THE QUATERMASS X-PERIMENT (a.k.a - THE CREEPING UNKNOWN -1955)
DIRECTED BY Val Guest
SCREENPLAY by Richard Landau and Val Guest based on the TV serial "The Quatermass Experiment" by Nigel Kneale
STARRING - Brian Donlevy as Professor Bernard Quatermass, Richard Wordsworth as Victor Carroon, Jack Warner as Inspector Lomax, David King-Wood as Dr. Gordon Briscoe, Margia Dean as Judith Carroon
PLOT - When an experimental British rocket ship crash lands on the outskirts of London it's inventor (and head of the British Rocket Group) Professor Bernard Quatermass is called in to investigate.
Quatermass finds that out of the crew of three only a single astronaut - Victor Carroon remains, the other two crewmen have mysteriously vanished.
Carroon himself seems to be afflicted with a strange disorder - he's in a catatonic state and his skin appears to be changing and taking on a plantlike texture.
Very soon it becomes obvious that Carroon has been infected by a malignant alien parasite. A parasite that is slowly taking over his body and mutating him into a predatory monster.
Can the alien creature that was once Victor Carroon be stopped before it places the lives of every man, woman and child on Earth in deadly jeopardy ?...
PERFORMANCES - Bernard Quatermass is an icon of British sci-fi and the character was a massive influence in pop culture - he was one of the inspirations for the character of Doctor Who and here with this movie was at the very beginning of the wave of horror films that would make Hammer studios a household name.
The character of Quatermass started out on BBC television in a trilogy of highly rated and critically acclaimed sci-fi drama serials and in his TV incarnation was played by three different actors. Quatermass was a very British character - a slightly eccentric, gentlemanly academic who just happened to be very skilled in repelling alien menaces. He's the sort of character you could easily imagine someone like Peter Cushing playing and nailing perfectly. So who better to play Quatermass than an American actor best known for his "tough guy" roles ? It would be like casting Clint Eastwood to play Sherlock Holmes for crying out loud ! What WHERE they thinking ???
The answer is of course - box office ratings. At that point in time Hammer where looking to crack the American market, so in thier infinite wisdom they decided that they needed to cast an American actor in the title role to act as a box office draw. In theory this is a sound enough idea - there where plenty of American actors who would have made a great Quatermass - Burgess Meredith for example is one name that springs off the top of my head, Hell - they could even have got Vincent Price to do it - I'm sure he'd have been well up for it.
Instead they cast Brian Donlevy - an actor more at home playing cops and soldiers than alien fighting genius professors. With his gritty sounding drawl of a voice you could easily imagine him playing a cynical, tough Police Detective or Private Eye. You can see him walking into a seedy bar in the Bronx and beating a confession out of a stool pigeon before embarking on a gun fight with a local crime boss. What you can't imagine him doing is building a fully functioning rocket ship and figuring out a means to stop an alien contagion. He's hopelessly miscast.
Despite all that he is quite entertaining to watch as Quatermass, partially because he's such an awkward and off kilter choice (he even pronounces his name as "Quaydermuss") and partially because he makes the main hero so unlikeable that he weirdly becomes a more interesting character as a result.
Donlevy's Quatermass is rude, abrasive and so driven in his scientific endeavours that he doesn't seem to care about the consequences of his actions - the ends simply justify the means and that's all that matters. At the end of the film, mere seconds after the alien has been destroyed Quatermass is blithely making the decision to start building a new rocket ship asap. Despite the fact that the last rocket bought back something which cost the lives of several people, he doesn't care. He's a man who clearly hasn't learnt his lesson. Bizzarely, against all expectations and odds Donlevy actually manages to pull it off...but only just.
Quatermass is aided by his assistant Dr Briscoe - played by David King-Wood. Ironically King-Wood in both physical appearance and the way he plays his role is much closer to the type of actor you'd imagine would be playing Quatermass himself. Weirdness upon weirdness. Jack Warner is also on hand playing a police inspector who helps Quatermass defeat the alien. He's decent enough but his character doesn't make that big of an impression on the story despite Warner recieving joint top billing with Donlevy.
Somebody who DOES make a big impression though is Richard Wordsworth who plays the doomed astronaut Victor Carroon. He's brilliant, by far the best thing about the movie. With his gaunt features and thousand yard stare he manages to be both unnerving and sympathetic. I've heard people mention his "monster performance" in the same breath as Karloff playing the Frankenstein monster and they're not far wrong. Wordsworth manages to convey both the frightened dying man who's slowly transforming into something unearthly AND the cold, unsympathetic alien intelligence that's slowly consuming him. It's a remarkable performance.
The best scene is when Carroon breaks into a pharmacist and confronts the frightened man working there - he does this weird hissing sob that sounds really agonised as he hides his mutated arm inside his coat. You can see that he just KNOWS he's about to kill this unfortunate bloke but also can't stop himself from doing so. It's chilling and utterly great.
SFX - Carroon's transformation is achieved mainly by makeup work - it's quite primitive in its way but coupled with the well shot black and white photography it DOES manage to sell the body horror element of the story pretty well.
The transformed Carroon's final fully alien form is pretty impressive for the time, I particularly like the one remaining human-like eye that they give it - it's like there's still a little bit of Victor left in there, staring out in grief and horror at what he's become.
VIOLENCE - The Carroon creature kills his victims by absorbing them into his own body. With his earlier victims he only seems to absorb parts of them leaving behind twisted mangled bodies that look as if they've partially collapsed-in on themselves. It's a pretty creepy little effect for a movie that's getting a bit long in the tooth.
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