Quatermass and the Pit (film)

Quatermass and the Pit (released as Five Million Years to Earth in the United States) is a 1967 British science fiction horror film from Hammer Film Productions. It is a sequel to the earlier Hammer films The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass 2. Like its predecessors, it is based on a BBC Television serial, in this case Quatermass and the Pit, written by Nigel Kneale. It is directed by Roy Ward Baker and stars Andrew Keir Although not playing the title role, Donald was accorded top-billing status.

Nigel Kneale had long been highly critical of Brian Donlevy's interpretation of Quatermass and lobbied for the role to be recast, arguing that enough time had passed that audiences would not resist a change of actor. Several actors were considered for the part, including André Morell, who had played Quatermass in the television version of Quatermass and the Pit. Morell was not interested in revisiting a role he had already played. The producers eventually settled on the Scottish actor Andrew Keir, who had appeared in supporting roles in other Hammer productions, including The Pirates of Blood River (1962), The Devil-Ship Pirates (1964) and Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966). Keir found the shoot an unhappy experience: he later recalled: "The director – Roy Ward Baker – didn't want me for the role. He wanted Kenneth More ... and it was a very unhappy shoot. [...] Normally I enjoy going to work every day. But for seven-and-a-half weeks it was sheer hell." Roy Ward Baker denied he had wanted Kenneth More, who he felt would be "too nice" for the role, Quatermass and the Pit was her last film for the company and she subsequently worked in television and the theatre. Roy Ward Baker was particularly taken with his leading lady, telling Bizarre Magazine in 1974 that he was "mad about her in the sense of love. We used to waltz about the set together, a great love affair."

Filming

By the time Quatermass and the Pit finally entered production Val Guest was occupied on Casino Royale (1967), so directing duties went instead to Roy Ward Baker. Baker's first film had been The October Man (1947) and he was best known for The One That Got Away (1957) and A Night to Remember (1958). Following the failure of Two Left Feet (1963), he moved into television, directing episodes of The Human Jungle (1963–64), The Saint (1962–69) and The Avengers. Producer Anthony Nelson Keys chose Baker as director because he felt his experience on such films as A Night to Remember gave him the technical expertise to handle the film's significant special effects requirements. Baker, for his part, felt that his background on fact-based dramas such as A Night to Remember and The One That Got Away enabled him to give Quatermass and the Pit the air of realism it needed to be convincing to audiences. He was impressed by Nigel Kneale's screenplay, feeling the script was "taut, exciting and an intriguing story with excellent narrative drive. It needed no work at all. All one had to do was cast it and shoot it." He was also impressed with Hammer Films' lean set-up: having been used to working for major studios with thousands of full-time employees, he was surprised to find that Hammer's core operation consisted of just five people and enjoyed how this made the decision-making process fast and simple. Cary also recalled that "the main use of electronics in Quatermass, I think, was the violent shaking, vibrating sound that the "thing in the tunnel" gave off ... It was not a terribly challenging sound to do, though I never played it very loud because I didn't want to destroy my speakers—I did have hopes of destroying a few cinema loudspeaker systems, though it never happened." Several orchestral and electronic cues from the film were released by GDI Records on a compilation titled The Quatermass Film Music Collection. The soundtrack was released on yellow vinyl in the UK for Record Store Day 2017.

Title sequence

The title sequence of Quatermass and the Pit was devised to be evocative. Kim Newman, in his British Film Institute (BFI) monograph about the movie, states: "The words 'Hammer Film Production' appear on a black background. Successive jigsaw-piece cutaways reveal a slightly psychedelic skull. Swirling, infernal images are superimposed on bone – perhaps maps or landscapes – evoking both the red planet Mars and the fires of Hell. Beside this, the title appears in jagged red letters."

Censorship

The script was sent to John Trevelyan of the British Board of Film Censors in December 1966. Trevelyan replied that the film would require an X certificate and complained about the sound of the vibrations from the alien ship, the showing of the Martian massacre, scenes of destruction and panic as the Martian influence takes hold, and the image of the Devil.

Release

Quatermass and the Pit premiered on 9 November 1967 and went on general release as a double feature with Circus of Fear on 19 November. It was released in the US by 20th Century Fox, as Five Million Years to Earth, in March 1968.

Home media

Various DVDs of the film include a commentary from Nigel Kneale and Roy Ward Baker, as well as cast and crew interviews, trailers and an instalment of The World of Hammer TV series devoted to Hammer's forays into science fiction.

A UK Blu-ray was released on 10 October 2011, followed by releases in the US, Germany and Australia.

Reception

Box office

According to Fox records, the film required $1.2 million in rentals to break even and made only $881,000 ($ in ).

Critical response

The critical reception was generally positive. Writing in The Times, John Russell Taylor found that, "after a slowish beginning, which shows up the deficiencies of acting and direction, things really start hopping when a mysterious missile-like object discovered in a London excavation proves to be a relic of a prehistoric Martian attempt (successful, it would seem) to colonize Earth [...] The development of this situation is scrupulously worked out and the film is genuinely gripping even when (a real test this) the Power of Evil is finally shown personified in hazy glowing outline, a spectacle as a rule more likely to provoke titters than gasps of horror."

Paul Errol of the Evening Standard described the film as a "well-made, but wordy, blob of hokum", a view echoed by William Hall of The Evening News who described the film as "entertaining hokum" with an "imaginative ending". A slightly more critical view was espoused by Penelope Mortimer in The Observer who said: "This nonsense makes quite a good film, well put together, competently photographed, on the whole sturdily performed. What it totally lacks is imagination." Leslie Halliwell wrote: "The third film of a Quatermass serial is the most ambitious, and in many ways inventive and enjoyable, yet spoiled by the very fertility of the author's imagination: the concepts are simply too intellectual to be easily followed in what should be a visual thriller. The climax, in which the devil rears over London and is "earthed", is satisfactorily harrowing."

Legacy

The film was a success for Hammer and they quickly announced that Nigel Kneale was writing a new Quatermass story for them but the script never went further than a few preliminary discussions. Kneale did eventually write a fourth Quatermass story, broadcast as a four-part serial, titled Quatermass, by ITV television in 1979, an edited version of which was also given a limited cinema release under the title The Quatermass Conclusion. Quatermass and the Pit marked the return to directing for the cinema for Roy Ward Baker.

Quatermass and the Pit continues to be generally well regarded among critics. John Baxter notes in Science Fiction in the Cinema that "Baker's unravelling of this crisp thriller is tough and interesting. [...] The film has moments of pure terror, perhaps the most effective that in which the drill operator, driven off the spaceship by the mysterious power within is caught up in a whirlwind that fills the excavation with a mass of flying papers." John Brosnan, writing in The Primal Scream, found that "as a condensed version of the serial, the film is fine but the old black-and-white version, though understandably creaky in places and with inferior effects, still works surprisingly well, having more time to build up a disturbing atmosphere." Bill Warren in Keep Watching the Skies! said: "The ambition of the storyline is contained in a well-constructed mystery that unfolds carefully and clearly." Nigel Kneale had mixed feelings about the result "I was very happy with Andrew Keir, who they eventually chose, and very happy with the film. There are, however, a few things that bother me. ... The special effects in Hammer films were always diabolical."

It has been suggested that Tobe Hooper's 1985 Lifeforce is largely a remake of Hammer's Quatermass and the Pit. In an interview, director Tobe Hooper discussed how Cannon Films gave him $25 million, free rein, and Colin Wilson's book The Space Vampires. Hooper then shares how giddy he was: "I thought I'd go back to my roots and make a 70 mm Hammer film."

In 1998, Alex Proyas was reportedly developing an updated version of Quatermass and the Pit, however, he indicated that undisclosed legal issues needed to be cleared by Warner Bros. before it could move forward.