He was Scotty in The Thing from Another World: The baffling Hollywood career of Douglas Spencer

Wednesday 4/2/25

In the 1954 film Them!--which is simultaneously one of the best horror films of the 1950s, one of the best sci-films, one of the best thrillers, an ecological parable, and a Cold War warning--there's a scene where a bunch of reporters fight for position to ask questions as to what's going. A bespectacled, balding fellow fires off a question, which was also the actor's lone line in the film.

Horror and sci-fi fans are apt to do a double-take, because it seems like that actor is same guy who played Ned "Scotty" Scott the newsman, in Christian Nyby's--but just as much Howard Hawks'--1951 film, The Thing from Another World, but surely it can't be?

After all, given how great and prominent that actor was three years prior, he wouldn't have the mere line now, would he?

But it turns out that he did. The actor in question Douglas Spencer, who was born in Princeton, Illinois on February 10, 1910. There's a tendency--recency bias--for people to overrate John Carpenter's 1982 film The Thing and devalue the Nyby/Hawks picture.

To me, Carpenter is a surface artist, which is to say, not really an artist at all, similar to Guillermo del Toro. But the movies are in color, there's more gore, and the names of these directors allow people to cast themselves in their favored role of film sophisticate the way that their counterparts on the music side of things will say that Led Zeppelin made the best music ever or whatever, which is what someone says when they don't know any better, for a host of reasons, and wish to come off as an authoritative voice, a gatekeeper--a taste-keeper, if you like.

The Thing from Another World anticipates Rio Bravo eight years before the fact, with the Old West instead being the scientific frontier of the Arctic. The dialogue overlaps, there's no real star to the picture--everyone in it matters as much as everyone else, just about--and it's very much a communal affair.

One might think of the film, like a Mercury Theatre radio production come to cinematic life, with signature moments of enduring horror, and characters we pull for, as it doesn't take long for ourselves--as the viewers--to feel like we're a part of the group.

But the person who brings it all together, who is integral to the whole thing working, is the Scotty characters. He's the newsman who pitches in, provides a kind of informal, unofficial narration by dint of what he does, how he speaks, and walks--and crosses, both ways--the line between civilian and military person, on account of the gravity of the situation these people find themselves in.

Spencer is a natural in the part. Total pro. His Scotty is acerbic, cuts through the tension. He is, more than anyone else in the picture, the character who is our "go-to" in terms of who we gravitate towards. He also delivers the movie's final lines, microphone in hand, which are among the defining lines of all of horror and sci-fi cinema. Lasting lines. Ring-out-in-film-history lines.

But this was only his real shining moment as an actor, and I don't understand why. I don't know why. There's no real explanation anywhere as to why.

He's excellent in this film, and it wasn't an easy film to act in, given the challenges of the dialogue and style of dialogue. A very-true-to-life style as to how humans speak--often--when they're in groups with each other.

You'd think that Spencer would have been showing up everywhere as a character actor. He was Ray Milland's body double-which seems like an odd gig for him--and he had parts in Shane (1955), This Island Earth (1955), and The Diary of Ann Frank (1959), but like I said, there he is, unbilled, with that one line in Them! which he presumably agreed to because that was the only type of thing he could get.

I haven't read accounts of him not wanting to work or not being able to. He featured in a 1960 Bonanza episode, "The Gunmen," directed, tellingly, by Nyby, who clearly wanted to keep him involved or going or I don't know.

His career is a mystery to me. He had a distinctive voice, too, and would have been perfect for radio--you could imagine him being on Gunsmoke, Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar, and Dragnet in the same week--but you won't find him there either. He was in the Twilight Zone episode "Mr. Dingle, the Strong," in a part that I'll just flat out say was beneath his dignity.

Anyone who has watched The Thing from Another World would just assume that the person playing Scott worked a lot. He has one of these looks, one of those faces, one of those voices, of the classic character actor you see hundreds of times, and always pick them out, even if you don't know their name. A character actor like, say, Claude Akins, who was in Rio Bravo, who makes you think, "Oh, this movie should be good, that guy's in it."

Douglas was tall and thin, but he died of a heart attack and a diabetic condition, in 1960, aged only fifty. A most baffling career. I don't get it. But I do know how excellent Spencer was in The Thing from Another World.