War of the worlds: "The Quatermass Xperiment"

The latest of Hammer's big-screen reissues, The Quatermass Xperiment, was the Britain of 1955's response to then-recent developments in American science fiction (and space exploration): an enterprising expansion of Nigel Kneale's hit BBC drama of 1953 that ditched the E in Experiment for xtra dynamism, and was subsequently resold in the US under the pulpier B-movie soubriquet The Creeping Unknown. That we're watching something very British becomes apparent from the opening stretch, an unusually detailed account of the aftermath of a manned rocket crashlanding on Earth. The early drama is more jurisdictional than out of this world: tensions emerge between Brian Donlevy's eponymous American professor, trying to protect both the tech and its findings, the local authorities attempting to clear up the crashsite, and the general public who've massed in the streets and backroads of Bray, having witnessed with their own eyes this shooting star turn into a falling comet. Later on, we'll get what feels like a full briefing on the rota of night nurses assigned to the one survivor who crawled out of the wreckage; later still, some idea of the in-and-outs of outside broadcasting. It's hardly what you'd call kitchen-sink - because it's a movie rather than telly, director Val Guest can call in boats, cars and even the Army (or library footage thereof) when it becomes clear the situation cannot be contained - but it's not as far off as you might think. A film premised on the nitty-gritty of public health crisis management, and a rare sci-fi picture to have some grounding in actual science, it plays very differently in this post-Covid moment, with the Quatermass-adjacent figure of Robert Kennedy running amok, than it would have done in the first years of the Cold War.

We're heading towards the tentacular territory that would later be staked out by the various Alien movies, but for a long while, this script takes a very Fifties line of approach. The crash is treated almost as a locked-room mystery - swapping a rocketship for a country house - where the powers-that-be have to extract from the one mute astronaut who returned (Richard Wordsworth, as gaunt as any Grand Tour cyclist) what happened to the two who didn't. Heading up Scotland Yard's inquiry: Jack Warner, post-The Blue Lamp but pre-Dixon of Dock Green, going toe-to-toe with the pushy, arrogant Quatermass. This is a war of old and new worlds; as Warner's Inspector Lomax shrugs to his second-in-command after they've both felt the sharp end of the Quatermass tongue, "you might almost say we've been given a rocket". Much of the appeal of this quaint yet supremely entertaining artefact rests on this terrific double act: one avuncular and methodical, the other hardnosed and results-driven. (Briefly, they're on the same page, looking on aghast at the silent film taken by the spacecraft's inflight camera, a sequence in which Guest very nearly invents the walking-up-the-walls setpiece in Kubrick's 2001 a decade later.) The focus throughout is less on awesome spectacle than on the people involved, represented by dependable, occasionally recognisable character actors: the horny surgeon who seems to have crossed over from the Doctor series, Thora Hird as the itinerant bystander who suffers from "gin goblins" (a phrase that conjures a whole world in itself), the young girl (played by Jane Asher!) who embodies the collective purity threatened by intergalactic infection, the zookeeper who anticipates the TV career of Johnny Morris, the stricken astronaut, and the wife who realises the man who fell to earth is not the same man she married. Later SF epics would deploy millions of dollars and casts of thousands to suggest the many lives at stake; this most successful and enduring of B-movie experiments uses expert writing and playing to achieve the same effect.

The Quatermass Xperiment plays in selected cinemas from today; a limited edition 4K boxset will be available through Hammer Films from Monday.