For the big screen version, Hammer brought in Val Guest to direct and co-script the adaptation and imported American actor Brian Donlevy to play Professor Bernard Quatermas. The film opens with the crash landing of the first manned spaceflight out of Earth's atmosphere, a mission that went awry. The ship (which sticks out of the ground of a rural British farm like an arrow, looking like a Flash Gordon rocket excavated in an archeological dig) has returned without explanation, still burning up from the reentry heat, too hot to open with killing the men inside. As the military cordons off the area, Professor Quatermas arrives, takes charge and finally orders the ship open, where he finds two astronauts inexplicably missing and the third (Richard Wordsworth) in shock, with a look of fear frozen on his face and an unidentified fungus-like growth on his arm. The scene takes place at night, with military spotlights cutting through the mist and casting hard shadows across the ground, and the sense of mystery and the unknown builds from there.
Nigel Kneale, who had no involvement in the big-screen production, was unimpressed with the film and actively hostile to the casting of Donlevy, who brought in solely to have an American lead for U.S. distribution. I can't fault Kneale's judgment here. His Quatermas is a great British hero of science and reason, an atomic age Sherlock Holmes with a streak of compassion. The screenplay adaptation resorts to the bluster of scientific arrogance to bully the cops and government officials who are trying to wrap their minds around a space-age mystery while Donlevy plays Quatermass not as an inquisitive intellectual but an arrogant, authoritarian scientist with a brusque attitude and a tendency to dismiss any avenue of inquiry that he didn't think up himself. It makes him very "American" in a British culture of understatement and almost ritualized politeness and he is easily the most energized presence in the film, barking orders and snapping at anyone who questions him, jumping on discoveries and leapfrogging through the possibilities at a race. In his way, Donlevy does provide the film's engine, but without much dimension to what should be the voice of reason over fear and superstition.
Given those dramatic problems, the rest of the film is never less than intriguing and, at is best, is haunting, horrific and riveting. While Quatermas bullies and stonewalls the police investigators and government officials as they establish jurisdictional authority, the sole surviving astronaut, put into quarantine and under observation, is changing at an alarming rate. When his hand bumps a potted cactus, his arms starts to replicate the hard skin and spines (anticipating John Carpenter's version of The Thing), and when he flees the quarantine, its hard to tell if it's human terror or alien survival instinct. Wordsworth is haunting as the tormented and speechless survivor, gaunt and silent, looking on with hollow eyes at his protective wife as his body undergoes a transformation that no one can explain and skulking through the shadows of the city like a wounded animal.
The Quatermas Xperiment was released two years before Hammer remade itself as the leading horror studio with The Curse of Frankenstein and a new, gothic style. You can see the roots of that style here: science fiction film with an atmosphere of horror as the transforming man flees through the city at night and hides along the banks of the river in the mist of the morning. It's space-age horror with a Gothic look, thanks to the cobblestone streets and age-old brick and stone architecture of the city of London and Guest's sculpted lighting in the night scenes, but it's more than just stylish atmospherics. Though the creature that emerges echoes with resemblances to numerous subsequent films, it was something new in the monster pantheon in its time: a completely alien life-form that bears no physical or biological resemblance to man. The final battle between human science and alien morphology takes place in a temple of longevity and mystery and religion, an aspect of Kneale's approach to science fiction that later films explores more deeply: religion and myth as a reflection of ancient science and unexplainable phenomenon. Given the limitations of budget and special effects technology (and a slightly hamfisted melodrama on the human side of the battle), it still retains an eerie edge and a sense of urgency.
Kneale wrote four Quatermas serials and all of them were turned into features (the last one simply edited down from the longer TV mini-series). Andre Morell, Andrew Keir and John Mills all played the role in subsequent incarnations on screen, big and small, and offered interpretations much closer to Kneale's intention: introspective, inquisitive, engaging with both the evidence and his research partners to solve the scientific mysteries. But while Donlevy is far from the ideal Quatermas (he's a tad more restrained in the sequel Quatermas 2, aka Enemy from Space), it's his incarnation that was first seen by many British filmgoers and the first in any medium in the U.S., and his Quatermas who launched arguably the most intelligent and conceptually ambitious science fiction films of the fifties and sixties.
Released on the MGM Limited Edition Collection, part of their manufacture-on-demand line of films. It's a DVD-R format, burned to disc rather than pressed, and may not have as a long a shelf-life as a DVD. The film is well mastered as most films from the fifties, with a strong black & white image and a clean mono soundtrack. It's presented in Academy ratio (1.33:1) and features no supplements.
To order The Quatermass Xperiment, go to Amazon.
by Sean Axmaker
