Film:
The Quatermass Xperiment
Format: DVD from St. Charles Public Library through OCLC WorldCat on The New Portable.
Science fiction from the 1950s tended to deal with some very specific topics in a number of different ways. One of those major topics was space travel. Generally speaking, there were two basic space travel plots. The first, and by far much larger group of films dealt with space travel as a robust phenomenon. People in these films are flying between planets and solar systems, exploring the universe in a pre-
Star Trek fashion. The other set of films was set more in the era’s present, with the first steps of space exploration happening. For this basic plot, the big part of the story tended to be a capsule (manned or unmanned) coming back with something that attached itself from outer space. Of these,
The Quatermass Xperiment (sometimes called
The Creeping Unknown) is one of the granddaddies.
The thin outline referenced above will form the guts of our story. The British Rocket Group launches a capsule under the tutelage of American professor Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevey). It goes up with three men and comes back with just one. Victor Caroon (Richard Wordsworth) seems to still be around, but his companions Reichenheim and Green are nowhere to be found. Caroon’s wife Judith (Margia Dean) complicates matters slightly, although her concern for her husband is certainly understandable.
