The Quatermass Xperiment

Unlike the exploitative science fiction and horror films made for American consumption during the 1950s, which targeted teenagers and young adults, the far fewer genre films produced and released in Great Britain were much more serious and adult. The Quatermass British TV teleplays were an absolute fan favorite, riveting viewers to their couches and generating instant interest in costlier movie production remakes. Not surprisingly, Hammer Film Productions was the first to recognize the potential by 1955, only a few years after the Quatermass plays were broadcast. Richard Landau (he the co-writer of Frankenstein 1970) and director Val Guest wrote the script, based on the BBC Television Play by the legendary Nigel Kneale, James Bernard wrote the musical score, Les Bowie created the special effects, James Needs edited, Len Harris operated the cameras, Phil Leakey did the make-up, and Anthony Hinds produced, all recognizable Hammer names.

The movie captures a distinct mood from the start, as a young couple laughs and cuddles while walking down a country road. They run into a farmer’s field, rolling in the hay, when a loud noise is heard overhead, disrupting the young couple. As the male says to get down, the young girl panics and runs at breakneck speed toward a farmhouse, whose owner beckons them inside as debris falls and the ceiling collapses. The farmer goes for a shotgun as dogs bark outside—a horse whinnies. The man witnesses a crashed rocket ship intact, with its noise buried deep in a field, smoke billowing around it.

Soon, the entire community gathers in their nightclothes, crowding together as a fire truck arrives. As an official car passes the Bray Garage (a nod to the fact that the movie was filmed at Bray Studios), the authorities broadcast a message for the gathered crowd to go home, as they are congesting the streets. Following the arrival of an ambulance and a fire truck at the site of the rocket, officials again ask people to leave. Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) is also driving to the crash scene, accompanied by four staff members, and Quatermass looks stern as always. Blake (Lionel Jeffries) asks Quatermass what went wrong, to which he responds that he is a scientist, not a fortune teller, persisting in his grumpy ways. Quatermass is proud to have launched a rocket into space and brought it back. A doctor, part of Quatermass’ crew, worries about the condition of the three men launched into space. However, they must first wait for the rocket to cool down before entering the vessel, which will take three or four hours, as Marsh attempts to contact the men inside.

Quatermass objects to people who want to open the rocket right now, “A blast of air would incinerate them!” Blake, a member of the government scientific committee, says Quatermass was gambling with these men’s lives since, “You launched that rocket without official sanction!” And Quatermass answers that all gambles are risks, “If the whole world waited for official sanction, it’ll be standing still.” Quatermass says whether the men are living or not, “They’ll fire the imagination of a hundred men who will fight for the same privilege when we launch the second rocket, you can’t stop.” Quatermass talks rapidly in a staccato rhythm without any emotion. Marsh reports a tapping from inside, and Quatermass instructs the fireman to approach the exit door carefully and spray it with water when he opens it remotely.

As the rocket’s door slowly opens amid powerful water sprays, only one astronaut, Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth), comes out, not three. Quatermass and Marsh enter the rocket's interior to investigate; they only find that the pressure suits are empty and the shoes are lying about. The other two men are not on the rocket. Inside the ambulance, Carroon looks to be dirtied, burned, and in a state of shock, twisting his head around as if to speak, but he can’t. He mutters, “Help me,” but he can only flex his right arm.

Inspector Lomax (Jack Warner) is in his office, shaving while Quatermass comes to see him. In a calm yet derisive manner, Quatermass barks, “I’ll come straight to the point. Inspector… I will not have your men coming into my research center and treating Victor Carroon as if he were a pathological criminal. He’s a sick man, Inspector. He’s been through an ordeal that few men could have survived.” Lomax reveals, “But two men did not survive … “ Lomax goes on to describe himself as an old-fashioned sort of chap, a plain and simple Bible man: … if three men take off in a rocket and only one comes back, that leaves minus two … “ Quatermass dips into his valise and produces in-depth reports on all three men to help Lomax in his investigation. Quatermass abruptly leaves, stating that the only inquiry that will be of any value is the scientific one, and he’s better suited for that.

From the very beginning, Police Inspector Lomax is contrasted with the scientist, Professor Quatermass. Lomax acknowledges that he knows little about rockets or outer space; he doesn’t indulge in science fiction, but he is a man of practicality and common sense. The two men, compelled to work together to solve this mystery, will become better individuals through the process of learning from each other.

Richard Wordsworth as Victor Caroon commits the first performance of the 1950s to be worthy of critical attention in a genre film. In this sequence, Caroon sits handcuffed in an examination chair, his blank gaze staring straight ahead. Studying Carroon’s chart, the doctor says he shouldn’t be alive. The doctor shows Quatermass Carroon’s shoulder, which is swollen and discolored, and then shows him Carroon’s face, telling him that his bone structure has changed. At this moment, Carroon’s wife, Mrs. Judith Carroon (Margia Dean), enters and asks if her husband is any better. Judith asks if Victor should be in a hospital, but it is obvious that Quatermass has been keeping him here. The doctor says he can no longer take responsibility for Carroon’s condition, doesn’t have the proper equipment here, and wants Victor hospitalized. Quatermass says, “I suppose you're both right.” Then he rants, “But can a hospital do more than you can do? Would a hospital know what goes on in space? … it’s a whole new world out there, a wilderness, uncharted. He’s been there and come back … unlock his mind for me, Briscoe (David King-Wood). You’ll stay with him, Judith, he needs you!” After Quatermass leaves, Caroon seems to smirk, and his right arm still twitches, but he remains silent even though he seems more aware than he lets on—his sense of being aware when speechless is creepy.

“The solution is elementary, my dear Inspector,” says Quatermass as he enters the room. Lomax states that he wishes to return the files on the three spacemen to Quatermass. But he wants Quatermass to see how Carroon’s past fingerprints differ from those of last night. “But these prints aren’t even human,” Quatermass declares as he answers the phone. The call seems to disturb him, beckoning him back to the rocket. Quatermass’ crew has found a strange jelly-like substance in the confines of the ship. And Quatermass wants it examined immediately.

After Dr. Briscoe has had time to study the space jelly, he reports to Quatermass. “Harmless organic jelly … cell tissue … could be animal or human cells.” “You know what you ‘re saying … You mean you’re asking me to believe that these are the remains of two human beings?” As this debriefing continues, in the back hospital room, with his Carroon’s wife sleeping, Carroon stirs, slowly gets out of bed, reaches for a bouquet, knocks it over, and falls, awakening Judith. She immediately exits the room, crying for help, and the men pick up Carroon. As they help him into bed, they notice his quivering right arm and that his facial skin is changing even more. Judith, in anger, tells Quatermass her husband would be better off dead. “You destroyed him like you’ve destroyed everything else you’ve touched.” Judith feels she can help him better than Quatermass, but he says, “There’s no room for personal feelings and science, Judith.” Briscoe finally demands that Carroon be admitted to a hospital, but Quatermass insists that he be placed in isolation within the hospital.

Quatermass is told that the film from the smashed camera on board the rocket has been developed and is ready to be shown. The silent film shows the three men inside the capsule sleeping and awakening. Then something rocks the capsule, knocking the men to the ground as they hurry to their workstations. The capsule readings are out of kilter. A white shimmering light blurs the film twice as one man falls. Then a second collapses. Then the shimmering, blinding light returns for the third time, as the third man collapses and the film turns white. Quatermass orders the projectionist to rerun it.

After visiting hours at the Central Clinic Hospital, Judith inquires about Victor Carroon's condition with the man at the desk. The desk clerk, after telephoning, says Carroon is unchanged, no worse. Then Judith begs to see him for a moment. She asks if she could wait for the night nurse to go off shift in half an hour to talk to him. The desk clerk directs her to the elevator she will be using. Judith ducks outside to pay a man, Christie (Harold Long), to help Carroon escape. The hired man puts on a white lab coat, tells Judith to wait 15 minutes, and then sneaks inside the hospital. Christie reports to Carroon’s room and tells the male nurse he is his relief. After the on-duty nurse leaves, Christie rushes to get Carroon dressed and ready to meet his wife. But the silent Carroon eyes a cactus plant on his hospital table, staring intently at it. Caroon makes a fist and bashes the plant, crying silently, obviously in pain. Hiding his right hand inside his jacket, the two men exit to join Judith. When Christie tries to see what is hidden inside the sports jacket in the elevator, Christie expresses unbridled fear as Carroon strikes him with an unseen object and exits alone. Judith opens the hospital door from the outside and sees Victor standing blankly. She whisks him to her car as another nurse finds Christie’s body slumped over, half his face gone, his hand contorted (Quatermass’ crew later say it looks as though the “life was drawn out of him.”) Now Carroon is in the front seat with Judith, who is optimistically ranting about how she will get him the finest doctors and everything will be all right. Carroon just intensely stares at her. Victor’s right hand is buried in his pocket, and when his wife notices, she pulls the car over to the curb. Victor, who is slowly transforming, produces the right hand, which he holds up, obviously mutated, but quickly escapes as Judith screams. When Judith is finally found alone in her car, moaning, she reveals “something about his hand being all gray with thorns like a cactus.”

When examining Christie’s body, they find growth on his face, which was half-plant. His “entire tissue structure has been eaten away to the bone,” Briscoe says. Quatermass queries, “Briscoe, what if there is a form of life in space, not on some planet, but just drifting … not life as we know it with intelligence, but pure energy with no organic structure, invisible. Now, the rocket passed through its path and entered the rocket, finding living specimens of our form of life. Cell organisms, human … now if even by accident it could enter one of those structures, what a way to invade the Earth!” Quatermass goes on to say this alien organism took the blood out of the missing two astronauts and “now is using Carroon,” Quatermass continues. “And it’s found other forms of life like the cactus.” And it seeks to mutate animals and plants into a new organism with “the ability to destroy, possess, and multiply at will.” But to live, it must have food.

Carroon wanders and tries to enter a drug store that is closing. Carroon jangles the door knob to gain attention. The pharmacist relents and allows the man to enter the shop. It seems Carroon is searching for a specific drug, and he haphazardly pushes rows of medicine off the shelves. The druggist asks to examine his hand, which is now swollen and turning a dark color, illustrating the merger of human flesh and a cactus plant. Carroon, obviously in pain, swats his arm at the druggist, who screams.

Lomax is again shaving and whistling a tune when he receives an emergency phone call about the mess at the drug store and asks all the usual suspects to be there. Shouting, he tells his wife he must return, putting on his tie. Arriving at the drug store, Lomax, Quatermass, Briscoe, and other people open a closet door, and the body of the druggist falls out, again showing shriveled, distorted hands and a half-eaten face, just like Christie.

Meanwhile, Carroon wanders the harbor area, moving in a spastic rhythm until he finally falls. He's crying in obvious pain, cuddling his transforming arm. He collapses near a small boat. The next morning, a little girl (Jane Asher) pushes a baby carriage (holding her doll) near the marshlands. She awakens Carroon, sleeping inside the small boat, and he soon exits behind the little girl, talking to her doll. The girl turns around to face Victor, who is again hiding his deformed arm. The young girl talks pleasantly to Carroon until he hits and breaks the doll with a violent swing of his arm. The doll lies in pieces on the ground as Victor runs away up a hill. In the distance, the little girl cuddles her doll.

Even though Carroon is not Frankenstein’s Monster, the scene with Jane Asher reminds us of the scene with Little Maria (Marilyn Harris) from Frankenstein (1931). In the 1931 version, the little girl throws flowers into a pond to watch them float. The Monster also believes Little Maria will float, so he gently tosses her into the water; however, she does not float.

Another night, a zoo-keeper checks up on all the animals, putting them to bed. The man makes his rounds among animal sounds, which are pretty spooky in the darkness. But buried in the bushes is a stalking Carroon. Animals appear to be agitated and restless, making more noise than usual. Caroon observes the animals; in one instance, the photographer uses a subjective point-of-view shot from Caroon’s perspective, showing him lurking through the brush. The next morning, dead animals are scattered around the zoo and in cages, perplexing the zoo owner while Lomax and Quatermass investigate. Briscoe discovers some wet ooze from the bushes, and while probing, he finds a living substance (which the audience does not see), and he wonders aloud what form Carroon will take next. We view Briscoe’s horrified face.

At Quatermass’s lab, we view the organic blob in a cage with a white mouse, having absorbed all the others; the cactus/blob quivering. Briscoe predicts the mass will double in size within the hour, but Quatermass thinks aloud, "This is only a fragment of the main organism … no living thing on Earth stands a chance against it. How do we fight it; how do we stop it!” While Quatermass, Lomax, and the crew investigate the latest sighting of the plant-like creature, back at Quatermass’s lab, the blob creature has more than doubled in size, shattering its glass cage and threatening other lab animals. Meanwhile, Quatermass and Briscoe return to find the crawling organic mass. Lomax sends a desperate plea to his department to search for and find the alien invader.

The cameras go blank during a BBC documentary about the restoration of Westminster Abbey. When they return, the sight of a dead body appears on camera, and other people are investigating as the director runs out of the studio to discover what is going on. He crosses an unnoticed trail of slime leading directly to Westminster Abbey. It turns out the dead man fell from a scaffolding. Returning to the show, the camera pans through the Abbey and spots the gigantic creature near the scaffolding high in the Abbey. It now sports two eyes, creating some semblance of a face. Someone utters, “It’s 20 feet across.”

Quatermass tells Lomax to hook the electrical cable up to it, to burn the thing to a crisp, and to divert all the power from London’s power stations to this location. In several montage shots, London goes dark as the power is rechanneled to Westminster Abbey. The monster cries out when the power is switched on as flames ignite. Camera shots reveal the beast is being burned alive, ending up on fire, lying still. Lomax states, as the crew views the dead remains of the creature, “This time you won. In my simple way, I’ve done a lot of praying. One world at a time is good enough for me. Then Quatermass exits without saying a word, not even answering people who speak to him. Finally, he speaks, “I am going to need some help … I’m going to start again.” Quatermass walks alone down a shadowy street. This fades into a shot of another rocket taking off as end credits appear. The experiment continues.

In 1955, space science was in its early stages, largely unknown, and this Hammer film was made two years before The Curse of Frankenstein, marking the beginning of Hammer’s success in the genre. And The Quatermass Xperiment was also a minor science fiction/horror classic, which was somewhat rickety due to its limited budget, hampering the production's classic status. The film features two distinct monsters, the Victor Carroon human monster and the creeping blob/cactus creature. Luckily for fans, the film focuses on the terrific performance by Richard Wordsworth as Victor Carroon, the film’s major strength. Whether it is losing control, striking out violently, favoring his mutated right arm, crying almost quietly in pain, or registering fear and confusion, Richard submits a riveting performance.

The film is merely a good early science fiction mystery, but combined with Wordsworth's performance, it is excellent. But the film's ending feels rushed, as the blob/cactus creature appears during the film’s final 10 minutes. And what does it do except sit motionless on scaffolding at Westminster Abbey? Authentic narrators come to the police to tell stories of crawling creatures, but this is not a radio play. Unlike The Thing from Another World, the narrated scene is too bloody and violent. The scene to be filmed, as described, is simply too costly, and Hammer’s budget cannot support it.

The true golden era of Ray Harryhausen’s career was two years away, and his stop-motion animation would have been perfect for The Quatermass Xperiment. Still, he might not have had the time for Hammer, or Hammer might not have had the money for him. With spectators describing the creature crawling down streets, up and over walls, we all get a two-eyed monster sitting still in Westminster Abbey, glancing around at people in the film's final minutes. With the proper special effects, this portion of the movie could be a real crowd-pleaser and a section just as good as the Wordsworth footage. And then we might have a proper classic.

Many people criticize Brian Donlevy’s portrayal of Quatermass, and director Val Guest should share some blame. Quatermass is pure science. And he cares about just one thing: the furtherment of scientific discovery. People are pawns ready to be sacrificed for a scientific cause, and do not matter in the grand scheme of things. Val Guest draws this out of Donlevy at the expense of making him a stereotype, a one-dimensional character, when he badly needs conflicting aspects of his personality to make him three-dimensional. Dunlevy was rumored to be struggling with alcoholism, which allegedly diminished his acting ability. However, I believe the primary issue lies in the character's direction, which renders him a type rather than a fully developed person.

In 1955, The Quatermass Xperiment was somewhat of a minor classic. It featured a slam-bang script and one superb performance surrounded by many good ones. It is original in execution and aimed at the adult market. In many ways, the quaint settings and low budget enhance the film. But when you desire to fly into outer space and bring back a monster, you are required to have the proper budget to pull things off.

THE TRANSFORMATION OF VICTOR CAROON INTO CACTUS/HUMAN IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY

VICTOR CARROON IS ABOUT TO BASH THE CACTUS PLANT, WHICH WILL THEN START TO MERGE WITH HIM TO CREATE A MONSTER.