by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s Mars movie screening
(http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted
of two films of quite different levels of artistic interest and quality. The
first was a 1967 production from Hammer Films called … well, in its native
Britain it was called Quatermass and the Pit, but in the U.S. it was retitled Five Million
Years to Earth. The reason for the title
change was it was actually based on the third of four British TV miniseries
written by Nigel Kneale and based on the character of Professor Bernard
Quatermass (Andrew Keir), an annoying know-it-all who specializes in
investigating whatsis’s and whatnots from outer space. The series began with The
Quatermass Experiment in 1955 and that got
turned into a film — as did its immediate sequel — with U.S. actor Brian
Donlevy as Quatermass. Though Kneale had to wait nine years for this set of TV
scripts to be turned into a movie (the first two Quatermass serials had been
filmed within a year or two after the TV versions), he said it was the first
film he’d actually liked because he though Andrew Keir a far better Quatermass
than Donlevy, whom he described as an old U.S. character actor who was a
hopeless alcoholic by the time the Quatermass films were made. (Incidentally
I’d always assumed the name was pronounced like the word “quarter” with the
first “r” removed, but the people in the movie pronounce the first two
syllables to rhyme with “crater” — to my mind a much less attractive sound.) I
must admit to a certain prejudice against this movie because of the
circumstances under which I first saw it — it was double-billed with another
Hammer production, a pretty standard sword-and-sandals film called The
Viking Queen (which I liked better then
but probably wouldn’t now), and my mom, my brother and I walked in on Five
Million Years to Earth in the
middle, tried to make heads or tails of what was going on, and ultimately tried
the old trick of staying long enough through the next showing at least to see
what we’d missed — and this is decidedly not a film that works seen out of sequence.
In
sequence, it seems a mixed bag, a surprising attempt given Hammer’s usual
orientation (which was to take the old Universal monster movies and up both the
sex and the gore) to do a Val Lewton-style chiller in which, at least until the
end, the menace is unseen. The plot is about a group of workers at the Hobbs
Lane subway station in London who are digging tunnels for an extension of the
line until they uncover what look like human remains — only they’re not human: they’re ape-men who inhabited the planet
five million years previously and they have much larger skulls than any known
hominids, living or fossil, which presumably means they had bigger brains. The
subway workers keep digging until they find a solid object that at first they
believe — and the authorities concur — is a leftover bomb from World War II.
But eventually they realize that it’s actually a spaceship and the ape-men were
either the inhabitants of the ship from another planet or the aliens
jump-started evolution and we’re the result. This is classed as a Mars movie
because that’s supposedly where the aliens came from originally — the theory
being that they could transport themselves between the planets but lacked the
technology to make it here from another solar system — and while much of it is
just people arguing either at the site of the excavation or in offices
(Quatermass’s particular bane is British army colonel Breen, played by Julian
Glover, who insists on treating the site as a bomb threat even when it’s
apparent to virtually everyone else in the movie that it’s more than that),
there are some quite good effects in which the evil energy lurking around the
site makes the walls shake, blows crockery off shelves (in one scene a
bartender serves Quatermass a whiskey in a coffee cup and apologizes, saying
that the whatsit has broken all his good glasses) and in general menaces the
surrounding population while itself remaining invisible.
Unfortunately, though
Kneale wrote the script himself and Roy Ward Baker (whose presence puts
everyone in this cast one degree of separation from Marilyn Monroe; her first
top-billed movie, 1952’s Don’t Bother to Knock, was directed by Baker) directed (quite
effectively, given how much of this film takes place in tightly enclosed
spaces), the “suits” at Hammer couldn’t resist a full-bore visible monster in
the final reel, something which looks like a piece of cotton candy floating in
mid-air and which is annihilated by one of the film’s leads, anthropologist Dr.
Matthew Roney (James Donald, top-billed), when he smashes a construction crane
into it, though apparently at the cost of his own life. Five Million Years
to Earth is a difficult film to
evaluate because it’s obviously trying so hard to be subtle, to be different,
to be something beyond Hammer’s normal fare at the time — but at the same time
it’s awfully dull through much of the running time and the human conflicts are
pretty stock for this sort of drama (science vs. duty, and also the sexual
conflicts involved since there’s one token woman in the dramatis personae, Barbara Judd, played by Barbara Shelley, though
she comes off pretty much as just “one of the boys” instead of a possible
romantic or sexual crush object). It’s a movie that still doesn’t work for me
even though I liked it a lot better than I had the first time around!
