Film Review
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
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Next Val Guest film:
Quatermass 2 (1957)
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.