The Thing From Another World (1951) by Howard Hawks.
‘The Thing From Another World is an exemplary movie. Theoretically, this is an anti-communist movie made during the cold war -an anti-communism which is not but can be guessed, as it was shot in 1950-1951. Curiously though, as in many other of his films, the film constantly shows many people acting simultaneously. In each sequence, Hawks shows us the behavior of a small group -five or ten people. The action takes place in a station in Alaska or in the Great North, isolated from the world -it’s a huis-clos film. Each character has a professional and personalized function and the film shows how they react as if each actor was at the same time directed and his own director. This a real orchestration: not only a personal itinerary but one of an entire group, which leads me to say that The Thing From Another World is a communist film -which rejoins the true nature of communism. It’s an example for all directors: most of the time, they don’t want to direct their secondary actors and let them do what they want. Instead, everyone here has his own individuality. It’s fascinating to see all those secondary actors -none of them are really famous- who act as parts of a group would in life. Hawks’ film is a model for every director and a typical example, maybe the most typical, of cinema history.’
About the film: a wonderfully crisp script and quick-paced direction distinguishes this film about an alien creature discovered near an Arctic outpost. Members of a scientific research team cart the frozen pilot back to camp where it thaws out -much to their regret.
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About Luc Moullet
A former critics at Cahiers du cinéma (from 1956 to 1965), Luc Moullet has become a key figure in French cinema for over forty years with a string of comic masterpieces characterized by caustic humor, occasional gunplay, shoestring budgets, careful attention to landscape and an overall b-movie scabbiness which as yet knows no equal. Relentlessly teetering between rigorous logic and the heights of the absurd, Moullet’s films have earned the consistent praise of critics like Jonathan Rosenbaum and filmmakers like Jean-Marie Straub (who called him ‘the only heir of both Buñuel and Tati’), Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette. . In 2006, her directs Le prestige de la mort (The Pretige of Death), ‘a sort of remake of Le mort en fuite by André Berthomieu or Whispering Chorus by Cecil B. DeMille -the story of a man that takes a dead man’s identity to get away from a tricky situation. Actually, it’s about a filmmaker that wants people to believe he’s dead in order to benefit from the headlines of his own death!’. Luc Moullet is currently developing several feature-length films projects including La terre de la folie (The Land of Madness), ‘a documentary about a region in France that is very impregnated by madness…’