kill it, even after it's shown to be a danger.

The movie's horror is, well, horrible, as it should be. The space thing is a walking "carrot with brains," oversized and lost on our world, but smart enough to make itself a danger. "No pleasure, no pain, no emotion, no heart," someone says. "Our superior in every way."

The Thing is played by James Arness, later the star of TV's Gunsmoke, though as with any good horror pic, we rarely see the monster up close.

George Fenneman, Groucho's sidekick on You Bet Your Life, has an uncredited but important role. 

Inexplicably, nobody on screen but Arness and Fenneman made much of a ripple in Hollywood, though all of them are better than good.

Can't close this without mentioning the music, which is by Dimitri Tiomkin and is perfect.

Verdict: BIG YES.

In googling to make sure Mr Fenneman's name was spelled correctly, I've learned and am saddened to report that a revival of You Bet Your Life is underway, starring Jay Leno.

♦ ♦ ♦    

Barbarians at the Gate (1993)
Streaming free on YouTube

Based on a book that's based on what happened in the 1980s, this is the idiotic and lunarly-leveraged deal that led to RJR Nabisco's sale to the highest bidder.

It's snappy and fast-paced, moving at about 120 wisecracks an hour — MASH's Larry Gelbert wrote the script — and slowing down only occasionally, for the necessary explanations of leveraged buyouts and venture capitalism and other complexities of corporate evil.

All the jokes are in the characters' snide comments, and many bring chuckles, but in the end this is a high tragedy of high finance.

Events unfold from the perspective of RJR Nabisco CEO F Ross Johnson, played by James Garner. We're supposed to be pulling for him, and of course he's Garner and Garner is always likable. Toward the end, he delivers 2½ fiery 'good guy speeches' worthy of Jimmy Stewart, but the people he's talking to aren't buying his baloney, and neither am I. Johnson is simply another big-money bastard running a giant company. He's not someone anyone should be pulling for, and there's no-one here who is — all of the film's principal characters are assholes.

Certainly, every plot development, every single thing that any of the principles characters do in this film, ought to be illegal. 

It's fun watching, though. Jonathan Pryce, Peter Riegert, Joanna Cassidy, and Fred Thompson co-star.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦ 

Edge of Fury (1978)
Streaming free at DailyMotion

Time for some kung fu!

Bruce Li plays Fang, the driver for a bad guy / drug kingpin, but Fang's not a bad guy himself. So why would the movie's good guy work for a bad guy? Sentimental reasons, it turns out, but I shan't say anything more about that. 

Anyway, when his boss is captured and executed, everybody wants the drugs, and the boss's money and power and wife.

As kung fu movies go, it's not bad but certainly never good, and seems content to define itself as an ordinary genre picture. The MP4 I saw was dubbed in English with a British accent, which is sometimes amusing, more often weird.

"Bruce Li" is, obviously, fake name, one of several actors misspelling his name various ways, who emerged in Hong Kong cinema after the genuine Bruce Lee died.

I'd only seen Li in films where he was playing, basically, Bruce Lee, but here he's not mimicking the real Lee. He's trying to be a chop socky star on his own, and I've read that in this film's Asian release, Li was billed under his real name, Ho Chung Tao.

That's a step in the right direction, but it's not a very big step when the movie is as ordinary as this. If you've seen a few non-Bruce and non-Jackie Chan chop socky movies, well, watching this is watching another.

Verdict: MAYBE.

♦ ♦ ♦    

• Coming attractions •

Brain Donors (1992)

Go West (1925)

Go West (1940)

    • And then •

American Revolution 2 (1969)

Caged Men: Tales from Chicago's SRO Hotels (2017) 

The Dark Crystal (1982)

Delicatessen (1991)

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

District 9 (2009)

Eight Characters in Search of a Sitcom (2003)

The Flipside of Dominick Hide (1980)

Following (1998) 

Freaked (1993)

High-Rise (2016)

Hit! (1973)

Inherent Vice (2014) 

The Invisible Man (1933)

Jurassic Punk (2022)

Last Tango in Paris (1972)

Merrily We Go to Hell (1932)

My Life in Monsters (2015) 

Naked (1993)

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (first season, 2022)

Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1988)

Tunnel Vision (2023) 

12:01 (1993) 

Upstream Color (2013) 

White Lotus (first season, 2021) 

Who Killed Captain Alex (2010)    

7/31/2023  

There are so many good movies out there — old movies, odd or artsy, foreign or forgotten movies, or do-it-yourself movies made just for the joy of making them — that if you only watch whatever's on Netflix or playing at the twenty-plex, you're missing out.

To get beyond the ordinary, I recommend:

Alter
Cineverse
Criterion
CultCinema Classics
DocsVille
Dust
Fandor
Films for Action
Hoopla
IHaveNoTV
IndieFlix
Internet Archive
Kanopy
KinoCult
Kino Lorber
Korean Classic Film
Christopher R Mihm
Mosfilm
Mubi
National Film Board of Canada
New Yorker Screening Room
Damon Packard
Mark Pirro
PizzaFlix
PopcornFlix
Public Domain Movies
RareFilmm
Scarecrow Video
Shudder
ThoughtMaybe
Timeless Classic Movies
VoleFlix
WatchDocumentaries
or your local library.

Some people even access films through shady methods, though of course, that would be wrong.

— — —

 

Illustration by Jeff Meyer. Reviews are spoiler-free, or at least spoiler-warned. Click any image to enlarge. Arguments & recommendations are welcome, but no talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff.

 

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