After a while with all trend setting films, imitation and time start to take it's toll. The Thing From Another World is starting to look a little ragged 60 years later.
Howard Hawk's shot at updating the old Universal monster movie by assembling a good script and a top group of technical professionals still looks pretty good in a lot of ways. Unfortunately so many other films in the intervening years have ripped off so much from this film, it's diminished a lot of the special qualities of the original. The whole monster on the loose in an isolated setting has been copied by the Alien film series, Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Quatermass Experiment, the Re-Animator, to name only a few that come to mind.
Still, the film is extremely well made. Hawks cleverly cast no stars in this ensemble film, he also used his famous overlapping dialog technique to make them sound like real people. The film is well photographed and edited. The action scenes, particularly the attack of the monster in the base with the air force personnel setting it on fire looks very intense. Someone playing the monster obviously stood there while people threw flaming kerosene on him.
Dimitri Tiomkin's electronic score isn't up to the same level as Bernard Herrmann's work on Day The Earth Stood Still, Tiomkin was too much of a mainstream film composer to get really radical but it's a decent effort. The film also has a lot of humor in it to relieve the tension before the next monster attack, a very clever touch.
A lot of thought and hard work went into making The Thing From Another World, it's a good example of a mainstream Hollywood film that is extremely well made in the somewhat dubious science fiction and horror genres.
87 minutes
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