PLAGUE DIARY 21: SKY WRITES REVIEWS OF OLD BAD HOLLYWOOD MOVIES TO KEEP HIM SANE DURING THIS TIME OF HORRIFIC INSANITY

The Thing from Another World (1951)
It’s Noel Coward meets Frankstein. Howard Hawkes produced the film — and wrote it along with Ben Hecht (they collaborated on His Girl Friday). A bunch of incredibly handsome military types with really sexy 50s haircuts fly up to the North Pole in a rickety 1950s plane, because they’ve got wind of a ‘tremendous disturbance.’ Fortunately they have a Noble-Prize-Winning scientist, Dr. Carrington,  who is so brilliant he can’t finish a sentence:“We can learn secrets that have been hidden from man since the beginning of -” or  “I won't allow you to destroy -” Thank heaven Hawkes and Hecht only interrupt this mental heavyweight when we are all absolutely clear about precisely what he is going to say next. This film is very much like COVID-19. Nothing ever happens — except at key moments, to a very select group of people —and the rest of us have to sit around, waiting and making conversation. But oh, that conversation. Some really talented people wrote some of these ancient bloated Hollywood monstrosities — probably because most of them were destitute alcoholics. (Did you know that Dorothy Parker wrote a scene in Hitchcock’s Saboteur? I figured out which one it is — where Robert Cummings and  Priscilla Lane are hiding on a train, and stumble on some stray circus performers — The Fat Lady, the Midget and the Siamese Twins —and have a surprising, poignant, existential chat). In this film everyone talks over each other, which is meant to be naturalistic, but has exactly the opposite effect — (it’s all very David Mamet when Mamet was barely born.) What I find fascinating is that this is masculine chat, and we are supposedly eavesdropping on the way real, masculine men talk when they are alone. A lot of the talk is about ‘dames’ of course: “You oughta know better than to fool him, only dames can do that,” and “Try Seattle, they got girls there without fur pants on” etc etc. I find this incredibly sexy. None of the men in my house when I was growing up were witty, or talked about ‘dames,’ or interrupted each other, they would sit in corners silently, and acted miffed if you tried to draw them out. I remember going to sleep listening to the gentle (but clear) murmur of my Nana and my mother gossiping in the kitchen.  I knew that someday I wanted to be like them, so funny, and nasty, and deliciously immoral, ripping people apart and never bothering to put them back together again. Well in The Thing from Another World I was fascinated, intimidated and turned on by the short, snappy, incredibly fast, incredibly macho repartee. Do real men talk like this? I doubt it, but it’s fun to imagine it. And the kicker is — even the women in this movie talk like these fantasy men. Margaret Sheridan —playing a woman with the unlikely name of Nikki Nicholson (proving Hawkes and Hecht kinda wouldn’t know a woman if they fell over one, which they probably often did) — has this gorgeous scene that comes out of nowhere. She and the luscious Kenneth Tobey (as Captain Patrick Hendry) are flirting in a hard nosed, smoking kind of way, about how he was a bit too ‘handy’ with her on their date. He says suddenly “You’d could tie my hands if you want to.” Cut. And the scene continues in another room, and the edible Kenneth Tobey has actually been tied up by the cocky Margaret Sheridan. “Well you suggested it” she quips. More banter. Then she is kissing him while he’s tied up, and giving him drags on a cigarette. This is outright kinky, and mirrors what Feste says about language in 12th Night; that it is wanton. Language is, in case you haven’t noticed, dangerous. Talking about being tied up can lead to being tied up. And then there’s ‘telegraph vines.’ Dr. Carrington is mansplaining about intelligent vegetables — comparing The Thing to a ‘super carrot.” And someone says “An intellectual carrot, the mind boggles!’ And then they all discuss intelligent plants. (The appearance of The Thing is very disappointing — like all the monsters in these 50s films — it’s just James Arness glimpsed vaguely through snow, with what looks like fake fingernails, and a bald cap, and wearing a Hazmat suit.) Then we are on to ‘telegraph vines.’ I googled them (’Codariocalyx motorius’) — and they do exist. Dr. Carrington claims telegraph vines can talk to each other by wiggling in the air. But that is a fancy (again) of Hawkes’ and Hecht’s magical verbiage. (Telegraph vines don’t talk — they wiggle about to catch the sun.) But it’s a nice thought. And why shouldn’t it be true? I want to live in a world in which everything we wish was true always is. and everyone talks like they do in a Howard Hawkes film, where the women talk like imaginary men, and flirt as if their life depended on it. It’s a feast of words, and when you see it, so unexpectedly—  in this tawdry horror flick — you realise that the rest of the time, we’re just munching on scraps.