The Quatermass Experiment (1953, aka The Creeping Unknown) is a surprisingly effective taut drama concerning the first flight into space. Three astronauts go up, but when the spacecraft comes back down, there’s only one left – and two empty suits. We follow along as the man in charge, Quatermass, bulldozes his way through British politeness towards finding out what happened to the missing astronauts – and what’s happening to the survivor.
This is a quality production. The acting is at a professional level; the characters are written with some lovely quirkiness, the pretty lady is not preserved, but bullheadedly takes her own initiative and pays the price; the extended search for the monster is well-written, full of twists, turns, horror, and suspense. That poor little girl. But the details were often handled with great respect, such as the live-TV crew that finds the monster in the midst of its documentary and desperately tries different cameras and finally switches to another host, all the while dealing with the police. Most shows would have just had them support the police, but in reality they would have had multiple responsibilities – and the movie shows that.
The special effects range the gamut from mundane to, for the era, quite spectacular. Not in a flashy way, but simply “I believe this” – I refer to the sequence in which the film from the spacecraft is under review. My Arts Editor and I were spellbound seeing this sequence, not only as it was a good reveal that something had happened during the flight, but it was also really very much within the realm of what you’d expect to see. A quiet professional take on the matter.
And yet, for all that the above may sound like a rave, it was, in some undefined way, a trifle flat. Perhaps it’s dated, since we know enough about space to know what is depicted is unlikely, although I suppose not impossible. Perhaps the British sensibilities of the era don’t quite work for an American such as myself. In the event, I wouldn’t mind hearing other opinions of this well-regarded film, which actually initially aired as a serial on the BBC, and, according to Wikipedia, cleared the British streets as everyone had to catch it each episode.
