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.
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