A country road at night, somewhere in the east of England; an open-topped car barrels along, driven by a young woman, whose boyfriend is in some distress. They nearly hit the only other car in sight and skid to a halt. The other driver is understandably furious, but this turns out to be a highly serendipitous near-miss, as he turns out to be Professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy), maverick engineer and head of the ill-starred British Rocket Group, and this is all the pre-credits sequence for Val Guest’s 1957 film adaptation Quatermass 2. (Fun factoid: this was the first English-language sequel to go with the simple ‘2’ or ‘II’ suffix, apparently, the first worldwide being Kurosawa’s Sanshiro Sugata II in 1945 – though some suggest the nature of how Japanese kanji translate makes this a little questionable.)
The first Quatermass film was such a big hit for Hammer Films that they bought the film rights to the second TV series before it had even been on the telly. This time the famously cantankerous writer Nigel Kneale was more involved in the scripting process, along with Guest, although exactly how the movie matches up to the TV show is inevitably a little obscure given that much of the series has been lost to the ether.
Quatermass learns the couple were near somewhere called Winnerden Flats, once a village but now the site of a large industrial development, when a meteorite landed nearby – it was investigating this that led to the young man becoming incapacitated. As chance would have it – there are a few fortuitous coincidences in the plot here, mainly the result of the running time of the story being chopped in half – Quatermass’ minions at the BRG have been monitoring showers of meteorites coming in low and slow in that particular part of the country.
The prof goes up to Winnerden Flats himself to take a look at the place, accompanied by a colleague (he is played by Bryan Forbes, who went on to have a fairly substantial directorial career, including well-remembered films like The Stepford Wives). Never mind the meteorite showers, Quatermass is staggered to find the industrial site is actually a near-replica of the lunar colony project he’s been struggling to get official support for. But why has someone built a sealed environment designed to keep out a hostile atmosphere in the English countryside?
Well, perhaps they should be worrying about the meteorites, too, as Quatermass’ assistant finds one and it cracks open in his face, spraying a vapour that produces a distinctive blemish. Armed guards appear and hustle him off for treatment, leaving Quatermass to ponder just what’s going on. The official line is that Winnerden Flats is producing synthetic food, but secrecy surrounds the development, and whoever is operating it seems to have friends in high places – friends who usually turn out to have curious blemishes on their hands or faces…
Quatermass II is possibly the least well-remembered of the three BBC serials about the character, and the same is probably true of the Hammer versions of them. Perhaps this is because it’s the one with the least explicit horror element to it – this is much more a piece of paranoid SF, on the face of things owing a debt to American films with similar themes, most obviously Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On the other hand, Quatermass 2 was not without a certain amount of influence – this tale of alien intelligences arriving by meteorite to infiltrate British industry and then the establishment will seem very familiar to many people well-versed in British TV SF and fantasy.
What’s present here which is perhaps lacking from its heirs is a sense of timeliness and social commentary – though made in 1957, it still feels very strongly like a post-war movie, with the country undergoing social and industrial changes, old villages being levelled to make way for new plants and other factories. There’s often a sense of reactionary distrust about Nigel Kneale’s work and the coding of the Winnerden Flats project as alien and sinister is clearly an expression of this. Quatermass ends up inciting what borders on being a peasants’ revolt amongst the non-possessed workers at the plant and it is they, with his help, who end up saving the day – the authorities prove impotent. Quatermass is assisted by a police detective – a returning character from the first film, though played by John Longden this time – and a journalist, played by Sid James (a fairly unlikely bit of casting for modern audiences, though Sid is fine in the part). Final confirmation that this is a Hammer movie comes with the appearance of Michael Ripper as the landlord of the pub where the workers gather (not quite his first role for the House, but still early days).
And on the whole it’s pretty acceptable, as these things go – it’s much stronger on plot and incident than it is on ideas or characterisation, and Donlevy isn’t a particularly memorable Quatermass (accounts vary as to just how drunk he was on set: Kneale claimed he could hardly stand up, but Guest’s recollection is of a functioning alcoholic), but it never slows down enough to get dull and Kneale is shrewd enough to ensure that the story isn’t reliant on visual effects to work – the only crunch point comes right at the climax, where Ripper’s character blows open the pressure domes at the plant and giant amorphous alien monsters briefly rampage (slowly) across the countryside. The ammonids aren’t great, but they’re par for the course in a film of this vintage and it could have been much worse.
The gold medal for Quatermass stories is always going to go to one or other version of Quatermass and the Pit, but the original tale deserves an honourable mention too. Which might make it seem like Quatermass 2 is a minor entry in the series, its final position really dependent on your feelings about the ITV Quatermass – which has great production values and John Mills, but is crippled by some eccentric scripting and Kneale’s reactionary pessimism. Personally I find that particular call a tough one, but even a weaker Quatermass can still be an effective SF thriller. Which, for its period, this film arguably is.
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