The Quatermass Xperiment (1955)
Directed by Val Guest
Starring Brian Donlevy, Jack Warner, Richard Wordsworth, Margia Dean, Thora Hird, Lionel Jeffries

“There’s no room for personal feelings in science.”
– Professor Bernard Quatermass –

That quote is one of the reason why I enjoy the Quatermass movies so much. What attracted me the most was the blind dedication that Quatermass has, much like one of his fore-fathers… Victor Frankenstein. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt when you have an alien monster on loose either.

The film starts out with a rocket ship crashing to the earth, which was put up into space by Professor Quatermass and his team of scientists. But when the hatch opens, only one of the three men that were on board comes out. There’s no trace of the other two, besides their empty suits and the lone survivor seems to be a little different. As Quatermass and his team try to figure out just what happen when their rocket was in space, the lone survivor escapes and starts to change.

This was the film that really put Hammer Studios on the map. They’d been around since the mid-’30s, starting as a releasing company, but then they started producing their own films, usually adapting radio shows into films. But when a teleplay started on July 18th, 1953, called The Quatermass Experiment, Hammer producer Anthony Hinds immediately took note. The series was so successful that each Saturday it played it would clear out the pubs because everyone was at home watching! Hammer acquired the film rights and went to work condensing this six half-hour episodes into a feature film.

The job of directing this project was Val Guest, who had already directed a few pictures for Hammer, such as The Men of Sherwood Forest (1954) and Break in the Circle (1955), but nothing in this type of genre. But he decided to make it as if it was a newsreel or documentary, giving it a very real look and feel to it. Not only did it work, it was effective, scary, and damn entertaining!

American actor Brian Donlevy was cast to play Professor Quatermass, which some English critics didn’t care for (including writer Nigel Kneale who had written the original teleplay). The original character was more of an older professor type, quite different than the way Donlevy played it, bringing an air of authority and attitude. He’s always running around telling people what to do, firing off order after order. In this version, Quatermass could really care less about anything or anybody, as long as it doesn’t stop his progress. His goals may be for the benefit of mankind, but if a few people have to give their lives to science then so be it.

Richard Wordsworth plays Victor Carroon, the lone survivor of the rocket, doing an incredible job bringing this character to life with no dialogue and not much to do physically other than the look on his face. What he emits from his expressions and the tortured look on his face is worth pages of dialogue. You can feel the inner torment that is going on inside his body. Wordsworth would later go on to play the beggar in opening sequence of Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf (1961) as well in few other roles.

It was released here in the states under the title The Creeping Unknown because American audience weren’t familiar with the teleplay. The letter E was dropped from the British title because the studio wanted to emphasize the X certificate it has received. A nice bit of ballyhoo there.

This is an essential title in the Hammer filmography. Not only is it a thrilling and exciting film, it is well made, filled with great characters that seem like real people. Donlevy is such a prick, but you have to admire his drive. Not only is it one of my favorites from the studio, but it set the tone for what was to come, not only with two sequels to this, Quatermass 2 (American title Enemy from Space, 1957) and Quatermass and the Pit (American title Five Million Years to Earth, 1967), but with plenty of horror to come a few years later, in bright, glorious and gory color!