Daily Archives: August 11, 2015

The Thing from Another World
Directed by Christian Nyby
Written by Charles Lederer from the story “Who Goes There?” by John W. Campbell, Jr.
1951/USA
RKO Radio Pictures/Winchester Pictures Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental

Dr. Arthur Carrington: [about the carrot] Its development was not handicapped by emotional or sexual factors.

This early sci-fi classic is a hell of a lot of fun.

Captain Healy and his crew are called to an Arctic research station to investigate a plane crash.   Healy is also able to use the opportunity to get reacquainted with sparring partner and love interest Nikki, a research assistant at the station.

When the men get out to the crash site, they discover a large circular object buried in the ice.  When they use Thermite bombs to free it, the craft is completely destroyed by the explosion.  Traces left in the ice convince everyone that this was a flying saucer.  They find the body of one of the crew members encased in a slab of ice and take it back to the station.

Captain Hendry insists that nothing be done with the body until he has authority from headquarters.  But the radio won’t work properly and he gets drawn into a running battle with chief scientist Dr. Carrington who believes that nothing should trump scientific investigation of this superior being.  All Hendry’s caution is for naught when one his guards melts the ice holding the body with an electric blanket.

Then all hell breaks lose.  The men find they are confronting a blood sucking organism that is more vegetable than animal and cannot be harmed by their guns.  Carrington sabotages every move to contain the monster.  Then they discover the thing’s seeds are starting to reproduce.  James Arness played The Thing.

This one contains the snappy banter and overlapping dialogue that characterize producer Howard Hawks’s best work.  His contribution to the actual direction of the film is unknown but his influence is unmistakable.  The movie has a breathless pace uncharacteristic of most such genre films.  It also made me jump more than once, always a good sign. Recommended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5xcVxkTZzM

Trailer

The Idiot (Hakuchi)
Directed by Akira Kurosawa
Written by Akira Kurosawa and Eijirô Hisaita from the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky
1951/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu

[box] Mutsuo Kayama, the secretary: What could be so frightening about that idiot?[/box]

This is a beautiful, fantastically acted film.  Unfortunately, it is also 166 minutes long and I don’t feel like I quite got the point.

Kurosawa has transposed the setting of Dostoevsky’s novel from Tsarist Russia to post-war Hokkaido.  The story takes place mostly in severe winter weather.

Kinji Kameda (Masayuki Mori) has just been released from an American military hospital where he had been treated for “epileptic idiocy”.  This condition developed after Kameda was spared at the very last minute from execution after having been erroneously charged with being a war criminal.  As he waited to die, Kameda felt an enormous love for everyone and regret that he had not been kinder or more considerate.

On his train journey back to Sapporo, Kameda is befriended by Denkichi Akama (Toshiro Mifune) who is headed there to reunite with and attempt to marry the woman he loves, Taeku Nasu (Setsuko Hara).  On arrival, the two stop to admire her portrait which is on display at a photographer’s shop.  Kameda immediately feels compassion for Taeku due to the sadness he sees in her eyes.

Taeko was taken as a fourteen-year-old girl to be the mistress of a rich man who apparently forced her into some unspeakable degradation.  The man has now tired of her and has offered Ayako, the son of Ono (Takashi Shimura), 600,000 yen to marry her.  Akama raises a million yen in a bid to marry her himself.  But Kameda quietly tells Taeko shed is not the person her trials have made her and she should not marry.  He offers to take care of her although he has no money.  Then Ono reveals that Kameda is actually the owner of a valuable estate that Ono has appropriated.

But Taeko cannot bear to “ruin” someone as good as Kameda. Although Kameda’s feelings for Taeko are more tender than passionate and despite their real friendship, Kameda and Akama are at odds over her fate for the rest of the film.  In the meantime, Kameda engages in a fairly bizarre courtship with Oda’s daughter.  Tragedy ensues.

Obviously, with this cast the viewer is in store for some tremendous acting.  Masayuki Mori, who played the samurai in Rashomon, is the standout as the “idiot”.  You have to love him.  Mifune and especially Hara were almost unrecognizable to me during the first part of the film and very good.

The film begins with a text saying that Dostoevsky wanted to create a character who was completely good and the only way to do so in this corrupt world was to make him an idiot.  The story is supposed to show the destruction of such a character by life.  I suppose this is true but the message kind of got lost for me in the extremely convoluted plot.

I think this movie could have lost forty-five minutes and been improved.  Be that as it may, the version I watched was already cut from the Kurosawa’s original, which clocked in at 265 minutes and the 180 minute version shown at the film’s premier.  Since I still don’t understand some of the plot points maybe they were left on the cutting room floor.