The Thing from Another World
1951
**½
Director: Christian Nyby (Howard Hawks)
Cast: Margaret Sheridan, Kenneth Tobey, Douglas Spencer, Robert O. Cornthwaite, James R. Young, Dewey Martin, Robert Nichols, William Self, Eduard Franz
Military men and scientists working on the North Pole discover a crashed UFO and an alien trapped in a block of ice. When the ice thaws, all hell breaks loose. Or, in this case, a big guy in a cheap monster suit breaks loose. This sympathetic but rather silly film has dated less favourably than the idea-based science fiction of The Day the Earth Stood Still or Forbidden Planet. Here the world is still innocent and there's even time for romance, which is a far cry from John Carpenter's bleak and claustrophobic remake The Thing 30 years later. The screenplay is based on John W. Campbell's novella Who Goes There? and it was allegedly directed by its producer Howard Hawks.
