QUATERMASS AND THE PIT: Serial Versus Film

Cover by Bryan Kneale, 1960. Click for a better jpeg.

QUATERMASS AND THE PIT, aka FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (1967) is by no means a bad film, and if accepted on its own terms, it could easily be considered good. Yet despite its virtues, for me, it cannot match the scope and unsettling mood of its television source.

Broadcast in six episodes by the BBC from 1958 to 1959, Nigel Kneale's QUATERMASS AND THE PIT remains one of the best TV serials I have watched; only I, CLAUDIUS and CHERNOBYL have rivalled it.

The Hammer Film adaptation does what it can to honour the source, and at certain points, it compares favourably. Roy Ward Baker directs crowd and panic sequences with all of the skill he had displayed in 1958's A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (by far the best Titanic film I have seen). Lead actors Andrew Keir and James Donald are as good as Andre Morell and Cec Linder, their counterparts in the TV serial, and I would hardly be surprised if many viewers preferred the film leads.

Andrew Keir. Click for a better jpeg.

Yet even with its lower budget and limited technical resources, the TV serial comes across as the "bigger" production, with a huge cast, and with visual effects often better than those used in the film. In particular, the design and construction of the TV aliens go far beyond anything seen in the film, and they come to life more convincingly in the serial's "optic-encephalograph" sequence.

Above all, the TV serial gains from its extended running time of three-and-a-half hours. Nigel Kneale was always at his best when he had room to explore the implications of his ideas. That was true in THE QUATERMASS EXPERIMENT serial, but even more so in the TV version of QUATERMASS AND THE PIT. In six episodes, Kneale took a small event and then built upon it, built upon it, built upon it, until it involved nothing less than the fate of humanity. The film version does what it can with Kneale's ideas, but seems rushed and cramped in comparison, with less time to linger on the sinister details. The film is also forced to toss away much of the serial's nuance, those elegant moments when Kneale played with ideas for unexpected results. (A case in point: what Quatermass finds in the serial's pit is intriguingly more elaborate, more strange, than what he finds in the film.)

Andre Morell and Cec Linder. Click for a better jpeg.

The serial brought other advantages. Kneale's Quatermass plays were novels for television, with varied characters from different walks of life squabbling, cooperating, and horribly dying; the film cannot match the scope of Kneale's original. The music of Trevor Duncan works more effectively in the serial than does the music of Tristram Carey in the film. The coda of the serial, which provides a haunting final statement of the story's point, was cut from the film, and the result feels like a missing tooth to a questing tongue.

In the end, viewers who come to the film without knowledge of the TV serial (or of Kneale's published teleplay), will most likely find a lot to appreciate, but I love the scale and sinister details of the TV serial too much to accept the film on its own terms. That is my limitation; it might not be yours.