The Quatermass Xperiment

This was listed as The Creeping Unknown, which was the US release title, but when the film started it used the original title, so I’m going with that. It’s much better than the US title would lead you to believe.

I have seen one of the Bernard Quatermass movies, Quatermass and the Pit (US title: Five Million Years to Earth), and was aware that it was originally a British TV series, but didn’t know just how influential it was. Wiki says that BQ was the first real series hero on the BBC, maybe a bit like our own Marshall Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke. I don’t know quite what to make of that, but I’m impressed that while we were watching a pretty good series about the old West and a lawman, the Brits were enthralled by a scientist who was the head of the space programme over there. The character was created by Nigel Kneale, and was a staple on TV, in movies, on radio, and in books for over 50 years. And for my money, I would have happily traded Marshall Dillon, Paladin, the Mavericks, and the whole Cartwright family including Hoss and Little Joe for Quatermass.

But this movie isn’t Quatermass. I’m sure the script had a lot to do with it, but casting Brian Donlevy didn’t help one bit. Seems that to get financing they had to have one American movie star in it, and that’s who they chose. Quatermass as originally written was a moral and sensitive man. Donlevy plays him as a cold, implacable steamroller, somehow able to order around the police and military. How did he get that kind of juice? Never explained. He has no human feelings, and even says the laughably stupid line “There is no room for emotion in science.” Lord, how many times have we heard that line from mad and/or driven scientists in the movies? We still hear it today, and it is utterly false. A good scientist thinks about the impact of his discoveries, good and bad, and they have been known to agonize over them, like Robert Oppenheimer. (Of course, there have been a few human cesspits like Edward Teller to provide the exception to the rule.) Nigel Kneale hated Donlevy, who was a staggering drunk at this point in his declining career.

Which is too bad, as otherwise it’s a pretty good creepy thriller. Val Guest shoots it in a semi-documentary style, as a rocket ship returns from the first trip into space (a full 1,500 miles!) with two dead crewman, and one driven mad and infected with some sort of space fungus. He starts morphing into a giant amebic octopus that eats most of the animals in the zoo, and then is cornered in Westminster Abbey and killed with … electricity! And how many times has the human race had its tits pulled out of the wringer by that good old standby, electricity? Never mind. It’s well done, with the glaring exception of the heartless little Hitler in the center of it.