This is a 1951 black & white science fiction movie set in the Arctic, and it’s one of the most famous of the 1950s science fiction films. (This original version has been eclipsed over the decades by a 1982 remake directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell, with pulsing music by Ennio Morricone and gruesome special effects that turned off many viewers at the time. But that’s another discussion.)
This version is directed by Christian Nyby with music by Dimitri Tiomkin and a credit to John W. Campbell Jr., who wrote the 1938 novella “Who Goes There?” that the movie is based on. (That story ranks first in my latest weighted poll of science fiction novellas, as shown and discussed on this page.)
The film opens with distributor RKO’s logo, a Eiffel Tower atop a clear, slowly spinning globe, and then the logo, two crossed rifles, of production company Winchester Pictures.
Then we are in the arctic, amidst wind and swirling snow. The location is a base of the Alaska Air Command (according to the Wikipedia entry for the film) and the story opens as a visiting reporter, Scottie, enters the Officer’s Club looking for a story. Men inside play cards. A message come from the local Nobel laureate, Dr. Carrington (whom we later see is a somewhat fussy man with a goatee) that a magnetic disturbance suggests that some large plane has crashed nearby. Men from the Air Command fly — using a transport aircraft with skies on its front wheels — to Carrington’s outpost. (These appear to be live-action shots, not models or special effects.)
There we get a bit of love interest, as was common even among SF films of the time. Captain Henry from the Air Command base discovers that an old flame, Miss Nicholson, is Carrington’s assistant. They exchange banter about their last meeting, which Henry barely remembers, and flirt about whether they might give it another try.
A combined crew from both base and outpost, along with a pack of dogs, fly some 48 miles east, to the location of the anomaly. They find a clear round patch in the ice, with a airplane-like fin sticking out of it. They try blasting it loose with thermite, but that only destroys whatever is under the ice. But then they get another reading and discover a humanoid creature a bit away, as if an alien thrown away from the wreckage, under the ice.
They cut a block of ice holding this creature and carry it back on their plane to Carrington’s base. They put it in a room with a window smashed open to keep it cold, but one of them throws a plugged-in electric blanket over the ice, which thaws it out. By morning, the creature is gone.
Then follows a long sequence in which the everyone but Carrington wants to find and kill the creature, while Carrington wants to study it. Men and dogs are killed. Carrington discovers the creature is vegetable-like, which results in a crack about it being a “carrot.” Despite Carrington’s pleas (near the end the creature simply knocks him aside into a crumple on the floor — Hollywood’s judgment on eggheads and trying to understand), the creature is eventually cornered and destroyed via kerosene and an electric grid inside the station.
The movie ends as the reporter gets a connection to Anchorage, and submits his dramatic report, ending: “Tell the world. Tell this to everybody, wherever they are. Watch the skies everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies!”
That last line was, of course, the title of the Bill Warren book I blogged about on April 1st.
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This is actually a pretty intelligent movie, to a point, that suffers a couple three crucial limitations or flaws. First, if not exactly a flaw, this 1951 film is directed in a manner like many 1940s films, in which all the actors speak their dialogue very quickly, as if they’re in a rush to get somewhere once filming wraps. It was just the style of the ’40s; see e.g. His Girl Friday. This manner gradually disappeared in just the next few years.
Second, the creature at the end is revealed to be just a man in a crude suit (see image above). To make it worse for the movie’s reputation, that actor was James Arness, who went on to have a great career starring in the TV series Gunsmoke for 20 years. This early role came to be rather an embarrassment on his resume.
And third, despite Carrington’s pleas, the creature doesn’t seem to act very intelligently at all. It breaks out of its cell, and cuts their power supply. Nothing about what a real intelligent creature might do, like… try to communicate? It’s primitive science fiction that considers alien life simply as monsters to be destroyed.
And it’s especially ironic since the source material, John W. Campbell, Jr.’ “Who Goes There?”, was much more intelligent and speculative about what the motives of this alien creature might be. Further, the shape-shifting theme of the original story was dropped from this film, and while Carpenter’s 1982 version used the shape-shifting theme gruesomely, both versions dropped Campbell’s mind-reading theme. In both cases, Hollywood dumbed down what was originally a deep, thoughtful, and clever science fiction novella.
