THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)

The Quatermass Xperiment is one of very few films that can legitimately be called iconic. Its themes, imagery, and legacy all combine to make it so. But let’s get something straight right away. It’s an old movie that must be considered within the context of its era. New viewers will either be immediately won over by its stylish though moody retro-futurism or find the pseudo-science funny despite the serious tone of the story. Either way, they’ll find something to enjoy and, although the science may indeed be fiction, it was impressively prescient and well thought through for the time. Bear in mind the movie was made 70 years ago. That’s six years before Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space and 13 years ahead of Apollo 8 taking its crew of three beyond Earth’s orbit.

The film opens with the return of a similar, though ill-fated, rocket mission into deep space from which only one of its three-man crew appears to have survived. But it seems the rocket brought something extra back. Extra-terrestrial, that is, which has hidden itself within the cells of the hapless astronaut and, if uncontained, could threaten all life on Earth. This was also 16 years before Robert Wise’s The Andromeda Strain (1971) and 24 years before Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)—which are just two among so many movies that owe a huge debt to Quatermass creator, Nigel Kneale, for templating future fusions of science fiction and horror. For me, the film has the added appeal of feeling like BBC’s unofficial pilot for Doctor Who, in the same way that Forbidden Planet (1956) can be considered the unofficial pilot for Star Trek (1966-69).

The title of The Quatermass Xperiment was deliberately misspelled for a number of reasons: to differentiate it from Kneale’s hugely popular six-part BBC television drama broadcast live-to-camera in 1953; and as a marketing ploy highlighting its status as one of the first dozen or so films to be given the newly introduced ‘X’ certificate by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), indicating suitability for adults only.

Perhaps reality had been horrific enough for most audiences because horror movies seem to have died in the War. Only a few were made in the first post-war decade, and fewer in Britain, with perhaps Ealing’s Dead of Night (1946) being one of note. But the gothic had fallen from favour to be replaced with science fiction that often tried to put a more optimistic spin on new technologies that had emerged during the war. However, the terrors of the Blitz that devastated cities across Britain or the atomic bombs dropped on Japan lingered in recent memory and mixed with the growing paranoia of the Cold War. Monsters now came from outer space as veiled metaphors of ‘the other’.

This was counterpointed by a surge of optimism encouraged by the Festival of Britain, held in 1951 to celebrate the flourishing of arts and sciences in post-war Britain and to kick-start increased investment in industry. This was combined with the promise of a new era following the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, which was filmed and broadcast by the BBC. It seems Nigel Kneale felt it was his duty to buck against the trend and emphasise the darker possibilities of rapidly accelerating technologies. His decision to have the dénouement of his dark tale take place in Westminster Abbey would have tapped into the collective consciousness of the British folk and their memories of the Coronation. Though there are other narrative reasons for this choice of setting, relating to a subtext of faith versus science.

The original series was the first of its kind at a time when Nigel Kneale along with George F. Kerr comprised the entire BBC script unit and it was rushed into production with the first episodes being broadcast before the finale was scripted. Its effect on the viewing public was similar to that of the notorious Orson Welles radio adaptation of War of the Worlds that disturbed listeners in the US during 1938. It seems everyone who had a TV, which by 1955 had exceeded 50% of all households, was captivated. Producer Anthony Hinds was among those immediately impressed by the first episodes and suggested James Carreras, at Exclusive distribution, watch the show. Before that unwritten finale aired, they were already negotiating feature film rights on behalf of Hammer Films, the production subsidiary of Exclusive, and had earmarked a budget of around £40,000.

Little did they know that Hammer’s 43rd feature would be the beginning of the studio’s long, lucrative, and hugely successful association with the horror genre that would make it famous. By the time the movie was in development, Nigel Kneale was busy writing a sequel series for the BBC and Richard Landau was tasked with adapting three hours of teledrama into a tight script for a film of less than half that duration. He condensed Kneale’s 200-page television draft into 150 pages and director Val Guest jettisoned 30 of those prior to production. Val Guest had already helmed 17 films including four for Hammer—Life with the Lyons (1953) and its sequel, The Lyons in Paris (1955), both based on a comedy radio series; The Men of Sherwood Forest (1954), a period adventure featuring Robin Hood; and Break in the Circle (1954), a spy thriller about a smuggler helping a scientist to defect.

Kneale’s script had a preamble covering the launch and events before the rocket fell back to Earth. Landau drew from The War of the Worlds, both the novel and George Pal’s 1953 update. The audience doesn’t immediately know it’s a spaceship of terrestrial origin and it does recall the cylinder from Mars embedded in the turf of Horsell Common, initially too hot to approach.

In the original treatment, the rocket came down on Wimbledon Common which wasn’t possible to visualise in a studio-bound live telecast, so it crashed down on top of a house set. The movie version transfers the action to a rural setting of Oakley Green but retains the sequence of the house being damaged by the impact, again recalling the sequence from War of the Worlds when a cylinder half buries the protagonists under the rubble of a farmhouse.

Walter Harvey’s cinematography leans heavily into noir aesthetics as much of the action occurs at night with shadows used as compositional elements while creating a sense of lurking fear. This foreboding atmosphere is further enhanced from the start by James Bernard’s moody, often ominous score, which would be his first of many for Hammer.

The image of the rocket with its nose cone buried in the ground and its tail fins towering above trees and a haystack is one of cinema’s most striking. It may stretch credulity that the spaceship remains intact, but one assumes that its integrity must have been sturdy to withstand the stresses of speed and space. Besides, automated retro rockets may well have fired before impact. Part of the rocket cylinder with the hatch in it was constructed full-size on location in a field neighbouring the Hammer studios at Bray. The rest was a beautifully blended matte shot courtesy of special effects pioneer Les Bowie who had provided some excellent matte effects for the Powell and Pressburger classic The Red Shoes (1948) and would go on to become legendary for his work on many Hammer classics to come.

Such imagery would have conjured disturbing memories of wartime bombings for many of the audience and it’s no accident that the archetypal ‘golden age’ rocket resembles a V2. Note that Wernher von Braun, one of the main developers of Nazi Germany’s V2 rocket, was working on the space programme for NASA by the time The Quatermass Xperiment was in production. Incidentally, stock footage of a V2 was used as a stand-in for the rocket launch in the television version which would have made this reference all the more explicit.

We soon learn that the experimental rocket was launched without official clearance, by a joint Anglo-American team headed by Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) who arrives at the scene with assistant March (Maurice Kaufmann), his chief medical officer Dr. Briscoe (David King-Wood), a displeased man from the Ministry (Lionel Jeffries), and Judith Carroon (Margia Dean), wife of one of the astronauts. When the rocket’s hatch is finally opened her husband, Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth), stumbles out, seemingly the sole survivor of the mission as the space suits of his fellow crew members are found to be empty.

American actor Brian Donlevy was a veteran actor of more than 75 films having started his screen career in the 1920s. His age and experience brought a gravitas to the character, making the filmic Quatermass a lot more single-minded and harsher compared to the version scripted by Kneale. Throughout, he’s wrestling with feelings of guilt and responsibility for the men lost to his ‘failed’ experiment. As a scientist, he must focus on what can be learnt and, although he can’t save the astronauts, he may still save the world. Jack Warner provides a perfect foil, as the down-to-earth policeman who turns out to be surprisingly broad-minded, quickly diffusing any pseudo-scientific jargon and repeatedly humanising the proceedings. Warner was about to become a household name as he reprised his starring role in The Blue Lamp (1950) as PC George Dixon for the immensely popular BBC television series Dixon of Dock Green (1955-1976).

David King-Wood is convincing as the doctor, a man of science with a conscience finding himself helplessly out of his depth. Still, his tenacity pays off and he works out some crucial aspects of the alien creature’s biology, thus revealing the existential threat it presents. King-Wood had already worked with Val Guest on The Men of Sherwood Forest.

Margia Dean was a hard-working actress with around 50 appearances since her 1944 début. She’s fine as the well-meaning but ill-informed Judith Carroon who, with the aid of private detective Christie (Harold Lang), breaks Victor Carroon out of hospital. However, she doesn’t manage to get him home before he gives her the slip, leaving her screaming in the car. Taking things into her own hands for love of her husband showed some gumption on her part, but this isn’t what can be considered a strong female lead, and a steep gender power gradient is evident throughout. She’s kept in the dark by orders of Quatermass and must hire a man to retrieve her man-cactus hybrid husband.

The film was made and set in the 1950s so the idea of gender equality was a mere glimmer in the eye of British society. Young women had been called upon to do men’s work while the men were away fighting and dying on the front. But after the war, the men who returned wanted their jobs back and their artifice of superiority rebuilt. The groundbreaking element of body horror addresses an underlying social anxiety facing post-war masculinity. It explores the dissolution of identity, a fear of diminishing power and control—a loss of self. A growing paranoia that a rapidly changing world was gradually alienating them from their ’safe’ traditional roles.

Richard Wordsworth’s performance is a magnificent study in physical pain and mental anguish. He landed the role because of his theatrical experience and training in mime and clearly conveys the turmoil of his inner war against the mutating creature. It’s a battle between its overwhelming urge to multiply and the vestiges of Carroon’s staunch morality—an aspect of his humanity that the alien life form inadvertently preserved when it created the initial facsimile of the astronaut.

In Kneale’s original story, it’s made clear that the creature has not ‘taken over’ Carroon but is a new chameleon-like entity. To acclimatise itself to the Earthly environment, it absorbed the DNA and some aspects of personality from all three crew members. We learn this when it speaks in fragments of their different native languages. In Landau and Guest’s reworking, this is implied through Wordsworth’s physical performance, which is all but mute apart from the chilling and barely uttered single line, “Help me…”

The horror lies in the inkling that a human awareness is trapped, overwhelmed yet able to understand that its will is being diffused, stripped away within an alien lifeform that is non-sentient, driven by only biological imperatives to feed and reproduce. The alien is no more evil than a mould and the humanness it subsumes is its victim; therefore, the creature isn’t really a monster to be hated and feared, but to be pitied and stopped.

His performance was unavoidably compared to Boris Karloff because of the scene when he’s approached by a young girl (Jane Asher) at the canal side and barely manages to avoid striking her, diverting the swipe of his altered arm and breaking her doll instead. His restraint, which obviously takes great willpower, reminds us that some trace of Carroon’s humanity survives deep within the alien organism that has stolen his form. It’s a tense and upsetting sequence that deliberately echoes the controversial scene in Frankenstein (1931) in which the Monster throws a similar little girl into a lake, expecting her to float. Subsequently, he was offered the role of Frankenstein’s Monster in Hammer’s Curse of Frankenstein (1957) which he declined. Had he taken it his career trajectory may have been very different. The part went to Christopher Lee instead—his first of many Hammer films.

The final incarnation of the creature was created by Les Bowie, assisted by producer and second unit director Anthony Hinds, using an amalgam of tripe held together with textured rubber. There was some reversal of the film to make the unravelling of the tripe tentacles look as if they were muscular and coiling. Its final reveal still occurs in Westminster Abbey. In the telecast the primitive illusion was created with a cut-away to a photograph, with a hole cut into it to allow the alien puppet made from rubber gloves and garden cuttings to be pushed through. For the film, Les Bowie used a sophisticated combination of studio set with an excellent miniature in a seamless matte shot. The insert of an eye, albeit that of an octopus, and the overdub of a humanoid cry were added to provide a point of connection with what may have been the last vestige of Carroon—the ultimate, self-sacrificing element of humanity.

The demise of the monster was significantly streamlined from the telecast. In the movie, one assumes the last of Carroon’s will influences it to go to the Abbey. This could either be because it’s a big and obvious location where it will certainly be noticed, or perhaps Carroon is simply seeking sanctuary or divine intervention. However, the thing needs no coaxing or coercion from Quatermass to wrap itself around the metal scaffolding. The subtle subtext of Carroon’s chaotic emotions creating a balance with the rational intellect of Quatermass was implied rather than spelled out with unnecessary expositional dialogue. The professor’s final ‘inspirational’ speech was dropped in favour of a single classic line. When asked, “What next?”, he replies, “I’m going to start again,” and stridently strides off. Into the uncertain future.

UK | 1955 | 82 MINUTES (UK CUT) • 78 MINUTES (US CUT) | 1.66:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH

Limited Edition 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray Special Features:

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of The Quatermass Xperiment, Hammer Films have restored the immensely influential genre classic from a new 4K scan of the best quality surviving elements. The result is a lavish 5-disc box set presenting reconstructed versions of the original 1.37:1 academy aspect ratio, as filmed, the 1.66:1 theatrical format and the rarer US version of the film, given the dreadful title of The Creeping Unknown, presented in 1.85:1 widescreen. The generous bonus material includes two new documentaries, one chronicling the life and influence of Nigel Kneale, and the making of The Quatermass Xperiment. There’s a featurette detailing the restoration process, plus plenty of archival materials from previous releases, including commentaries, featurettes, and the original House of Hammer magazine comic strip adaptation which will definitely elicit a frisson of nostalgia for anyone of a certain age who fondly remembers the periodical that published from 1976 until 1984.

The package also includes the surviving first two episodes of the original 1953 BBC television series, which was one of the last BBC dramas to be performed and broadcast live from the studios at Alexandra Palace. They are thought to constitute the earliest significant examples of BBC drama to have been preserved. The episodes were recorded by pointing a camera at a monitor screen during broadcast, a primitive technique that was first used to preserve the Coronation earlier that year. This may be apocryphal but, apparently, a Canadian television network had wanted to buy the series, but a big fly landed on the screen and crawled about on it for a good proportion of part two, rendering the footage unsaleable. So, the BBC didn’t even bother recording the subsequent four broadcasts. If true this was a rather poetic echo of the key theme, as our state-of-the-art modern technology was defeated by a lowly and ancient biological organism.

Cast & Crew

director: Val Guest.
writers: Richard Landau & Val Guest (based on a serial written by Nigel Kneale).
starring: Brian Donlevy, Richard Wordsworth, Jack Warner, David King-Wood, Margia Dean & Maurice Kaufmann.