Conceptual Simplicity: QUATERMASS 2

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Of the Hammer films adapted from Nigel Kneale's television plays, QUATERMASS 2 works the best because it was based on the simplest concept.

The teleplays written before and after used the extended range of a mini-series to explore the implications of complex ideas. Hammer ignored these ideas in THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT, and degraded Kneale's unusual alien threat into a standard movie monster; the studio remained a bit more faithful to QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, but abridged severely the exploration of its concepts, and in doing this, took away the pleasures of escalating discovery that had made the original so compelling.

QUATERMASS 2, on the other hand, was less about the exploration of ideas than about the suspense of an alien invasion that spreads in technocratic governmental secrecy: a threat less important in its nature than in the question of what Quatermass can do to stop it. The simplicity of this concept allowed Hammer to condense the plot of the teleplay without sacrificing nuance, and the result is a film that moves rapidly without seeming to have lost its reasons for moving at all.

The film also benefits from strong direction by Val Guest, who stages events on several planes at once, in foreground, background, and often in middleground. This hive-like activity builds a sense of encroaching, claustrophobic danger even in wide-open spaces.

Other benefits are the score, the photography, editing, and cast: those familiar Hammer faces. In this crowd, only Brian Donlevy seems to be in the wrong film. His performance is competent, sometimes even good, but he is never convincing as a man of intellect and scientific perception; he never feels like the true Quatermass.

This one disappointment never takes away the pleasures of the adaptation as a whole. Hammer's reductions of THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT and of PIT have never worked for me, but QUATERMASS 2 is a film I recommend.