nerds movie, though there's some crossover because ultimately I would say that while Margaret Sheridan is playing a scientist, her real loyalties are more on the jock side. She's with the military guys in the end. But yeah, this is a movie in which the jocks, the military, represent tough common sense. And the nerds, the scientists, represent an unhealthy and ill-advised curiosity, a mind that is a little too open for its own good. And this brings us to the next character that we wanted to talk about and the actor who plays him. And that's, if this movie has a human villain, this is the human villain. This is Dr. Carrington. I would say he is the main figure in the movie representing the villainous potential of the nerds among us. He's so curious to know more about the life forms from other worlds that he forgets his loyalty to this one. And I think this is a good jumping off point to talk about some of the historical political context of the film. So I want to be clear. I do not know if it was intended this way by the filmmakers. This could be something that is just a, an artifact of interpretation, but it's easy to see how this has been interpreted as a cold war paranoia movie. You know, it was released early during the second Red Scare, and it involves sort of commie-coded intellectuals who betray their loyalty to the home team in a spirit of suicidal interplanetary cosmopolitanism. So Dr. Carrington, there's something kind of off about him and his aesthetics. He dresses in these strange slacks that look, I'm not sure what they were. They look kind of like pajama pants with a strange pattern on them. And he wears a turtleneck sweater and a double-breasted jacket. And he has a pointy beard. So he looks almost like the classic Looney Tunes caricature of the Freudian psychiatrist. You know what I'm talking about? He looks like the archetype of an untrustworthy, godless intellectual, like somebody that John Wayne would slug in the mouth in Big Jim McClane. Yeah.

Almost like a stereotypical communist sympathizer intellectual of the day. Yeah,

yeah. There are a number of sci-fi movies of this time interpreted as Cold War paranoia movies, and they tend to feature plot devices of either one of two mechanisms, either mind control or body snatching. but secretly they're working for the other side. And you can see examples of this in the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There was a remake in 78 that I think is absolutely fantastic. If you've never seen the 78 version, that's another remake from, I guess, a few years before, but around the same time as Carpenter's Thing remake, that is a remake that is at least as good as the original and probably better. I've

never seen the 70s remake. I've only seen the 1956 version, which as a child, like, scared the crap out of me a bit. Something about just the black and white nature of it and just how just frenzied Kevin McCarthy's character is towards the end. Like, he's just completely losing it with, well, it's not even paranoia in the context of the film because people are being replaced by pod people. And he's the, like the only sane man left trying to warn us. Oh,

well, you really should see the 78 Body Snatchers because it's also just fantastic. It's got a great cast, Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Veronica Cartwright, Jeff Goldblum, Leonard Nimoy. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's a wonderful cast and excellently scripted, like really good. But anyway, in those cases, especially the original 56 invasion of the body snatchers, because it's in this sort of red scare period of the 50s after World War II, it fits into this mold. You've got people who look like your friends, but actually they work for the enemy. And on the hammy or B-movie side of things, you've also got movies like It Conquered the World, which I think you could say the same thing about. It also came out in 1956, a Corman special, Roger Corman. And how would you describe It Conquered the World? It's a movie where a giant communist mind control artichoke from Venus conquers a military base in a nearby town by like making a brain thrall out of Lee Van Cleef.

Yeah, it's an interesting film. It has a ridiculous monster in it, but a lot of it revolves around Peter Graves' character having these conversations with Lee Van Cleef's character, kind of like just philosophical arguments about how we should be treating the aliens that are invading the world. With Lee Van Cleef, since he tends to play the more villainous roles, though he's not really an outright villain, not an unsympathetic villain in this. He comes through in the end. Yeah, he comes through in the end, but he also seems to be, has a very logic based approach to everything into why he is essentially siding with the aliens. And that's kind of the heart of it. Like the alien threat exists and it's about how are we as a culture responding to it? And are we engaging in dangerous sensibilities and dangerous ideas regarding the treatment of alien beings.

Will we learn only too late that man is a feeling creature?

Right. And that's a big, that's a big theme in all of these, right? The idea that this, this dangerous ideology or, you know, or alien presence, whatever the infection happens to be, it will rob you of your individuality. You're just to be made into, you'll be a pod person, you'll be a, you know, whatever the thing is, you're going to be robbed of your individuality and your personality. And

that this alien persuasion, this alien frame of mind, or the sympathies to the enemy are not visible from the outside, right? That the enemy, whether it's mind control or body snatching, either way, the effect is the same, which is that the enemy is among us blending in, you know, and this is very much in the political spirit of the age. It's like, you know, McCarthy's speech when he stood up in 1950 and he said he had a list of communist spies who were secretly working in the State Department. They're just blending in with everybody else. And so the main mood or theme of these movies, a little bit less than outright terror is instead paranoia, right? It's this thing of like, who can I trust? Who is not what they seem? And there's an irony here because I think Carpenter's adaptation of the thing accomplishes this theme of paranoia much more powerfully than the original thing from another world, even though I don't think Carpenter's version has any of that red scare political DNA. I don't think that's it's concerned with that at all. It's just sort of like more free floating paranoia. And I think it accomplishes that because specifically it involves an alien who impersonates people who can look like your co-workers and you wouldn't know it was actually an alien until you test their blood unlike this movie instead of having somebody who's an alien body snatcher or someone under alien mind control it has just the suspect loyalties of the scientist and the intellectual because they're hungry for knowledge and they're open-minded to a fault. And because of that, they will flirt with dangerous forces from outside the zone of safety. And that's the role that Dr. Carrington, this character, plays in the movie. And for the record, the actor, Robert Cornthwaite, is great in this role. I love him as the godless, untrustworthy nerd.

Yeah, he's pretty great, even though at times it feels like they're laying down a bit thick with him. Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a little cheesy, yeah. Because everyone else is like, this thing's murdering people and it's drinking blood. And he's like, yes, but I think we should reason with it. There's so much we could learn from this murderous carrot. Yeah. And even right up there at the end, you know, they're trying to lure it into a high tech trap to

shock it to death. And he's like, wait, let me speak to the creature. It must not be hurt, you know? And we get to see the nerd get punished for his foolishness. You know, he's so naive that he thinks he can form a relationship with the alien, you know, unlike he doesn't have the rough common sense of the, uh, of the captain in the army who's like, well, you just got to kill this thing. Yeah. So he gets swatted. Yeah. He gets smacked down. I think they say that he survives. I think they say, uh, that he does just ends up with some broken bones.

Yeah. Broken bones and a wounded spirit, but perhaps he'll, he'll, uh, now he knows that he shouldn't put science first.

Right. So

this actor, Cornthwaite, he was born in 1917, died in 2006. He did a lot of TV and film work throughout his long career, including Future World. That was one of the sequels to Westworld. He was in 1953's War of the Worlds, 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. He was in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. What is that? You don't know The Ghost and Mr. Chicken? I do not know The Ghost and Mr. Chicken. Oh, it was a Don Knotts comedy. Oh, okay. I think I saw it a lot as a kid for some reason. But anyway, this actor was on tons of famous TV shows from the old days, stuff like Andy Griffith, Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock. This was his first credited film or TV acting gig, though, and he often played lawyers and scientists because he had that kind of like intellectual air, you know, that intellectual delivery that lent itself well to those roles. Yeah,

maybe a nasal voice and a pointy beard. And you just look at that guy and you're like, I don't know if I can trust him. Now,

we also have a very amusing journalist character who has a lot of screen time. It's our character, Ned Scott. And I enjoyed this character a lot because he's very stereotypical in many ways, but is so well written, has a lot of snappy dialogue.

Fast talking journalist has some extremely cheesy lines. He gives the final the final speech at the end of the movie. So this movie's version of the he learned too late that man is a feeling creature is instead him like talking over the military radio to, I don't know, some command post and like dictating a news story off the top of his head. It starts off with some line like, uh, well, thousands of years ago, a man named Noah saved the earth with an arc made of wood today with a man named a captain, whatever, saved the earth with an arc of electricity.

Yep. Yep. Great lead. Great lead, Ned. Really,

really good.

Uh, the interesting thing about that ending with the Keep Watching the Skies is I sometime, having never seen it before, but being familiar with that ending line, I kind of combined that knowledge with the ending to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where there's like a crazed urgency to it. And there's no crazed urgency here. He's not like, for God's sake, keep watching the skies because this is going to happen again and again. He's just kind of like in generally saying, keep watching the skies just in case. I don't know. There might be, who knows? Just keep watching the skies.

Yeah. Watch the skies. Keep watching them.

Anyway, this character though, very amusing, Ned Scott. He was played by Douglas Spencer, who lived 1910 through 1960. So, you know, ultimately didn't have as long a career as he could have, given that his life was a bit cut short there. But he was in, among other things, This Island Earth, The Diary of Anne Frank, and the classic Western Shane. And speaking of Westerns, let's talk about Team Monster here. Oh, boy. Now, you mentioned already that James Arnaz plays the monster, and it is indeed. James Arnaz lived 1923 through 2011. This is a guy that's mostly well-known and well-remembered for one or two things. First of all, he played the lead character Matt Dillon on the long-running Gunsmoke Western TV show. That show aired 1955 through 1975, and then was just always in syndication afterwards, it seems like. I remember my grandpa would watch it like every day on TV. I've never seen Gunsmoke. I really

don't know anything about it.

I mean, all I know, I don't think I ever actively watched it because I mean, I was a kid, I wasn't interested in Gunsmoke so much, but it was on and he was like, you know, cowboy sheriff or whatnot.

And he's like, let me guess, is he the new sheriff who comes into a lawless town and has to fix everything? I guess. But it's I mean, the show ran

for like 20 years. So you'd think he'd get into a pattern there after a while. Eventually, the people would be like, you've had 15 years to fix this town and it's still lawless. Yeah. Like, does he have to run for re-election? How does it work? I don't know. Gunsmoke fans let us know. But it wasn't just Westerns for James Arnaz. He was also in 1954's Them, a giant bug movie. Have you seen this one?

Actually, shame to say. No, I have not. I know it's a classic. The

other interesting thing about James Arnaz is that he was born James King Arnaz, and he was the older brother of a guy by the name of Peter Duesler Arnaz, who acted under the name Peter Graves,

who we just mentioned. Yeah. So this is Peter Graves' brother. So you could have literally had a brother-to conversation about how you learned too late that man is a feeling creature. Yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting, though. I mean, this is often the case with siblings, right? I mean, this is nothing remarkable, but you don't think of James Arnaz and Peter Graves as being is playing the same sorts of characters. There's like a there's a ruggedness to James Arnaz, like he's just always going to be that cowboy. And Peter Graves, on the other hand, often played these more, you know, these thoughtful characters. They're sometimes villainous, but there's like a sternness to both actors. But I don't know, Peter Graves, different type of roles. I can't imagine them ever like competing for the same character and it being like the same character if either of them played it.