1951 science fiction, dir. Christian Nyby, Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan:
IMDb /
allmovie. So the
arctic scientists find an alien spaceship in the ice…
This is officially an adaptation of Who Goes There?. They paid
Campbell and everything. But while it starts off close enough, with
the crash site (one of my favourite shots ever, the flat circle of ice
and the track leading to it)
and the loss of the spacecraft and the ice-block holding the survivor,
the meat of the film diverges sharply: no shapeshifter here, just a
nigh-invulnerable creature that lives on blood.
That said, this is a groundbreaking film – beating out The Day The
Earth Stood Still by a few months to be, I think, the first filmic
depiction of an alien landing on Earth, and very much setting the mood
for 1950s alien-invasion paranoia in which the military is suspicious
and right, and the scientists are welcoming and wrong.
But unlike many of the imitators, there's room for at least a little
subtlety here: Scotty the reporter is an intellectual more than he's a
military man, but he's no wimp, he was at "El Alamein, and
Bougainville, and Okinawa". Meanwhile Carrington, oh dear, is not only
shown to be wrong in every single thing he does (except when he quite
reasonably objects to the military taking over the civilian station
with no more legal justification than "we have guns and you don't"),
he wears a heavy coat and a furry hat, he's clearly one of those
non-Manly repressed people rather than immediately indulging every
emotion he feels, and most of his assistants have foreign accents.
Captain Hendry, on the other hand, is the perfect CO, not only always
right in his decisions but willing to take advice from people who know
more about a specific subject than he does, And "Nikki" Nicholson is
about as strong as female characters got in 1951 – not to mention that
she and Hendry clearly have non-marital intentions towards each other.
(Many people found it hard to take the Production Code seriously after
everyone knew about the reality of WWII, but it got revised and
strengthened later in the year.)
At least as far as film is concerned, this is the origin of the alien
invasion story, the origin of the base under siege, and certainly the
prototype for "aliens are something like Commies". (It could even have
used the actual novella to riff on "they look just like us", but that
would have to wait for Invasion of the Body Snatchers a few years
later.) Yes, James Arness's monster suit clearly owes a lot to
Frankenstein's Monster, but where this film fails for a modern viewer
it's because the same things have been done since and better, not
because things here are being done badly.
As usual if you want more of my witterings you should listen to
Ribbon of Memes.
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