QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1967)

In London, a subway redevelopment project runs into a snag: the discovery of a five million year old skull of what the newspapers call an underground ape man. Dr. Roney (James Donald), a paleontologist, is called in to investigate. Soon they find a large metallic object which they fear could be an unexploded German bomb from the Blitz so the military is called in. Prof. Quatermass (Andrew Keir), who works on a national missile planning committee, goes to the site with his assistant Barbara Judd (Barbara Shelley) and immediately stirs up friction with Colonel Breen (Julian Glover) from the Army, who is trying to muscle his way into Quatermass' missile work. The metallic object, with a surface harder than diamond, turns out to be a hollow cylinder and another skull is found in it. Could this be an ancient spacecraft which once held living beings? Quatermass and Judd hear that an abandoned house across the street from the subway station is haunted, and they discover that, over the years, whenever the ground in the area has been disturbed, strange sightings occur. Soon, workers are having similar sightings of creepy life forms darting about. While a workman tries unsuccessfully to drill through the metal, a "freak vibration" is set off causing all in the area to have mini-seizures. Next, they find dead bodies of insectoid creatures, like giant locusts. Quatermass and Roney theorize that these are Martians who (if I've got this right) were trying to colonize the Earth in the altered form of an ape-like creature who eventually evolved into man. The locusts, who have horns, may be in our "race memory," having become the image of what we call the devil. Breen thinks the whole thing is some kind of weird Nazi propaganda and the government opens the excavation to the public. This is about where the plot went a bit wonky for me. Through some electronic device, race memory visions of the Martians can be viewed on a video monitor. Some people become possessed by the alien forces which seem to be emanating from the spaceship and they start behaving threateningly toward others who are not possessed and are therefore "different." Then a huge demonic vision of a locust Martian towers over London, leaving Quatermass, Judd and Roney to try and fight the madness.

This is an unusual movie, a mix of sci-fi, horror, mythology and maybe mysticism. There's a lot of backstory you can read on the Internet about the Quatermass series, three films which were adapted from three BBC TV serials. Suffice it to say that Prof. Quatermass is a somewhat gruff scientist involved in a British space program and each film was about some kind of contact with extraterrestrial life. This is often considered the best of the batch: it's the only one in color, it seems to have had a pretty decent budget, and Andrew Keir is usually judged to be a better Quatermass than American actor Brian Donlevy who played him in the first two—Keir certainly gives the character more dimension than Donlevy. Though I don't think anyone would call this a character-driven drama, the four main actors do very nice jobs giving their characters some roundness and fleshing out their relationships with each other. If there is a bad guy figure, it's Breen, standing in for the government, but as embodied by Julian Glover, even he doesn't come off as exactly villainous. Roney is a bit stiff and formal, but that’s how he should be and James Donald makes him likable enough. Barbara Shelley makes Judd compelling and full-blooded without going into caricature, and Keir seems perfect as the in-control but very human Quatermass. 

Other actors who have their moments include Duncan Lamont as a workman who is the first one affected by the Martian vibrations, Maurice Good as a military man, and Robert Morris as an assistant scientist ("cute guy with glasses" is how I described him in my notes; pictured at right). The plot details are quite fuzzy; even on a second viewing, I wasn't always sure what was happening in terms of machines and thought waves and race memory and telekinesis. But the idea that life on earth might have been seeded by aliens is interesting, and was echoed the next year in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's a bit talky but the last twenty minutes or so are full of action. The Blu-ray print is clear and gorgeous, and there is a very good audio commentary by film historian Bruce G. Hallenbeck. Another commentary by Constantine Nasr and film historian Steve Haberman is OK but gets repetitious and focuses a bit too much on comparing this film to the original TV serial. Recommended. Original American title: Five Million Years to Earth. Pictured at top are Keir and Glover. [Blu-ray]