What a bonkers movie!
Teresa said she wanted to watch a ‘50s sci-fi movie. I browsed Amazon Prime, and found this. And it’s Hammer! She’s keen on Hammer, esp’ the Cushing, Lee and Price stuff.
This oddity stars Brian Donlevy, a kind of pudgy moustachioed gone to seed Errol Flynn type guy, as the titular Quatermass. It’s a sequel to the Quatermass Xperiment (which we haven’t seen), in which Donlevy also starred. He’s the lone Yank in an otherwise British cast.
The plot is a kind of ‘invasion of the bodysnatchers’ type thing, also borrowing heavily from War of the Worlds. Boffins detect a kind of rain of meteorites, and… well, it’s too silly to bother synopsising, frankly.
It is worth remembering, however, that this is pre-moon landing, etc. So it’s more like Hergé’s Tintin on the Moon than things turned out; the rockets, for example, like Hergé’s, resemble souped-up German V2s more than the real rockets that would soon take man to the moon.
Donlevy is clumsily enjoyable (legend has it he was practically paralytic during filming*), in a ham-fisted B-movie way. And Sid ‘Carry On’ James has a part, as a boozy newshound. There are several other familiar faces, such as John Longden and Bryan Forbes.
But the acting isn’t the film’s strong suit. The best things about the film are the look of it; black and white, largely shot in a cool steel spaghetti pipe-filled oil refinery, with quite a few effective visual aspects, and the eerie post-WWII apocalyptic fear vibes.
As clumsy as it is, and as clunkily directed and acted as it may be, there is something paranoiac lurking within this film, just as the malevolently parasitic alien life form lurks in their asteroid pods. A certain post World War II Cold War era fear of pervasive ideological contamination.
I’d argue that most traditional myth is no more sophisticated than this, and that therefore what’s best about this film – aside from or in addition to the visual allure – is the idea of insidious colonisation of the mind and body as myth or metaphor.
Far from being great, or classic, there’s still a certain something about Quatermass II that makes it worth seeing.
*Not really 100% true, according to fellow cast members.