Things On My Mind

In movies, if not history, the intruding presence of white men among native cultures inevitably leads to conflict and often disaster. Director Philip Kaufman’s "The White Dawn" (1974) effectively, if not unsubtly, dramatized the unfortunate impact a trio of shipwrecked New England whalers adopted as "dog-children" by sympathetic Inuit have on their hosts.


In the same vein, if not the same geographical realm - but still snowbound and remote - 1975’s "The Man Who Would Be King" comes to mind. Based on a story by Rudyard Kipling (portrayed in the film by Christopher Plummer) this long-planned labor of love by director John Huston (originally intended for Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart) cast Sean Connery and Michael Caine (above) as British soldiers in India who go AWOL to trek through blizzards and avalanches to establish themselves as immortal monarchs in Kafiristan (part of modern-day Afghanistan) with tragic results.

It was the snowy altitudes of the Himalayas in Nepal and Tibet that gave rise to tales of the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman. Similar to alleged sightings of Bigfoot or Sasquatch in North America, the Abominable Snowman was described as a towering, apelike creature. Accounts of Yeti were first popularized in Western publications in the 19th century, when British naturalist Brian Hodgson reportedly saw a tall, bipedal creature with long, dark hair, which he assumed was an orangutan.

The Yeti had long been a part of pre-Buddhist beliefs among the Himalayan people. Known as "Glacier Beings," these simian "wild men" carried large stones as weapons and made a whistling sound.

In 1957, Hammer Film Productions, the British studio noted for revitalizing the horror franchise of "Frankenstein" and "Dracula" pictures in a series of colorfully bloody and teasingly erotic remakes, presented "The Abominable Snowman," starring the unflappable Peter Cushing (Hammer’s go-to portrayer of both monster-maker Frankenstein and vampire-hunter Van Helsing) as a botanist who hooks up with an American expedition to search the snowy heights of the Himalayas for the legendary Yeti. Cushing (below) earned the nickname "Props" on the set for throwing his costars off by unexpectedly pulling unscripted props from his pockets.

The reserved reverence Cushing’s scientist harbors for the reticent creatures (who are, perhaps, biding their time in hiding to inherit the earth), is played effectively against the brash showmanship of the American explorer, ironically named Tom Friend and memorably played, as if channeling the spirit of P.T. Barnum, by Forrest Tucker (below), an under-appreciated actor most familiar to TV viewers as the bombastic Sgt. O’Rourke in the late 1960s comedy series "F Troop."

Director Val Guest, who made the first two films in the popular "Quatermass" science-fiction franchise in the mid-1950s, "The Quatermass Xperiment" (shown in the U.S. as "The Creeping Unknown") and "Quatermass 2" (aka "Enemy from Space"), seamlessly blends studio footage of the cast with location filming in the mountains of the French Pyrenees, where doubles subbed for the principal actors. Forrest Tucker would later boast of the difficulties he had to endure in the harsh conditions of the production, despite never having to set foot outside of a soundstage!

The motion picture features an ornately designed depiction of a mountainside Tibetan monastery which becomes as much of an unforgettable "character" in the film as the human participants. (The Tibetan monks were actually waiters the director enlisted from London’s Chinese restaurants.)

Trusting the audience’s imagination, Guest steadfastly determined that the Yeti should be kept offscreen as much as possible, revealing only glimpses of hands, arms and silhouettes, until the climactic scene, when Cushing comes face to face with one of the beings. Guest cast an actor named Fred Johnson to play the creature in close-up because the director was convinced he had "eyes of worldly understanding," conveying the true benign nature of the Yeti.


Val Guest was a filmmaker who believed that motion pictures should move, so "The Abominable Snowman" clips along at a brisk pace, featuring a prowling camera, overlapping dialogue and handheld photography. Unfortunately, the result was a box office disappointment, which the director blamed on the intelligence of the script. "It was too subtle," Guest said, "and I also think it had too much to say."


On a lighter note, a Yeti nicknamed "Bumble" played a significant role in the enduring Yuletide TV classic "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," first telecast in 1964. Decades later, thanks to bargain-basement CGI nerds, the creature has become a ravenous, human-hungry antagonist in a number of SyFy Channel thrillers, including "Yeti: Curse of the Snow Demon" and "Rage of the Yeti."

Val Guest could never understand why U.S. distributors felt compelled to qualify his film with the title "The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas," which brings us in the moviehouse, in a convoluted segue, to the 1951 production of "The Thing from Another World." The script was based on a mothballed story, "Who Goes There?" by Don A. Stuart, a pseudonym for John W. Campbell Jr., originally published in 1938 in the pulp magazine "Astounding Science Fiction" (for which Campbell was the editor). The plot of the novella, interestingly conveyed mainly through dialogue, is sparked by the discovery at an Antarctic research station of the frozen remains of a 20-million-year-old alien.

By 1951, the film’s screenplay became a response to post-atomic bomb skepticism, even negativism, toward scientists - personified in this movie by smug scientists in turtlenecks with non-American accents - who meddle with things best left untouched. Roger Ebert noted, "In the 1950s…movies were read as allegories of the communist menace: Ordinary Americans were infested with Marxism…a manifestation of an alien ideology."

In the film - which moves the action from the Antarctic to the Arctic and features location photography in Montana’s Glacier National Park, with convincingly frosty interiors shot in a Los Angeles cold storage facility - the "Thing," as portrayed by a towering six-foot seven-inch James Arness, four years before television stardom in "Gunsmoke," is a humanoid monster, impervious to bullets and hungry for human blood, with the cellular structure of a mutant vegetable (one character describes it as a "super-carrot").

On film, Christian Nyby is credited as the director. Nyby started his career as a film editor in the 1940s and worked on four movies with director Howard Hawks, including "Red River," which earned Nyby an Oscar nomination. Hawks produced "The Thing from Another World," and there has always been a question of how much influence he had on the directing of the picture. John Stanley, author of Creature Features, noted, "It is generally known that producer Howard Hawks was on the set as guiding benefactor."

The film is without a doubt influenced by Hawks’ style of manipulating an ensemble cast with snappy, overlapping dialogue. The screenplay was written by Charles Lederer, who, along with contemporaries Ben Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz, was a major contributor to screwball comedies of the 1940s, including "His Girl Friday," "Monkey Business" (the one with Cary Grant, not the Marx Brothers) and "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" for director Hawks.

According to the editors of The Movie Guide, actress Margaret Sheridan, as the ex-girlfriend of Air Force Captain Kenneth Tobey, who coincidentally happens to be the tirelessly coffee-fetching secretary for the lead Arctic scientist, "is a tough woman in the Hawksian mold, and the romantic banter between her and Tobey is a joy to watch." In their opinion. Frankly, it is that trademark Hawksian banter, fast-paced and lighthearted - not just between the two leads but also among the gung-ho Yankee G.I.’s at the remote outpost - that works against the terror inherent in the situation. Nowhere is this more painfully obvious than in the presence of the expedition’s journalist, Scotty, a bald-headed nuisance whose endless stream of wisecracks ("I’m not going to stick my neck out and say that you’re stuffed absolutely clean-full of wild blueberry muffins…") make him a tiresome smartass who, unfortunately, does not get killed before the last reel but lives to deliver the film’s signature line: "Watch the skies," which became the working title for Steven Spielberg’s "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

"The Thing from Another World" established star Kenneth Tobey as the go-to monster-fighting protagonist of the 1950s, and he subsequently took on the fictional prehistoric "Rhedosaurus" in "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (1953) and the gigantic octopus in "It Came from Beneath the Sea," both featuring fantastic creatures brought to life by stop-motion animation wizard Ray Harryhausen. (Because of budget onstraints, the giant cephalopod in the latter was reduced from eight to six tentacles.)

One of "The Thing from Another World’s" most memorable achievements was the use of the early electronic musical instrument, the theremin, to provide the film’s chilling theme by Dimitri Tiomkin, a film composer best known for more conventional scores for films like "High Noon," "Rio Bravo," "The Alamo" and "The Guns of Navarone." (The theremin was also effectively utilized by composer Bernard Herrmann in his score for 1951’s "The Day the Earth Stood Still.")

Three decades later, when director John Carpenter (who burst upon the horror scene with the breakout hit film "Halloween" in 1978) remade "The Thing," the script was written by Bill Lancaster, the son of Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster who had previously scripted the popular comedy "The Bad News Bears."

The second of five children, Bill Lancaster was a husky, energetic toddler, described by his father as an "out-and-out athlete, strong as any child of his age I’ve ever seen." The proud papa looked forward to a future of sharing his love of physical sports with his son. While filming "Jim Thorpe - All-American" (1951), the movie star learned that Bill, just days shy of his third birthday, contracted polio, an affliction that would cause him to limp for the rest of his life.

Bill attempted to forge a sports link with his father by playing PONY league baseball. Burt coached, Bill was the catcher, a position requiring little base-running; after reaching first base, he would be replaced by a teammate. Burt would brag about his son, "He hits like a mule."

Joel Douglas, a son of Burt Lancaster’s friend and frequent costar Kirk Douglas, would recall, "The biggest thing that Billy and I used to talk about is to have your father strictly doing something with you for you…Bill and I used to fantasize that our dads were carpenters or plumbers where they knew we loved them for them and not because they were superstars."

In 1965, at the age of 17, Bill Lancaster eloped with 16-year-old Kippie Kovacs, daughter of the late comedian Ernie Kovacs, a Tijuana marriage viewed by some family insiders as an act of rebellion against this father. After the birth of Burt’s first and only grandchild, Bill dropped out of high school with hopes of becoming an actor.

By 1974, Burt Lancaster’s presence as major Hollywood force had diminished when he co-directed and starred in "The Midnight Man," a turgid murder mystery better suited for a made-for-television flick than the big screen. The old man threw his kid a bone with a supporting role as a shaggy hippie (pictured in the upper right corner of the poster below).


In the words of Burt Lancaster biographer Kate Buford, Bill continued his "desultory acting career" with a small part as the younger interpretation of his father’s starring role in the miniseries "Moses the Lawgiver." That same year, Bill Lancaster sold his screenplay for "The Bad News Bears." Writer Buford called Bill’s script "a transposition of his own childhood experience as the handicapped kid on a baseball team coached by his father." Joel Douglas said, " ‘Bad News Bears’ was the story of Bill’s growing up. He was Tatum O’Neal, the oddball on the team looking for a break." According to Douglas, "Billy never really got the recognition from his dad - and that's what we all do it for."

After writing the screenplay for "The Thing," which seemed to reflect author Buford’s assessment of him as "an intelligent, black-humor funnyman," Bill Lancaster (above) withdrew from what Buford called "the fray," drinking in excess to the point of blackouts. Shortly before his death from a heart attack at the age of 49 in 1997 (less than three years after the death of his father), he told childhood friend Joel Douglas, "I’m NIB - Not In the Business."

One can only wonder what personal demons Bill was trying to work out in his script for "The Thing." In one scene depicting the incarceration of an expedition member considered a threat to the others, Lancaster included the subtle image of a hangman’s noose in the background of the isolated shed’s interior.

Lancaster wanted to return to the claustrophobic atmosphere of the 1938 novella. The original story, faithfully recreated by director John Carpenter, is a stark study of paranoia among a group of individuals who have to work with each other in an isolated environment while contending with the ominpresence of a shape-shifting entity, in contrast to the Howard Hawks version, which slathers thick layers of teamwork amidst tough professionals who can handle any crisis if they stick together and crack wise together to battle a man-in-a-monster-suit. Hawks’ red-blooded masculine comrades function as a unified team, with no single character given much screen time alone.

The film’s bone-chilling authenticity relied heavily on location photography in British Columbia and the Tongas National Forest in Alaska (satisfactorily substituting for Antarctica). In an ensemble cast including Kurt Russell (above), Wilford Brimley, Keith David, Donald Moffat, Richard Masur and Richard Dysart, actor Joel Polis (later familiar to TV viewers as Gary, the owner of rival bar Olde Towne Tavern in "Cheers"), whose first film role this was, remembered, "You had sixty little boys with helicopters and flamethrowers and guns and a monster and we’re up at the Arctic…It was a gas, it was like playing cops and robbers when you’re a kid."

Years before computer-generated special effects, "The Thing" showcased a revolutionary communion of puppetry and animatronics, ushered in by 22-year-old Rob Bottin. Born in 1959, Bottin was a horror film fan since childhood. He was lucky enough to work as a protégé of special effects makeup artist Rick Baker, a seven-time Oscar-winner who received the Academy’s first Best Makeup award for "An American Werewolf in London." Bottin’s makeup was featured in the memorable cantina scene in 1977’s "Star Wars: A New Hope" (with Bottin himself as the tallest player in the cantina band). His big break on his own came in 1981 with "The Howling," an intelligently crafted goof on werewolf legends, which not only beat his mentor Rick Baker’s "An American Werewolf in London" to the theaters by five months but boasted - in our humble moviehouse opinion - far superior human-into-wolf transformations. Bottin was nominated for an Oscar for "Legend" (1985) and shared a special achievement Academy Award for his work on "Total Recall" (1990).

Bottin (above) toiled on "The Thing" seven days a week and late into the night for over a year. He would gleefully recall how John Carpenter "actually did give me a great opportunity to say, ‘Hey, kid, go nuts!’" Legendary special effects makeup guru Stan Winston ("The Terminator," "Aliens") was called upon by an exhausted Bottin to graciously provide the disturbing depiction of the dog-Thing.

John Stanley, author of Creature Features, proclaimed, "Rob Bottin and a team of tricksters create remarkably grisly…effects…perhaps the most gruesome ever captured on film…The stuff of our worst nightmares…as a special effects classic this is the greatest."

"Designer Rob Bottin’s work is novel and unforgettable," Time magazine’s Richard Schickel noted, "but since it exists in a near vacuum emotionally, it becomes too domineering and something of an exercise in abstract art." Roger Ebert praised the film’s special effects, calling them "among the most elaborate, nauseating, and horrifying sights yet achieved by Hollywood’s new generation of visual magicians" and called the result "a great barf-bag movie."

The film was initially a box-office and critical disappointment, due in part to its ambiguous ending (plus the fact that the movie, steeped in gore and fear, was released on the heels of Steven Spielberg’s syrupy, sunshiney fable of a benevolent alien, "E.T."). The filmmakers were coerced by studio suits to shoot a happy ending in which Kurt Russell’s character emerges as untainted by alien possession, but director Carpenter and Russell insisted on the nihilistic "We’re not getting out of here alive" conclusion. "My career would have been different if that had been a big hit," Carpenter then reflected. "The movie was hated. Even by science-fiction fans. They thought I had betrayed some kind of trust…Even the original movie’s director, Christian Nyby, dissed me."

Twenty years later, "The Thing" finally found its audience. When fans and critics embraced the film as a deserving classic, Carpenter commented, "I’m extremely proud of the film. I think we pulled off a movie that’s lasted longer than we may have all thought."

After the surprising success of the 2004 remake of "Dawn of the Dead," starring Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames, two of that film’s producers, Marc Abraham and Eric Newman, convinced Universal Studios to do a prequel to Carpenter’s "The Thing," entitled simply (and confusingly) "The Thing" (2011). The producers had decided against a remake, feeling it would be like "painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa." Instead, they concocted a scenario depicting the calamitous events at the Norwegian Antarctic research site which, as related in the Carpenter version, had initially discovered the alien in a block of ice.

Since spending two hours with subtitled Scandinavians in a theater wouldn’t be bankable, the filmmakers incorporated a team of American researchers to work alongside the Norwegians, notably a strong female presence in the performance of Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a paleontologist. A 21st-century take on a scream queen with roles in "Final Destination 3," "Black Christmas" and "Death Proof," Winstead not only proves she can wield a flamethrower as formidably as Kurt Russell but, as well, comes up with a foolproof who’s-who alien lab test as clever as Russell’s in the 1982 film.

The 2011 film, directed by Dutch-born Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., is nearly irreparably derailed with an extended, needless climax aboard the alien’s cavernous spacecraft but is ultimately redeemed by an inspired sequence of events that deftly lead up to the very beginning of John Carpenter’s film, right down a gracious reprise of that movie’s eerie main theme by composer Ennio Morricone.

"The Thing" (2011) was greeted with mixed reviews. Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune accused the new film of being "in lust" with the 1982 movie. Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir called it a "loving prequel to a horror classic…full of chills and thrills and isolated Antarctic atmosphere and terrific Hieronymous Bosch creature effects…if it winks genially at the plot twists of Carpenter’s film, it never feels even a little like some kind of inside joke."

Just a Couple More Things

In the eighth episode of the first season of "The X-Files," broadcast in November of 1993 and fittingly titled "Ice," FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) investigate the deaths of a research team at a remote base in Alaska and discover the presence of extraterrestrial parasitic worms which drive their victims into fits of impulsive rage.

Series creator Chris Carter admitted that both the 1951 and the 1982 versions of "The Thing" were the biggest inspirations for the episode, which features the opening, unsettling line of dialogue, "We are not who we are," echoing the tale’s original title, "Who Goes There?" (A member of the research team is named Campbell in homage to author John W. Campbell Jr.) It’s not coincidental that the episode’s research base was created by Graeme Murray, a production designer and art director who had worked on Carpenter’s "The Thing."

Writing for The A.V. Club, Keith Phipps rated the episode an "A." He felt that the cast "plays the paranoia beautifully" and that the episode was "as fine an hour as this first season would produce."

Two decades earlier, during what one web wag dubbed the "golden age of made-for-TV movies, from the 1970s into the early 1980s, when "only a few like ‘Duel’ and the original ‘Night Stalker’ are still known beyond collector’s circles," one television movie remains a cherished, if unreachable, memory among fans, a 1973 gem of science-fiction called "A Cold Night’s Death," starring Robert Culp (above) and Eli Wallach as scientists experimenting on primates and the effect of stress and extreme temperatures at a remote polar research station.

The film, originally titled "Chill Factor," featured, in the words of the aforementioned webmeister, "snowy settings to convey feelings of otherworldliness and isolation" as unexplained phenomena convince the scientists that supernatural forces are at work, with a twist at the end worthy of "The Twilight Zone." Like so many other television movies from that golden age, "A Cold Night’s Death" remains, sadly, a home-viewing obscurity.