BFI - Palgrave MacMillan
ISBN: 9781844577910
Paperback
Published October 2014
£12.99
REVIEW BY ADRIAN SMITH
The British Film Institute recently sponsored a major science fiction festival entitled
Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder. Alongside the many film screenings and DVD
releases they have also published several new volumes in their Film Classics
series. These are smaller volumes, around 100 pages in length, with each
focused on one specific film. Included are books on The War of the Worlds
(the 1953 version), Solaris (concentrating mainly on the 1972 Russian
classic, but also touching on Steven Soderbergh's 2002 adaptation), Silent
Running, Alien, Dr. Strangelove, Quatermass and the Pit
and more.
Quatermass and the Pit (1967) is seen as the high watermark of Hammer's science fiction
output. A belated follow-up to their two 1950s Quatermass films, themselves
based on a hugely successful BBC TV series penned by Nigel Kneale, the film
works better as a standalone story than as a direct sequel. Unlike those stark
monochrome films, which were shot mostly on location, Quatermass and the Pit
is colourful, studio-bound and uses a completely different cast. Brian Donlevy
had previously played the eponymous Professor Quatermass as a gruff,
no-nonsense American who had stepped straight from the pages of a Raymond
Chandler novel, the total opposite of Andrew Keir's bearded Scotsman. In this
film what appears to be an unexploded WWII bomb is uncovered during tube-tunnel
digging under London. Quatermass soon realises that this "bomb" is
actually a Martian spacecraft, crashed to Earth millions of years ago. These
aliens had come here to interfere with human evolution, meaning, as Barbara
Shelley's character puts it, "We are the Martians now."
Kim Newman is one of Britain's finest genre commentators, and his
writing here is illuminating as he discusses all incarnations of Quatermass,
from the first BBC series in 1953 through to the John Mills-starring The
Quatermass Conclusion in 1979. Even the ill-conceived 2005 remake gets a
mention. He goes into great depth on Pit itself, discussing the production and
the themes of the movie. The book is crammed with footnotes, each of which is
worth reading as they often contain more tidbits of information or humorous
asides. Newman may be a genre fan but he is not above sarcasm where it is
warranted.
This book demonstrates that although Hammer films must have more
books written about them than any other British studio's output, there is still
room for indepth analysis and commentary on individual significant titles. This
BFI Classics entry is a shrewd and penetrating introduction to Quatermass for
the uninitiated, and a must-have for those who think they already know
everything there is to know about Quatermass and his infernal pit.
You can order from the BFI Classics sci-fi range here:
http://shop.bfi.org.uk/sci-fi/sci-fi-books.html
