The Thing (RKO Radio) is a ferocious vegetable, eight feet tall, delivered on a flying saucer from another world. It bleeds green, howls like an aggravated banshee, multiplies by dropping seeds into the earth. It thinks like Einstein, looks like Frankenstein's monster and, like Dracula, thrives only on a diet of human blood.
The humans staked out by The Thing for its victory garden are a bit more convincing, but not by much. They are scientists and a U.S. Air Force crew, quartered for a research project at the North Pole with all the comforts of home, including a comely, sweater-bulging secretary (Margaret Sheridan). Except for the Air Force captain (Kenneth Tobey), whom the script had fated for her, the men treat this cute tomato with vegetable-like indifference. They keep their minds on science, though not very scientifically, e.g., when the grounded saucer's radioactivity sets their Geiger counter sputtering, they walk calmly into the radioactive field.
Finally, the unearthly vegetable touches off a conflict between the captain's horse sense and the chief scientist's highfalutin notions. The scientist (Robert Cornthwaite), who is suggestively costumed like a Russian, wants to appease The Thing to gain knowledge; the captain wants to destroy it—if he could only figure out how. For a while, it looks hopefully as if The Thing will destroy the actors. In the end, however, while small-fry moviegoers are brought to a sizzle, man masters the vegetable.
My Forbidden Past (RKO Radio) is set in New Orleans during the gaslight era, when connoisseurs of showboat melodrama might have taken it seriously. The moss-hung script casts Ava Gardner as Barbara Beaurevel, a fiery belle scheming to win back the Yankee doctor (Robert Mitchum) who has scorned her and married another.
Armed with a convenient $900,000 inheritance, Ava bribes her rakish ne'er-do-well of a cousin (Melvyn Douglas) to break up Mitchum's home by seducing his wife (Janis Carter)—a job Douglas seems perfectly willing to attempt without pay. But, on the point of success, Douglas accidentally kills his quarry. Mitchum, suspected of doing his wife in, can be saved only by Ava's last-minute confession of her foul scheme.
By that time, nothing can save the picture. But Cinemactress Gardner gets able support from Actor Douglas, who plays a scoundrel with relish, and a handsome variety of low-necked costumes get able support from Cinemactress Gardner.