Chapter 19
In 1950, man reached the moon (Destination Moon); in 1951, he came up against the Frankenstein Monster–type occupant of a flying saucer (The Thing from Another World) and the peaceful occupant of another (The Day the Earth Stood Still); and in 1953, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms invaded New York at the same instant that Mars invaded the Earth in The War of the Worlds. Landmark productions, each and every one, but manufactured in America. Yes — while our cousins from across the Atlantic were being treated to Chesley Bonestell’s astronomical backdrops of the lunar surface, alien James Arness stalking the company of an Arctic research base, Gort the Robot blasting the military with a laser beam, Ray Harryhausen’s animated dinosaur rampaging through New York’s thoroughfares and Martian fighting machines reducing Los Angeles to flaming rubble, we Brits were being fed ex-radio special agent Dick Barton on the trail of a stolen death ray (Dick Barton at Bay) and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. lumbered with a duck that laid radioactive eggs (Mister Drake’s Duck). Like the early British horror movie (chapter 25), early British sci-fi suffered from a lack of major studio financing and, as a consequence, appeared behind the times in comparison to U.S. product. Hammer’s influential The Quatermass Experiment lifted the genre out of the doldrums, but not that much; British science fiction films continued to be made in black-and-white (Satellite in the Sky was the exception), budgets were kept to a minimum and American stars were shipped over to boost appeal (and, hopefully, box-office takings) on the international market.
Looking back, it’s easy to see why critics have belittled movies like Four Sided Triangle, Devil Girl from Mars and Stranger from Venus. Scene for scene, they cannot hope to compete with the expensive glossiness brought to the big screen in Forbidden Planet, Conquest of Space and This Island Earth. They represent a time when British sci-fi struggled to match its American counterpart, but that doesn’t mean to say that one has to continuously devalue these often unsophisticated pictures. They are not, as one writer once described them, “pale imitations of the real things.” British sci-fi showed signs of marked improvement toward the latter part of the ’50s when the industry, quite correctly, cottoned on to the fact that an “X” certificate was a sure-fire route to box-office success; Quatermass 2, The Trollenberg Terror and First Man into Space bore this out beyond all reasonable doubt, each picture successfully aimed fairly and squarely at the adult audience. Let’s sort the wheat from the chaff and run through, year-by-year, what homegrown sci-fi fare offered to the great British public from 1950 to 1959.
1950
Between 1946 and 1951, Dick Barton: Special Agent was a nationwide “must” on the BBC’s Light Program. At the height of its popularity, 15 million listeners huddled around their radios and tuned in to hear one of the most famous radio theme tunes of all time introduce the latest piece of derring-do from a character said to have been the inspiration behind James Bond. This was the perfect form of mass escapism for the shell-shocked public in those dark days following the end of the war. Hammer Films specialized in knocking out feature films derived from radio plays and produced three movies based on the square-jawed hero’s radio exploits, each around 70-minutes long: Dick Barton: Special Agent (1948), Dick Barton Strikes Back (1949) and Dick Barton at Bay. Plans for a fourth, Dick Barton in Darkest Africa, were shelved when leading man Don Stannard was tragically killed in a car crash on July 9, 1949 following an end-of-shoot party.
Let it be said that the Dick Barton movies are beyond criticism. They were made 60 years ago, and what passed as entertainment then would empty a cinema today! In Dick Barton at Bay, barely over an hour long, Stannard, zooming around a drizzly London in an open-topped sports car and wearing a white trench coat, is as stiff as his upper lip; the script is peppered with exclamatory, purely British, colloquialisms (“Great Scott!” “Crikey!” “By Jove!” “Darn It!” “For the love of Mike!”); the cartoon villain is a dastardly German; the death ray machine could have been constructed by a schoolboy in a backyard; and, upholding the BBC’s own Dick Barton Code of Conduct, fights are strictly limited to the “sock ’em on the chin” variety. The plot? When megalomaniac German Meinhart Maur and his gang of ruffians steal Percy Walsh’s death ray loaded with top brass military personnel to bring the planes down, Stannard and buddy George Ford track the mob down to the Beachy Head lighthouse. In a climatic fight, the machine is disabled (Stannard simply throws a gun into the works!) and Maur topples to his death from the top of the lighthouse. Director Godfrey Grayson’s homage to the radio star is thrill-a-minute nostalgia, thick-ear stuff that a whole generation of families took refuge in from the harsh reality of life in those far-off, innocent times — and yes, Rupert Grayson’s instantly recognizable theme music that lodges itself in the brain and refuses to let go remains intact.
The Americans weren’t the only ones worried by the threat of a Russian nuclear holocaust. Set in a gray London still suffering from bomb damage sustained in the Blitz, London Films/The Boulting Brothers’ Seven Days to Noon, produced, written and directed by Roy and John Boulting, told of a conscience-stricken scientist (Barry Jones) who threatens to detonate an atomic device, the UR12, at noon on Sunday in Central London if the government doesn’t halt the manufacture of nuclear weapons. This was to be Britain’s one and only ’50s doomsday thriller and it’s a superb example of filmmaking at its grittiest, blending good old-fashioned Englishness with Cold War menace. André Morell played the Special Branch officer on the hunt for Jones, aided by the scientist’s colleague, Hugh Cross, and daughter Sheila Manahan. Shot in the documentary style that Val Guest effectively brought to the screen in his two Quatermass movies, containing stark images of the Capital courtesy of Gilbert Taylor, Jones flits from one location to another, carrying the bomb in a valise. Always one step ahead of his pursuers, he eventually hides out in brassy revue star Olive Sloane’s room and holds her prisoner while the city is evacuated. The scenes of mass evacuation are reminiscent of those carried out during the war, leaving a London eerily deserted, troops combing the empty buildings as time runs out. With 10 minutes to go, Jones is tracked down to Westminster’s ruined St. Stephen’s Church, where we saw him at the beginning; running from the building screaming “Too late,” he’s shot dead by soldier Victor Maddern; Cross successfully disables the bomb with one minute left on the clock.
There’s no disguising the anti-Russian feeling running throughout the film. With the Prime Minister withholding information up to the last second, rumor is rife concerning troop mobilization. Are the Russians about to invade? “We’re so scared, we don’t trust anyone,” states one person succinctly. The mentally unstable scientist makes his feelings clear to Sloane: “It’s better for a city to perish than the whole world.” Some biting touches include the Crown Jewels, art treasures and museum valuables being ferried away from the 12-mile blast area while pets are left to perish; a man plays the “Atomic Racer” game in an arcade and Jones first hears the Prime Minister’s radio broadcast of what is happening framed within the fossilized remains of a dinosaur. John Addison’s fine score is perfectly tuned to the action, and the whole picture has a “matter-of-fact” air to it, including Morell’s clipped performance. The U.K.’s sole ’50s contribution to Cold War paranoia cinema is as suspenseful as anything to emerge from the States in the early years of this decade, but the film is very rarely seen nowadays.
1951
British sci-fi showed no signs of lifting itself out of its cozy rut with Mister Drake’s Duck, a comic fantasy concerning a duck that lays eggs containing uranium. Val Guest, yet to make his mark with Hammer’s two Quatermass thrillers, directed this perky, homey tale of newlyweds Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Yolande Donlan (Guest’s wife), who take up residence on Greenacre Farm, left to them in his will by Fairbanks’ uncle. On a trip to the local market, Donlan buys 60 Aylesbury ducks, one of which lays eggs with green uranium yolks. As soon as the news gets out, the British army appears in force — Operation Chickweed is underway. Soldiers, tanks, aircraft, armored vehicles and cannons arrive in droves; that duck, when it can be separated from the other 59, must be safeguarded to prevent an international incident! The Americans lay claim to the bird as theirs because Fairbanks is a Yank; predictably, the Russians also get in on the act. Eventually located, the radioactive duck is taken to Guy’s Hospital in London, operated on to learn its secrets and dies. But was it the right duck? In the closing seconds, Fairbanks picks up an egg which, when tapped, emits a strange tone, just as the army returns. Is there a second duck laying uranium eggs? We will never know! Intermittently funny, Mister Drake’s Duck, a variation on the Goose that lays the Golden Egg parable and made by Fairbanks, Jr.’s own production company, is hardly cutting-edge cinema, and a running joke concerning an armored truck that continually flattens the farm’s brick-built gate post wears a bit thin after a while. Fairbanks, the perky Donlan, country yokel Jon Pertwee and a cast of English eccentrics play their parts with a kind of manic energy as befits a farce of this nature. The film was popular at the time, but again demonstrated that compared to what was appearing from across the ocean, the British still had a very long way to go in the sci-fi genre. Guest’s goofy movie, dealing with (but skating over) the possible effects of uranium poisoning, was a case of two webbed feet forward, one webbed foot back.
Ealing Studios cut down on the whimsy to produce a caustic satire on industrial relations in Alexander MacKendrick’s The Man in the White Suit. Alec Guinness is a scatterbrained boffin who invents a revolutionary fabric that is impervious to dirt, wear and tear, thereby placing the whole of England’s textile industry in jeopardy. As washerwoman Edie Martin grumbles toward the end of the film, “What becomes of me when there’s no washing to do?” Chiefs of industry Cecil Parker, Michael Gough and Ernest Thesiger, scared stiff that Guinness’ “everlasting thread” will bring about the collapse of their mills, plot to make sure the secret formula is suppressed and not leaked to the papers, as do the workers, afraid of losing their jobs. Ignoring huge financial bribes, Guinness is reduced to being a fugitive on the run, chased through the dark streets in his glowing white suit in the frenetic climax and finally cornered by the mob. But the cloth suddenly becomes unstable and disintegrates (“We’re saved!” they all cry); the manufacturing industry is spared from ruin although in the dying seconds, the inventor may have another trick up his sleeve.
A warning of the dangers of scientific progress sounding the death knell for socialism and employment, The Man in the White Suit is a marvelous Ealing picture that hasn’t aged at all. Apart from the great casting of Guinness, Gough, Parker and Thesiger, husky voiced Joan Greenwood plays Parker’s vivacious daughter and busty Vida Hope is the worker nursing a passion for the disinterested Guinness. It’s certainly more razor-edged than most of the company’s ’50s output, a fantasy farce minus the belly laughs and an important constituent of British cinema’s golden age that rewards on repeated viewings.
1953
Along with Stolen Face (1952), Hammer’s Four Sided Triangle occupies an important niche within the company’s pre-1957 history. Terence Fisher directed both pictures and both exhibited various trademarks that were to appear in this company‘s future repertoire, but in diluted form (A-rated, not “X” certified). The pieces of the Hammer jigsaw were gradually coming together but lacked that one vital ingredient to coalesce the product into a complete whole. Frankenstein in the English Countryside would be a fitting title for Fisher’s daring tale of two scientists (Stephen Murray and John Van Eyssen) who invent the “Reproducer,” a machine that can replicate any object, inanimate or living. When Van Eyssen marries peroxide blonde Barbara Payton (the trio are all childhood friends), Murray, also in love with her, clones a duplicate for his own pleasure. Unfortunately for him, Payton Mark 2 comes complete with Payton Mark 1’s memory banks; she, like her “twin,” loves Van Eyssen, rejecting Murray after going away on holiday with him (“Even if I did let her go, what good would it do. Don’t forget, there are two of them, in love with the same man.”). In order that she might return his desires, Murray erases her memory (“an empty mind and a new beginning.”). The result is a beautifully blank zombie. In a final conflagration (yes, a favored Hammer climax even then!), Murray and his creation are burned to death in the blazing laboratory; the original Payton survives, much to the relief of husband Van Eyssen.
Uncannily forecasting the likes of The Fly and Frankenstein Created Woman, Four Sided Triangle contained, in one form or another, traits that would crop up in countless Hammer Gothic productions that followed the unprecedented success of The Curse of Frankenstein, particularly in the laboratory sequences. In these, Fisher’s expertise behind the camera shone through, borrowing heavily from Bride of Frankenstein (and Man Made Monster?). He cleverly set up the scenes as a montage of odd-angled close-ups, flashing bulbs and bubbling flasks, Malcolm Arnold’s rising score imbuing feverish activity into Murray and Van Eyssen’s experiments. Yes, Hammer did exist before Cushing and Lee appeared in gory Eastmancolor; Four Sided Triangle pictures an embryonic Hammer gaining, step-by-step, a foothold in the world of sci-fi/horror. It appears, now, to be slightly unfinished and dainty, peculiarly English in design (not helped by an avuncular James Hayter narrating the story and a cozy village setting), but it was the blueprint of what happened next. Fisher’s first tentative sortie into Frankenstein territory must be looked upon as a movie of some considerable significance. Fisher also directed Spaceways, dabbling his toes further into the sci-fi pool. Becoming yet another Hammer adaptation of a radio play, this talkative space opera attempted to cross-fertilize romance and postwar espionage with a “first man into space” storyline. Unfortunately, Fisher’s much-vaunted fluid camerawork faltered at the first hurdle, the result being that Spaceways was hard going, even for early Hammer followers. Romance came in the form of Eastern European starlet Eva Bartok; she’s in love with American scientist Howard Duff, whose bitchy wife (Cecile Chevreau), bored with life on a research station, plans to run off with lover Andrew Osborn, a spy who has stolen Duff’s scientific blueprints. When the pair disappears, intelligence officer Alan Wheatley accuses Duff of murdering them and stowing the corpses on board a rocket that is orbiting the Earth as a satellite. To prove his innocence, Duff becomes the first astronaut into space, flying off in the AS1 with Bartok to show to the authorities that the bodies, presumed hidden on the satellite, aren’t there. Wheatley tracks down the lovers near Brighton, Osborn shoots Chevreau before being arrested and Duff has the job of steering the AS1 back to Earth where presumably he will live happily ever after with Bartok.
Set in the world of Bakelite instrument panels, makeshift spacesuits and none-tooaccurate technical jargon, Spaceways is very humdrum in execution and ideas. Fisher manages to breathe some life into the project in the closing sequences on board the AS1, staying in sharper focus and generating a degree of suspense, more so than what he established in the previous hour. The paltry budget couldn’t match the ambitions of the makers and it showed. Compared to The Quatermass Experiment, produced two years later, Spaceways is like something from another age, showing the huge strides Hammer made in those two years, from run-of-the-mill programmer to an out-an-out classic.
1954
Lost in the mists of time, Merton Park’s 84-minute The Brain Machine (released through RKO) opened in sci-fi/horror fashion, the initial scenes reminiscent of a forthcoming Quatermass film. To compound the effect, soundtrack addicts will detect Trevor Duncan’s hackle-raising music from the BBC tele-serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958/1959) used here as the main title theme. An insane criminal, responsible for murdering four people, is brought to Doctor Patrick Barr’s mental health institution. Barr’s wife, standoffish Elizabeth Allan, wires the psycho’s head up to a machine termed an electroencephalograph to record his violent brainwaves. Then Allan ups and leaves Barr, moving to the North London Hospital. Her next patient (Maxwell Reed) is an accident victim suffering from amnesia — when Allan rigs him up to the machine, his erratic brain patterns, made worse by a blood clot, match those of the other killer’s and she’s sure that she’s got another psychopath on her hands.
Director Ken Hughes, as he would do in Timeslip (1955), jettisoned the scientific potential of the ECG machine and instead put his foot on the gas, going flat-out for trashy noir; there’s not an ounce of fat in this lean, mean production — it steadfastly refuses to ease up. British heartthrob Reed, playing against type, is mesmerizing as a vicious crook selling the control drug cortisone on the black market. Imprisoning interfering Allan (who still wants to treat his condition) in a lockup garage under a railway line, he decides to murder Gibb McLaughlin, the head of the racket; callous hit-man Edwin Richfield, hired by McLaughlin, strangles Reed’s tramp of a wife but is shot dead by Reed in the lockup. After gunning down McLaughlin in a hail of bullets at the offices of Amalgamated Chemicals, half-crazed Reed is arrested and Allan walks off with husband Barr.
The Brain Machine crackles with helter-skelter energy — more could have been made of the sci-fi aspect, perhaps turning Reed into some kind of brain-fried monster. But that was the American way. The British way was to play it low-key, so Reed is a monster, but more of an off-the-rails one. Hughes’ violent B-thriller, seldom seen these days, needs rooting out for reappraisal.
Danziger Brothers’/Spartan’s wonderful Devil Girl from Mars (directed by David MacDonald) showed that it was possible to produce high-camp sci-fi on a shoestring budget and come up with something that would long be remembered with affection. Patricia Laffan played Nyah, a lofty female Martian on the lookout for healthy men to take back to her home planet in order to breed and, by doing so, preserve the Martian race, decimated by atomic war. All the males have perished, leaving a women-only matriarchal society. Landing her splendid flying saucer near a remote Scottish inn was probably not the best location in Britain to lay her well-manicured hands on prime specimens of British manhood, but that’s what she does, accompanied by her pet robot Chani. Statuesque Laffan was alluring as the mad empress in Quo Vadis; here, dressed from head to toe in black PVC, she’s positively mouth-watering!Any red-blooded male would be only too glad to get well away from those dreary Scottish moors and hitch a ride on her UFO but, no, reporter Hugh McDermott, Professor Joseph Tomelty and convict-on-the-run Peter Reynolds do their utmost to thwart Laffan in her plans to steal a required quota of human mating material. Also at her mercy are young Hazel Court and Adrienne Corri who Laffan despises as being weak examples of womanhood. Take these ingredients (a force field preventing escape; Chani resembling a refrigerator on clumpy legs, blasting thunderbolts from his head; Laffan’s laser gun reducing humans to ashes and a heavenly designed flying saucer) and add Laffan’s hilarious monotonic recitation, rattling off her lines by rote, Edwin Astley’s raucous score, a pseudo-scientific script that defies all logic and two English beauties in Court and Corri and we have an endearing slice of nonsense that is hugely entertaining, even today. And audiences know that this has “Made in Britain” stamped all over it when, in the middle of yet another bout of mayhem, the landlady announces to her regulars that there is, “nothing like a good cup of tea in a crisis.” The censors were unusually lenient with this movie — Devil Girl from Mars is without doubt the scariest British “U” film ever released in the 1950s.
Like Devil Girl from Mars, Stranger from Venus took place virtually on one set, an English public house set in leafy countryside. Acut-price version of The Day the Earth Stood Still with Patricia Neal, who is more or less reprising her role from the Robert Wise film, American Burt Balaban’s minimalist alien invasion tale had Venusian Helmut Dantine healing Neal after she had crashed her car, sustaining life-threatening injuries. Introducing himself to a nearby inn’s residents, the suave-looking alien announces to politician Derek Bond, Neal’s fiancé, that he has arrived on Earth to warn against the misuse of atomic weapons. If Earth’s leaders refuse to listen to his message, the Venusian mother ship, due to release further crafts over a field, will burn off the atmosphere and annihilate the surrounding area. The army lays an electronic trap to destroy the UFOs but Dantine, in a fit of conscience, orders the fleet to head back to their home planet. Poisoned by Earth’s atmosphere, he disappears in a melodramatic death scene, leaving Neal’s scarf by the side of a lake — he loved her but was afraid to admit it.
Yes, a saucer is shown near the end, although not quite up to the standard of Klaatu’s ship exhibited in the 20th Century Fox classic, and Neal displays the inner radiance that highlighted her performance in the earlier movie. The script is fairly witty in places (“These aren’t the fingerprints of a human being.” “Well, Arthur, let’s see this monster of yours from outer space.”) and Eric Spear’s score is lush beyond belief, a little too overpowering given the low-budget ambience. Despite Dantine’s remoteness, his scenes with Neal (she’s infatuated with him) are quite moving, bringing a touch of humanity to the perennial theme of “first contact.” There’s nothing earth shattering in Stranger from Venus. Rather the film maintains a restrained edginess that keeps us watching and makes one forget the absence of any sort of up-to-the-minute special effects.
1955
Journalist Paul Douglas and photographer Leslie Phillips, traveling through Eastern Europe by train, are arrested in the small Balkan state of Gudavia for being possible spies. Released on orders from ruthless dictator Walter Rilla, who doesn’t want to draw outside attention to his subversive activities, they discover that Rilla is experimenting with gamma rays on both adults and juveniles; a few child geniuses are produced that one day might control the state, but most adults are turned into mindless idiots called Goons who run through the streets and countryside like a herd of wild zombies, causing mayhem.
Directed by John Gilling for Columbia/Warwick, The Gamma People was a heavy-handed clash of styles, played for laughs in some scenes, played deadly straight in others. The anti-communist message wasn’t fully developed, Gilling content to focus his attention on whether Douglas and Phillips can uncover Rilla’s secret and escape from his army of Goons in one piece. Rilla’s castle laboratory was well designed and the climax, in which both lab and castle go up in flames, satisfactorily staged. Eva Bartok brought a whiff of European sex to the proceedings but the movie, like Douglas himself, was too stolid and curiously dated in appearance. A-rated in Britain, it wasn’t a great success at the cash registers when released in January 1956.
1955 was the year British science fiction at last obtained a footing on the global stage. First broadcast in July/August 1953, BBC-TV’s six-part serial The Quatermass Experiment, the brainchild of writer Nigel Kneale, had shocked television audiences into submission, a harrowing antithesis to all the euphoric festivities and general air of optimism taking place in the Queen’s Coronation Year. Two days after the final episode on August 22, which drew an audience of five million (huge for the time), Hammer Films successfully bid for the film rights and shooting commenced in October 1954. Unbeknown to Kneale, Hammer and director Val Guest had other ideas for the BBC’s groundbreaker, initiating a number of drastic revisions to the teleplay. They reasoned, quite correctly, that what was classed as suitable for a TV audience wouldn’t necessarily pass muster in a cinema. It needed to be more filmic in outlook. Consequently, Guest and Richard Landau’s translation of Kneale’s telescript became a condensation of the BBC serial: scenes were trimmed, subplots jettisoned, dialogue modified, certain characters’ roles shortened and the climax restructured, much to Kneale’s dissatisfaction. To cap it all, the company hired American Brian Donlevy, veteran of countless Hollywood Westerns and gangster thrillers, to play the Professor, a wise decision as it turned out; Donlevy, fueled by coffee laced with brandy, brought a tough, arrogant energy to the part that perhaps an Englishman was unable to accomplish (it’s interesting to compare Donlevy’s rude Americanized scientist against Jack Warner’s textbook, very polite, English police inspector). Hammer had to defend these decisions to an appalled Kneale, arguing that if they were to stand any chance of breaking into the lucrative overseas market, it was imperative that an actor of Donlevy’s standing would have to be employed. The company also made darned sure that their exciting new product would receive an “X” rating, disregarding the censor’s demands for minor cuts, the reason why, on first release, Experiment became Xperiment.
The film was premiered in London in August 1955, going out on general release as The Quatermass Xperiment in November of that year, paired with Jules Dassin’s definitive crime caper, Rififi. The release date was purposely set by Hammer to coincide with Kneale’s second Quatermass teleserial, Quatermass 2, whose third episode was aired to a record-breaking audience of eight million on November 5. Thus was created the Quatermass legend; Kneale’s Professor appeared on the small screen and big screen simultaneously, becoming a household name in England, a name synonymous with other-worldly terror. The Quatermass Xperiment c/w Rififi became the U.K.’s highest-grossing double bill of 1955 and the rest, as they say, is history.
The Quatermass Xperiment was a giant leap forward for Hammer, displaying a remarkable self-assurance in all things connected with space never experienced before in a British science fiction picture. After years of churning out passable thrillers, the company had finally blossomed into a force to be reckoned with, much like the Professor himself. It was the international breakthrough that they had hoped for, making critics and fans sit up and take notice and cementing, in Britain at least, their fast-growing reputation. Shot in newsreel–style to add urgent realism and a sense of “it’s really happening” to the narrative, Kneale’s ambitious concept of an astronaut returning to Earth, infected by an alien organism, proved to be a nationwide sensation, vindicating the alterations in script and personnel that Hammer had felt necessary. Gaunt Richard Wordsworth, brilliantly portraying the agonized spaceman mutating into something very nasty indeed, was responsible for a spate of faintings among female punters, one of the many factors that contributed to record till receipts. In retrospect, one can’t help but wonder how Terence Fisher’s more controlled pace would have fared with this material, but he was destined for fame and fortune in other arenas of the Hammer sphere — his breakthrough would occur two years later with The Curse of Frankenstein, the first British horror movie in color.
Timeslip (aka The Atomic Man) was the second of Ken Hughes’ low-budget sci-fi/horror movies of the ’50s, produced by Merton Park Studios for Allied Artists. British science fiction author Charles Eric Maine wrote the script — Maine’s novels and plays in the ’50s and ’60s (Hammer’s Spaceways was based on one of his radio plays) gravitated toward new science technology rather than men versus aliens. Timeslip began promisingly: A man (Peter Arne) is fished out of the River Thames with a bullet in his back. Taken to hospital, he clinically dies for seven and a half seconds. When he revives from the operation, he is seven and a half seconds ahead of time. Photos of him exhibit a strange halo, X-ray scans of his head turn out blank and his body has traces of radioactivity. Who is he? Journalist Gene Nelson and photographer Faith Domergue (brought over from America to add international interest) discover that Arne is a famous atomic physicist known as “The Isotope Man” and that his double (a crook surgically altered to look like him) has been substituted in his place. The clone plans to sabotage the Brant Nuclear Research Institute by blowing it up. Why? The labs are producing synthetic tungsten and the boss of a South American tungsten mining company (Vic Perry) wants Arne dead and the facility destroyed, seeing the work the scientist is undertaking as a threat to his business empire.
For about 50 minutes, Timeslip intrigues as we wonder who Arne is, how can he be in two places at one time and how can he possibly answer questions before they are asked. Once the cat is out of the bag, however, Hughes opts for a fragmented cops/investigative reporters versus spies chase thriller, ruining the cohesion set in the first part — the final 28 minutes is formulaic roughhouse stuff, abandoning the scientific possibilities brought on by Arne’s radiation-induced condition. The police remove the plutonium bomb from the facility before it is activated, Perry and his gang are shot dead, Arne the scientist acts normally and Domergue falls into the arms of Nelson. Despite going off the rails, Timeslip is a weighty piece of British sci-fi action, bolstered by a noisy stock score by George Melachrino and winning performances from the two American leads. Arne is also excellent in his twin roles of physicist and saboteur.
1956
The Quatermass Xperiment may have been a classic in the making but elsewhere, the small independents were still intent on inflicting garbage of the first order onto a very patient English cinema-going public. Eros’ Fire Maidens from Outer Space (or Fire Maidens of Outer Space) has entered the pages of cinema history as the worst British sci-fi picture released in this decade; perhaps the worst produced of all time. A team of astronauts blasts off for Jupiter’s 13th moon to determine the source of a mysterious signal. When they arrive, they find the remnants of the lost civilization of Atlantis, comprising 16 women dressed in skimpy tops and short skirts ruled by aged priest Owen Berry; this motley bunch are continually harassed by science fiction’s ropiest monster, a man in body-hugging tights wearing a fanged mask who skulks in the shadows. “Men at last!” the Maidens gasp in delight when they set their sex-starved eyes on the masculine desirability of Anthony Dexter, Paul Carpenter and crew, viewing them as possible mating partners.
Classical composer Alexander Borodin must have been turning in his grave at the misuse of his Polovtsian Suite (better known as “Stranger in Paradise”); attired in diaphanous gowns, the women prance around to his music, hoping that Dexter and company will take notice and ferry them back to Earth. When the monster kills Berry, the astronauts make sure the thing follows the dead leader into a fiery pit; they then take a senior Fire Maiden back to Earth, promising to pick up the remaining 15 later.
No attempt was made by Eros and director Cy Roth to imbue their product with at least a modicum of visual style. The control deck of the space rocket resembles the interior of an old wartime airplane, while Surrey’s green and pleasant countryside incongruously stands in for the 13th moon of Jupiter. As for that alien; it should have been consigned to the waste bin, along with the rest of the film. A cack-handed addition to the school of “lonely females on a planet awaiting Earthmen with which to copulate” filmmaking popularized by Queen of Outer Space and Missile to the Moon, Fire Maidens from Outer Space is a turkey of mammoth proportions, and something of an embarrassment to British sci-fi fans.
Underdeveloped in many areas, Michael Anderson’s 1984 was a depressingly dark first stab at George Orwell’s notorious novel about a dystopian future ruled by the omnipresent Big Brother. Defiant Edmond O’Brien played a worker in the records office of the Ministry of Truth, challenging the totalitarian state’s doctrine and finding solace in the arms of Jan Sterling in a society where sex was outlawed. Imaginative set pieces made full use of Orwell’s autocratic vision of what might lay ahead for all of us: telescreens, like blinking eyes, overseeing every move a person made; monitors piping mindless Muzak nonstop to the masses, informing them that “Even in your sleep, Big Brother is watching you”; loudspeakers blasting out propaganda; Hate Weeks directed at the enemy; anti-sex leagues; the zombie-like Thought Police and torture in Room 101 by tapping into one’s elemental fears. Oceania, the London of the future, looked impressive, blending detailed model shots into the scenario, and the constant threat of atomic war with neighboring Eurasia was well handled, Malcolm Arnold contributing a stirring score. But O’Brien and Sterling’s doomed romance didn’t tug at the heart strings as it should have done; Michael Redgrave, the boss of the Ministry, emerged tops in the acting stakes, an arrogant figurehead for the new movement who betrays O’Brien without batting an eyelid. Two endings were filmed: In U.S. prints, O’Brien and Sterling have been brainwashed, embracing Big Brother and all that it stands for; in the United Kingdom, O’Brien, after torture, continues to flout the state’s ideology and is killed. Despite its failure in some areas, 1984 showed that British science fiction was at last getting serious and growing up; it was the second sci-fi picture to be classified “X” and it wouldn’t be the last.
Filmed in Warnercolor and CinemaScope, the Danziger Brothers’ Satellite in the Sky was a giant step upward from the duo’s Devil Girl from Mars and boasted imaginative space effects by Wally Veevers, almost bordering on those paraded in Paramount’s more expensive Conquest of Space. But the subject matter was flat as handled by director Paul Dickson; the entire 85 minutes was composed of long shots, resulting in a marked absence of dramatic impetus needed to drive the storyline forward. Another in the “first man into space” series of ’50s space operas, Satellite in the Sky had jet pilot Kieron Moore and a crew of four taking off from a launch ramp (copied from When Worlds Collide) in the Stardust rocket with a tritonium bomb on board; scientist Donald Wolfit’s mission is to detonate the device above Earth’s atmosphere, the blast intending to act as a deterrent to nuclear war. When the bomb becomes attached to the rocket through magnetic attraction, Wolfit and Barry Keegan sacrifice their lives by leaving the ship and pushing the bomb away, the pair steering it into space where it explodes without harming the Stardust.
It’s all very stiff-upper-lipped, earnest and talkative; James Bond’s Miss Moneypenny, deliciously sexy Lois Maxwell, plays a stowaway pacifist reporter who falls for Moore’s dark good looks, and the cast, including Jimmy Hanley and Bryan Forbes, have to contend with an outrageous piece of overacting by Wolfit as the exuberant inventor. Veever’s detailed model work, especially the vast underground installation housing the rocket, is the chief reason for catching this rather lifeless space melodrama that seems to go on a lot longer than it actually does.
To capitalize on the British “X” certificate, Hammer’s unofficial follow-up to The Quatermass Xperiment left no doubts as to where their filmic ambitions lay — X: The Unknown, the big “X” emblazoned in red on the posters, one in the eye for the British censor. The company had asked Nigel Kneale for permission to use Professor Bernard Quatermass in the story but the request was flatly refused (Jimmy Sangster wrote the screenplay); Kneale was still smarting over their treatment of his character in The Quatermass Xperiment, even though he grudgingly admitted that the film had been a critical and commercial success, the public obviously unconcerned that Brian Donlevy had played the principal role instead of an English actor. Therefore, dour American Dean Jagger took on the Quatermass mantle, a nuclear scientist sent to Scotland to investigate a mysterious radioactive blob that emerges from 2,000-foot-deep fissures every 50 years, causing havoc. Leslie Norman’s opening scenes are terrific — a tracking shot of a soldier crossing a gravel pit, his Geiger counter registering an immense source of radioactivity, the ground suddenly opening at his feet as a minor quake occurs. A subplot focuses on the tensions between Jagger’s scatterbrained man of science (a direct opposite to Donlevy’s forthrightness) and Edward Chapman’s stubborn authoritativeness as boss of the Atomic Research complex. Chapman reckons that Jagger is a crackpot; Jagger thinks Chapman has no scientific vision. As they expostulate over the origins of the creature, the glowing blob oozes its way through dark woods and down country lanes, homing in on high tension cables and the power station to feed off electrical/nuclear energy and stripping the flesh from those who venture too close (Les Bowie’s effects work was minimal but potent, as it had been on The Quatermass Xperiment and would be on Quatermass 2 and The Trollenberg Terror). Jagger finally destroys the protoplasmic terror by enticing it out of the abyss with a cobalt isotope and bombarding it with electronic waves.
X: The Unknown is austere, sober science fiction for grown-ups, featuring, as did Quatermass, a spare but menacing score by James Bernard. Hammer Films was now forging ahead, the likes of Spaceways and Four Sided Triangle all but a distant memory. The adult market was theirs for the taking and this is where they would aim all their future material, whether or not the censor objected to what was submitted for classification (and Hammer’s ongoing spats with the censor during the 1950s are almost as legendary as their films).
1957
The Electronic Monster was based on Charles Eric Maine’s novel Escapement, the picture’s alternative title. Maine’s script again explored new technology; the movie was a predecessor of more sophisticated efforts such as Videodrome (1982), Brainstorm (1983) and others of their ilk. In Merton Park’s rather stodgy thriller, a machine has been invented by scientists at the Amercon clinic near Cannes that can brainwash patients’ disturbed minds by feeding them erotic images which later surface as pleasurable, or murderous, dreams — a self-dependant “drug” produced under unethical electronic hypnosis. Unfortunately, the rich and famous who are using this course of action to relieve them of psychiatric disorders are dying in fatal accidents, their brain tissues fried. American insurance investigator Rod Cameron steps in to uncover the truth behind the death of a film star who died before his car crashed. Cameron meets up with old flame Mary Murphy, engaged to the clinic’s unscrupulous owner, Peter Illing, and with the help of caring scientist Meredith Edwards discovers what goes on behind those closed doors.
Director Montgomery Tully does his best with this (for the time) fanciful material, but the movie appears labored, hampered by leading man Cameron’s unsympathetic, wooden performance. Skulduggery, brutal murder, lascivious dancing scenes, torture (one of the scientists is an ex-Nazi) and a happy ending (Cameron and Murphy back together after he’s rescued her from becoming another victim and the lab going up in flames) highlight the production. It’s quite a brew, but fails to connect, one of the reasons why the film didn’t receive a wide showing in U.K. cinemas and passed most fans by. Still stuck in some kind of artistic wasteland, Eros’ The Man Without a Body was a cheap-jack mad doctor-type offering jointly directed by W. Lee Wilder and Charles Saunders (Saunders’ input was apparently minimal). George Coulouris played a highly strung financier affected by a brain tumor who hits upon the crackpot idea of stealing the head of the prophet Nostradamus (buried in France), rigging it up to apparatus in Robert Hutton’s laboratory and then cajoling the thing into predicting how his business interests will benefit from the undoubted words of wisdom that will spill from those age-old lips. Coulouris secretly plans to have Hutton transplant the head onto his own body, so that he can more readily control his empire.
Twelve long minutes into this risible British shocker, we are informed of the results of Coulouris’ brain scan. Thirty even longer minutes after that, Nostradamus’ head gets to speak. While Coulouris communicates with the 16th-century prophet, his mistress (Nadja Regin) is carrying on behind his back with Doctor Sheldon Lawrence, so sexual betrayal is tossed into the mix for good measure. Nostradamus, understandably annoyed at having been disturbed after 500 years of rest, feeds the businessman erroneous information, leading to the downfall of his empire. Out of his mind Coulouris strangles Regin and shoots Lawrence, but only wounds him. Back in the lab, the plastic-looking head is grafted onto Lawrence’s body; the resulting creature, a square papier maché box surrounding its head in an absurd parody of the Frankenstein Monster, stalks the dark London streets, falling to its death from a bell tower after Coulouris has fallen to his death in identical fashion.
Drab and plodding are two words that best sums up The Man Without a Body. Coulouris never did cut it as a mad businessman/doctor (he was equally miscast in The Woman Eater, released the same year) and his eye-rolling turn here is laughable rather than laudable. Most of the action takes place in Hutton’s sparsely equipped laboratory, the monster in the closing 10 minutes will invite titters from the audience (as it did when I caught it in 1965, on a double bill with Fiend Without a Face) and Wilder’s direction lacks pace. The movie becomes a tired addition to ’50s British sci-fi/horror that does little or nothing to add to the genre’s standing or, indeed, supposed progression, as the decade wore on.
Hammer’s second Quatermass outing, Quatermass 2, consolidated the company’s position as purveyors of top-quality fare and is now rightly regarded as the highpoint of British science fiction in the 1950s. Val Guest and Nigel Kneale’s complex screenplay took in alien invasion, dormitory town paranoia and covert government conspiracy, coming across like a mix of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and 1984. Guest’s treatment of Kneale’s multitude of ideas is tough and involving: Professor Quatermass (Brian Donlevy reprising his role from The Quatermass Xperiment) is up against one frustrating problem after another in trying to persuade an obstinate British government to finance his moonbase project. Meanwhile, colleague William Franklyn is monitoring showers of meteorites falling over Southern England, originating from an asteroid orbiting the Earth. When Donlevy finds to his consternation that his pet project has been replicated at a secret military site near Winnerden Flats, and those gleaming domes, supposedly producing synthetic food, are harboring deadly organisms from outer space, the scene is set for an apocalyptic thriller that rivets from start to finish.
Despite Kneale’s continued objections to the actor’s involvement, Donlevy, surly and bull-headed, carries Quatermass 2 with conviction and verve, rattling off his lines with machine-gun ferocity. Whether steamrolling his raincoat-suited bulk through Whitehall and Scotland Yard’s corridors of power in order to get at the truth, or organizing a mass revolt at the center of alien operations, Donlevy is a one-man force of nature, not to be treated lightly or easily dismissed; this has to go down as one of the actor’s greatest-ever performances, brandy or no brandy. From disquieting beginnings, the film quickly escalates into a nightmare of alarming events as the domineering Professor single-handedly attempts to foil an alien takeover, one that members of the upper reaches of the cabinet and police are aware of. Shot in and around the Shell Haven Refinery in Essex, Q2benefits from Gerald Gibbs’ vivid cinematography, a sterling cast and Guest’s energetic direction. It perpetuates, even today, an undeniable power that places it firmly in the very top echelons of science fiction film history. And, as stated, Donlevy is outstanding.
1958
Fiend Without a Face continued the run of lean but effective British X-rated sci-fi horror, and the American star taking center stage this time was the ubiquitous Marshall Thompson, once again playing an officer in uniform and flying jacket. Marshall’s stolid presence ensured that this story of brain-like monsters materialized out of the thought processes of scientist Kynaston Reeves didn’t plummet into silliness. A murky, gray England stood in for Canada; Reeves is a miserable professor venting his dislike for his fellow folk by tapping his deranged thoughts via an experimental machine into an airbase’s atomic reactor. Inadvertently, he releases invisible creatures from his unbalanced mind that scuttle, rustle and slurp through the undergrowth, leaping on people and sucking their brains out through the back of the neck. A mad GI is blamed for the deaths, but all-round regular guy Thompson reckons it’s something far more sinister. Director Arthur Crabtree conjures up several nerve-racking interludes, assisted by Lionel Banes’ artful back-lighting. It all leads up to the extraordinary climax when Thompson, Kim Parker and a few locals, holed up in a house, come under attack from the animated flying brains. This lengthy sequence alone ensured the film’s everlasting status among fans, making one forget the final schmaltzy seconds when hero Thompson, after blowing up the base’s power plant which, as a result, destroys the miniature “Ids,” appears in a doorway; Parker rushes up to him and plants a big, wet smacker on his soppy face. Yes, in the 1950s, these movies always had to end with a kiss! Proving that anything Bert I. Gordon could do, the British could do as well, although even more ineptly, The Strange World of Planet X (aka Cosmic Monsters/The Cosmic Monster) receives the dubious honor of being the country’s one and only ’50s giant insect film, and an extremely poor one at that. Based on an unremembered television serial (it looks like a TV sitcom in parts) and shot in three locations — a public house, a laboratory and a wood — Gilbert Gunn’s tepid sci-fi drama told of glum-looking Forrest Tucker and Alec Mango’s experiments in playing around with Earth’s magnetic field. By doing so, a hole is created in the ionosphere; cosmic rays bombard the English countryside, causing insects to grow to huge dimensions. Friendly alien Martin Benson warns the scientists about the possible disastrous effects of their experimentation. The hole is then sealed by an alien race; Benson solemnly informs one and all that Earth is not fit to join the Federation of Planets and departs in a flying saucer (which resembles a silver spinning top.)
B.I. Gordon was the king of the back-projected magnified beastie but even his efforts look champion compared to what was on offer here; millipedes, caterpillars, crickets, cockroaches and a spider, all blown up to create an illusion of gigantism, the army blasting away at these images, having no real contact with the creatures. A tramp, turned into a homicidal strangler by the rays, patently fails to liven things up. Yes, Britain still had a long way to go before it could hope to catch up with our American cousins, judging by Eros’ effort. Hadn’t Hammer and their two Quatermass classics taught other filmmakers anything?
Well, judging by Tempean’s The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye), they had. Yet another adaptation of a British TV serial (broadcast December 1956/January 1957), Hammer scriptwriter Jimmy Sangster was hired to give added bite to this sub- Quatermass excursion into extraterrestrial activity on a Swiss mountain. Cyclopean octopus-type beings reside on the slopes of the Trollenberg Mountain, concealed by a radioactive cloud. U.N. science investigator Forrest Tucker (the imported actor was up to his eyes in British fantasy pictures in 1957/1958) has seen this before, in the Andes, but the authorities chose to ridicule his claims of alien creatures. Mind-reading sisters Janet Munro and Jennifer Jane arrive in the town and soon, Munro is communicating with the monsters by telepathy; they need thin air to survive on Earth, hence the mountains are an ideal environment. Climbers are decapitated, another taken over mentally by the things and the exciting showdown takes place on a mountain observatory busy monitoring cosmic rays. The giant octopi/jellyfish aliens attack the building, their writhing tentacles seeking human prey, before they’re finished off with a combination of Molotov cocktails and firebombs dropped by the air force.
Twin British lovelies Munro and Jayne offset Tucker’s dour presence, but the rest of the cast, especially Professor Warren Mitchell and Laurence Payne, are just as sullen. Still, the performances, plus Stanley Black’s fine score, match the movie’s downbeat mood, and Les Bowie’s monstrous alien effects work well despite the low budget. This remains one of the more atmospheric of the British X-rated sci-fi thrillers to emerge from this period. It was also, for a change, a satisfactory release from Eros.
1959
Behemoth the Sea Monster lays claim to being the only British dinosaur-on-the-loose picture released in the 1950s, the stop-motion effects created by veteran Willis O’ Brien and Pete Peterson. In contrast to the more flamboyant American monster movies, it has a spartan, European air to it, the imported actor on this occasion being Gene Evans. Eugene Lourie directed (American prints list Douglas Hickox as co-director); he was responsible for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (which Behemoth resembles in parts) and would unleash Gorgo onto London’s population in 1961. Behemoth had a somewhat checkered history; soon after general release in England, the censor ordered severe cuts to the “X” certificate print in order to satisfy Allied Artists’ demands that the film be made accessible to a wider and younger audience. With several scenes omitted (victims charred and blistered from radiation burns; the radioactive monster stomping through London’s streets; the smashing-down-the-pylons sequence), Behemoth was reissued as an “A” and renamed The Giant Behemoth. Ironically, both versions went the rounds in England during the mid-1960s; usually, seasoned buffs made a beeline for the X-rated Behemoth, curious to discover what exact footage the censor had judged unsuitable for the under- 16s when those under-16s were later quizzed about what they had witnessed in the A-rated flick.
As monster movies go, Behemoth the Sea Monster in its unedited form is a pretty good ’50s dinosaur-at-large romp. Granted, audiences have to wait 45 minutes for the main action to take place, but when it does, the stop-motion animation is superb (not so convincing is Jack Rabin’s fake-looking model upending the Woolwich ferryboat). Not really gifted with star charisma, Evans is gruff but adequate, André Morell lends articulate support as a professor and the black-and-white photography is needle-sharp. This was to be O’Brien’s final work on a monster flick, and how Lourie must have detested the British film censor’s office — he came up against an identical set of circumstances regarding censorship problems when Gorgo was released in 1961 as an “X,” not the “A” the distributors would have wished for.
First Man into Space took its cue from The Quatermass Experiment, the plot modeled on similar lines. Bill Edwards played a cocky space pilot who defies his superiors’ orders (and that includes brother Marshall Thompson) and guides his rocket, the Y13, 250 miles into space, a lot further than scheduled. Losing control of the craft, he flies through a shower of meteorite dust and disappears off radar screens. The Y13 crashes to Earth, Edwards coated in a glistening rock-like substance (a form of “cosmic protection”), needing the oxygen content from blood to survive. Director Robert Day obviously had minimal funds at his disposal, so a wintry-looking England inappropriately stood in for sunny New Mexico, with stock footage of American airbases inserted at intervals. Nevertheless, this efficient shocker, filmed in stark black-and-white, managed to produce some effective scenes: The tortured Edwards in his bulky spacesuit blundering into a blood bank and savagely ripping open a nurse’s throat; the deranged astronaut murdering two police officers and a prolonged climax in which Thompson, positive that Edwards can be saved (“If he can drive a car, he’s still retained some intelligence. He’s not all monster.”), lures his brother into a high-pressure chamber in the hope that the alien organism covering his body will be destroyed by increasing the altitude. Edwards, managing at last to communicate with the authorities and tell them what happened in space, expires through oxygen starvation, leaving Commander Thompson to take up with not-so-grieving Marla Landi, Edwards’ girlfriend.
Thompson was never out of uniform at this stage of his career, playing a commander not only in this picture but also in Fiend Without a Face and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. Solid and dependable, he does everything asked of him with a script that doesn’t plummet into silliness. Landi is darkly attractive but spends most of her screen time screaming, and Edwards’ make-up job, one eye staring out of a ravaged, pockmarked face, was considered too frightening for a younger audience, hence the “X” classification. Buxton Orr’s music is a little strident at times but never over-prominent, incorporating a weird electronic whistling sound to announce the monster’s approach. All in all, First Man into Space, given a major release in England in 1959, is an austere piece of sci-fi that races through its 77 minutes, a reminder of the sleeves-rolled-up ethic prevalent in British filmmaking that hallmarked this period, prior to the brassy ’60s taking over. Yes, progress had been made since the days of Dick Barton at Bay and Mister Drake’s Duck, as First Man into Space showed, but British sci-fi of the ’50s was very much a down-to-earth, black-and-white affair. It lacked both the color and expense that highlighted the movies flooding in from the States but did throw up a few classics along the way. However, compared to the gaudiness and tackiness that was to blight many a production in the 1960s, British ’50s sci-fi can, in hindsight, be viewed in a much more approving light; adult-orientated pictures that embodied solid craftsmanship allied to a “let’s get on with it” mindset, everything created on tight budgets, the end product successful at the box-office. It was this “hard graft on low finances” principle that summed up the decade perfectly.