Film Review - The Quatermass Xperiment

In the current age of digital downloads and streaming, or even physical media like DVD and before that VHS it's basically impossible to imagine how TV worked in the fifties. Even if a show was recorded before or during broadcast the only time anyone would ever see it again would be if there was a repeat, which happened rarely - if you missed it, you missed it. If you loved it there was a fair chance you'd never see it again.

Nigel Kneale's first Quatermass serial, The Quatermass Experiment, was broadcast on the BBC in 1953 and was one of the first times television became an event. Hard figures for how many people actually had a TV set at the time are hard to find (though it was greatly boosted by the coronation of Elizabeth II a couple of weeks before broadcast), but it's estimated that the 5 million people that turned in represented a gigantic chunk of it, as in 80% plus. It was also at the time a relatively expensive bit of television, and the BBC planned to offset this by filming the live serial and selling it to Canada. However, the recording process involved pointing a 16mm camera at a monitor (telerecording) and gave such poor results that after two of the six half-hour episodes they stopped bothering. So no repeats there (with the long-term result that two-thirds of one of the most seminal television dramas of all time will only ever be seen if aliens from the right number of light years away run us over a copy).

Enter Hammer Films, a British B-movie company, who immediately saw the profit in remaking the serial for cinema. The BBC and Kneale also saw the potential and shopped it around several more respectable companies without reaching a deal and accepting Hammer's tender. The three-hour television serial was compressed into a film half that length by Val Guest and Richard Landau, reportedly much to the displeasure of Kneale, the Alan Moore of TV writers. Guest then shot it on a budget of £24,000, employing a docudrama approach.

The resulting film really isn't too bad. The pared-down script holds up well, getting much of the original plot across to an extent that exposes the flab of the rigid half-hour serial format. Guest's eye for quasi-realism and suspense avoids the horror angle turning into full-on sensationalism (the film was awarded an X certificate, and Hammer capitalised on this by renaming it The Quatermass Xperiment, the letter rendered in massive red type on posters) and while the effects are clearly those of a fifties B-movie they don't turn the film into a laughing stock.

One problem was that Hammer raised the funding partly via a deal with an American distributor who arranged for lesser US stars to headline Hammer films and thus secured them bookings in theatres the other side of the Atlantic. This meant Quatermass himself was rewritten as an American scientist, if still head of British Rocket Group. Sadly, the 'star' Lippert parachuted in was Brian Donlevy, an Oscar nominee some 15 years before but at the time of filming a bloated, disinterested alcoholic. This means Quatermass' trademark bristling comes across as surly antagonism, and it's close to a killer blow.

Thankfully just about everything else goes right - Jack Warner's Inspector Lomax works well, possibly because we're more sympathetic due to him having to deal with the slobbish, grumpy Donlevy Quatermass, but the acting plaudits are stolen by Richard Wordsworth as the infected Carroon, a brilliant near non-verbal performance. Aside from Donlevy it's a solid, confident and still enjoyable movie thanks to Guest's robust pacing and ability to make the budget work for him rather than against him. However, having the lead so completely miscast is a big problem.