The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) - film review

Professor Bernard Quatermass is both excited and concerned when a rocket that he designed and launched crash-lands in the south of England.  The rocket has travelled further into space than any previously manned flight, but the professor has had no contact with its three-man crew since shortly after take-off.  To his relief, one of the crew, Victor Carroon, has survived, but the other two are missing, only their empty spacesuits remaining.  Seeing that Carroon is in a near-comatose state, Quatermass has him taken to his laboratory, where he and his colleague, Dr Briscoe, subject him to a series of examinations.  Incredibly, the astronaut appears to be undergoing some kind of physiological change, from which Quatermass deduces he must have made contact with some alien life form whilst in deep space.  Carroon’s wife, Judith, is equally concerned for her husband’s well being.  When she learns that Carroon has been moved to a hospital, she sees her chance and absconds with him, not realising that he is literally a changed man.  The next day, Quatermass learns that something has broken into a zoo and drained the life of several animals.  Carroon is no longer a man but is rapidly mutating into a new form of life, one that can directly absorb the life force of any plant or animal on contact.  If Quatermass is right, the creature will soon be able to reproduce itself like a plant, by releasing spores into the air.  Unless he can find and destroy it, the human race could be extinct within a matter of hours...

When Nigel Kneale’s six-part television serial The Quatermass Experiment was broadcast in Britain in the summer of 1953, no one could have foreseen the public reaction.  It attracted some of the highest viewing figures for a televised drama at that time in the UK and would create an appetite for realistic thrillers, galvanising a revolution in television drama.  One man who was quick to see the potential of Kneale’s creation was Anthony Hinds, producer for a small and not too well-known film production company called Hammer.  Immediately after watching the serial on television, Hinds contacted the BBC and soon acquired the rights to make a film adaptation.

The film (retitled The Quatermass Xperiment, to emphasise its X-rating and Xplicit horror content) proved to be every bit as successful as the original TV serial, achieving large audiences in both Britain and the United States.  Although it was made on a ludicrously small budget (around forty thousand pounds) it turned a profit of three million dollars, instantly transforming the fortunes of the company that made it.  Low budget horror films would turn out to be a gold mine for Hammer and in the decades that followed most of its output was directed towards the horror genre.  Today, the name Hammer is synonymous with a singularly English kind of Gothic horror.

The original Quatermass Experiment serial was broadcast live (as was customary with all BBC television dramas at the time) and it is fortuitous that two episodes were telerecorded onto film, allowing them to be viewed today.  Comparing these with the film version, several differences are readily apparent.  For the film, director Val Guest was keen to achieve a much greater degree of realism and to accentuate the horror elements of the story.  The main characters are slightly more believable than in the serial, and extensive use of recognisable real locations adds an almost documentary style authenticity to the story.   With its spine-tingling special effects (some of which are very daring for this era), the film easily earned the X-certificate that Hammer has been hankering after and would exploit to the fullest in their publicity.

Perhaps the most significant difference between the film and the serial is how the main character is portrayed.  In the serial, Professor Quatermass is a benign patrician-like scientist who is dedicated to his work but who has retained his human qualities.   In the film, the character is an unsympathetic authoritarian figure, obsessed with his research and hardly concerned with its consequences.  Brian Donlevy’s gruff portrayal of the rocket scientist hardly endears him to the audience, with the consequence that  the secondary characters, Inspector Lomax and Dr Briscoe, play a much more significant role.  The part of Lomax was played by Jack Warner who, immediately after making this film would begin work on a new BBC television series, Dixon of Dock Green, which ran for twenty years and made Warner’s the best-known face on British television.  Warner’s character in The Quatermass Xperiment is P.C. George Dixon in all but name.

Nigel Kneale was unimpressed with the film.  He was particularly annoyed with Brian Donlevy’s portrayal of Quatermass but he was also disappointed with the changes to the denouement.  In the film, the creature is fried by the National Grid whereas in the serial it kindly commits suicide when Quatermass appeals to its last vestiges of humanity.  It’s hard to imagine Donlevy’s Quatermass appealing to anything’s humanity when he visibly has so little, so the uninspiring B-movie ending was more or less foisted on the film once the casting decision had been made. 

One of the attractions of this film is the plethora of well-known British actors that make up the cast list. This includes Gordon Jackson, Thora Hird (magnificent as a down-and-out drunk), Lionel Jeffries and a very young Jane Asher (playing the sweetest little girl imaginable).  Richard Wordsworth gives the film its most memorable performance, even though he has virtually no dialogue.  As the mutating astronaut Carroon, Wordsworth conveys both menace and pathos, evoking memories of Boris Karloff’s portrayal of Frankenstein monster in the Universal horror films of the 1930s.

After the phenomenal success of The Quatermass Xperiment, Hammer was eager to make a follow-up and approached writer Nigel Kneale to either supply an original screenplay or give his permission for his character to be reused.  Kneale refused both but Hammer went ahead and made another film with a Quatermass-like character, X: The Unknown (1956).  The company would later adapt Kneale’s subsequent television Quatermass serials: Quatermass 2 (1957) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967).

© James Travers 2009

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