Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment,
a movie version of Nigel Kneale’s pioneering TV series (six episodes were transmitted
live, four of them now lost), holds up quite well, spanning large-scale
technological spectacle and intimate body horror, benefiting from its feeling
for everyday locations and personality types. The film starts with the return
of a spacecraft launched under the supervision of the titular Dr. Quatermass,
crashing into a farmer’s field, two of its three-man crew mysteriously vanished
and the other, Richard Caroon, in poor shape which only worsens from there (and
that’s putting it mildly). The film benefits significantly from Richard
Wordsworth’s performance as Caroon, suggesting depths of anguish beneath a
scarily drained exterior as he wreaks increasing havoc (the film makes
diverting use of a zoo in particular), and contrasting nicely with a host of
no-nonsense British presences. The climax comes in Westminster Abbey during a
live television broadcast, thereby fusing the alien menace with escalating
technological home invasion, suggesting the potential symbiotic multiplicity of
modern threats to one’s stability (presumably this was even more effective in
the original TV transmission, but the climactic episode was among those lost). Viewed
from a modern-day perspective, those threats might include the choice of an
American actor, Brian Donlevy, to play Quatermass, in the original another Brit,
the resonances only deepened by the knowledge that it was prompted by
commercial considerations, the actor’s initial bulldozing intransigence (which
softens a bit as the movie goes on) only deepening the sense of unwelcome disruption
(which nevertheless is mostly met with British subservience; it’s notable that
Quatermass launched the space vessel without waiting for official permission). And
if that’s not enough, the film may nowadays evoke thoughts of something like the
Covid lab-leak theory, in its depiction of inadequately ring-fenced science spawning
a potentially exponentially expanding contamination...
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