Based on a 1938 novella, "Who Goes There?" by John Campbell, the film starts by immediately transporting us into its frozen, hostile world. A reporter, Ned Scott, arrives at a storm swept military base in Anchorage, Alaska and acts as a sort of audience proxy. He meets up with a C-47 pilot, Captain Patrick Hendry, and with Hendry's men they engage in a Hawksian banter full of overlapping dialogue that shows the casual confidence of men having just won a world war. Without missing a beat, Hendry is called in by the base General and ordered to fly up to a science outpost near the North Pole and investigate a mysterious crash site. With Scott tagging along, Hendry and his crew take to the air for their fateful mission.
This film's main thematic conflict of science vs. the military, the quest for knowledge vs. the survival instinct, has probably been done to death, but it's not some obscure subtext wrung out by post-modernist critics. When Hendry arrives at the lone outpost on the ice, the visual contrast between him and Dr. Carrington, the ranking scientist in charge, is hard to miss. Where we see Hendry with his chiseled looks and ubiquitous leather bomber jacket, Dr. Carrington is presented with a beard, turtleneck, and a presumably blue yachting jacket. This was the 1950s. Beards meant communist. He's the visual antithesis to Hendry's military candoism. Hendry's just here to do a job. Carrington, on the other hand, has greater ambitions.
Except for one alien body thrown free.
After they dig it out in a block of ice and fly back (ignore the huge block of ice in the back that will prevent takeoff), Hendry and Carrington play out their first bit of conflict. Carrington wants to cut it out and study it, but Hendry decides to wait for further orders and commands one of his men to break the windows so the ice won't thaw in the storage room. Might, plus a little broken glass, makes right.
What's strange is the collective reaction to this monumental discovery. The military men are rather blasé about the whole thing. They crack a few jokes and at most are mildly creeped out. Maybe they were pre-acclimated by comic books about little green men. In any event, it's the job of one man per shift to guard the alien while the others vaguely socialize and play chess and Hendry and Nikki, Carrington's secretary, continue their chaste flirtations. They have a history of unresolved flirting. The cycle is a vicious one.
The action starts when, after a shift change, one of the men covers the alien's visage with an electric blanket (didn't he feel it was warm to the touch?) which in short order melts the ice allowing It to rise and that's where the shooting starts. This sequence unfortunately reminded me of a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode where a party of Westerners, pretty sure they were American, was heading through the jungle when, out of the blue, a native innocently appears. One of the men raised his rifle and for some unfathomable reason shot him. From then on the MST3K crew mercilessly ribbed him with lines like, "Hey, there's a plant you never saw before. Why don't you kill it?" That's how the shooting went down with the alien. See it, shoot it. Then when it escapes out into the snow, it's immediately attacked by vicious slave creatures the humans use to pull their sleds. So you can forgive the alien for thinking the Earth is, I don't know, a hostile place.
What proceeds is a more vituperative conflict between Hendry and Carrington, with Carrington devising schemes to communicate with it, even behind Hendry's back, and Hendry just wanting to kill it. And here's where the film plays a neat trick. While examining the alien's hand severed by the slave creatures, Carrington and his science team discuss its composition, almost vegetable-like, and just when Carrington starts to muse on the possibilities of communication, the hand moves, literally cutting him off mid-sentence. We're meant to be repulsed by its fingers contracting as if wanting to reach out and strangle something, and from then on the narrative leaves no doubt that communication is out of the question. The monster must be destroyed.
The rest of the plot alternates between violence and mayhem and planning for violence and mayhem, but through it all something kept nagging me about Captain Hendry. For all his cordiality and easy-going humor, he seemed strangely aloof, or maybe affectless. Not unflappable. More like something was missing inside him. People can be opaque and mysterious, but behind Hendry's all-American can-do facade, maybe he's just shallow.
I wasn't entirely satisfied with the alien's character, either. As in, it was nonexistent except for its physical outline. I might have caught a grrrr or two, I'm not sure. The physique of the creature was clearly modeled after the monster in Frankenstein, but Frankenstein was a tragedy because its monster showed feelings. It had desires and fears. The alien, however, is allowed none of that. It's never shown in closeup. Its face is almost always in shadow. Upon its ultimate demise in the improvised electrocution trap, we feel nothing except perhaps a revulsion at the ruthlessness of the execution (reflected by the air crew's wincing and grimacing as the creature slowly sinks to the ground and burns).
Finally, with this battle for the Earth concluded, it's left to press man Ned Scott to deliver the film's denouement as he files his story over the radio back to Anchorage. It's important that this was done in the voice of the journalist. If his final message, "Watch the skies!" was in the voice of the military, it would have come from an overbearing position of authority, but Scott's an everyman, just like us. His message was meant to convey fear in the most convincing way possible, with no barrier between messenger and audience.
It wasn't the most sophisticated propaganda. Those latter words don't naturally go together. I found the whole production, except for the crash site scene, lacking in anything dynamic. The performances were one-dimensional, the aesthetic workmanlike. In fact, the whole production mirrored the men in uniform – professional, efficient, unquestioning. A lost opportunity on balance. If only someone would remake it...
