But that day had passed now, and with it my brief enforced reprieve—I was back in the schoolyard while, I had been given to understand, the rest of the Tech Drag class were receiving their final examination results. And therefore I was rather surprised to suddenly spy several of my classmates running toward me when as near as I could figure it was only halfway to the lunchtime bell.
 “Come with us! You should see what’s happened!” they cried, all wanting to talk at once in their obvious excitement.
 “Why?” I asked suspiciously, “What for?”
 “Metamorphosis just gave us our results,” they told me, “And guess what?”
 “What.”
 “Only one person out of the whole class passed.”
 “Who was that?” I asked disinterestedly.
 “You,” they jubilantly cried.

 

A ground-breaking film that was way better than anyone thought at the time was The Thing (from another world), which took a serious view of alien invasion. The realisation that this is a superior piece of 50s sci-fi comes early, in the scene when the men stand on the edges to reveal the shape of the object they have discovered under the ice and find it circular.  They cut the body of the snap-frozen alien free and bring it into their base and watch apprehensively as the ice melts. And then, they suddenly discover the creature is still alive and has escaped. It is now a desperate battle for survival. They search the base but the deadly creature has an uncanny ability to evade them, and they discover it to be impervious to all of their weapons. The storm raging outside interferes with their radio preventing them from calling for help. They are trapped with their unwelcome visitor, and there’s a great moment when Ken Tobey opens the door and there it is! ... He simply closes the door again. Others are less lucky. They work out that the creature is some sort of plant life form and eventually they lure it into an electronic trap. James Arness, in his first role, played the monster.

  There’s a strange story concerning the director of the film. Christian Nyby is believed to not have existed, and was an Alan Smithee sort of alias. The rumour goes that it was really Orson Welles in the days when he was exiled from Hollywood. Certainly, with its ceilings and group shots in which everyone has a line, and extended tracking shots throughout the tunnels of the base, it looks Welles-like. But apparently he denied it. Another rumour has it that Howard Hawks, who was at war with the Director’s Guiid at the time, did the job secretly. Modern sources assert that Nyby actually existed, but no one is sure. All the other people involved in the production refused to answer the question, declaring that they were contractually bound to silence. It remains a mystery.