Category Archives: great british cinema

Great British Cinema: Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

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quartermass and the pit

I’m obviously a fan of Hammer Studios’ horror productions of the 1950s and 1960s as I’ve talked about them numerous times on these pages. I’ve also talked about how my wife doesn’t like horror films and that I usually watch them without her. She does like Hammer Horror as they usually aren’t too scary or gorey and so when my daughter is away I’ll sometimes throw one of their films on.

So it was with Quatermass and the Pit. My wife was actually busy doing something else when I put it on, but when I hollered down to her that I was watching a Hammer movie she came right up. Quatermass and the Pit is actually the third film in a loose trilogy. The first film The Quatermass XPeriment came out in 1955, Quatermass 2 followed in 1957 and then this third film came out in 1967. I’ve seen the other two but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you anything about them now. This isn’t to say that they were bad, but perhaps they just weren’t all that memorable.

All three films follow Professor Quatermass (played by Brian Donlevy in the first two films, and Andrew Keir in this one) a brilliant scientist who keeps finding himself involved in strange occurrences and alien invasions.

Quatermass and the Pit begins with some scientists down inside a London Tube station. Some construction workers had been digging out a new tunnel and came across some strange ape/man-looking skeletons. After some more digging, they come across a smooth, roundish object. Fearing it is a leftover Nazi bomb they call in the military. A little more digging shows it to actually be some kind of alien ship.

That’s when Quatermass is called in. There is a lot of silly sci-fi nonsense that comes after and the inevitable clashes between science and the military. The Quatermass films always remind me a bit of Jon Pertwee-era Doctor Who in that he’s this brilliant scientist who is amazed at new discoveries and alien lifeforms, and he winds up butting heads with military forces that just want to shoot things and blow them up.

The whole thing is a bit ridiculous and wonderful in the way science fiction films often were in the 1950s. The fact that this was made in the late 1960s makes it somehow even more awesome.

Great British Cinema: An Inspector Calls (1954)

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an inspector calls

The Birlings, an upper-class English family sit down to dinner. They are celebrating the engagement of the daughter Sheila (Eileen Moore) to Gerald (Brian Worth) a young man of good stock with great prospects. The father Mr. Birling (Arthur Young) a man of some standing in the community is ever so pleased with this match. The prim and proper Mrs. Birling (Olga Lindo) who dedicates her time as head of a charity organization designed to help destitute young women, is also pleased. Even young Eric (Bryan Forbest) who perhaps drinks too much and is not yet ready to become a serious young man, is happy for his sister.

Into this scene of merriment enters Inspector Poole (Alastair Sim) who tells the family a tale of a young woman, Eva Smith (Jane Wenham) who just that night swallowed some poison and died an excruciating death.

As the family begins to wonder what all that has to do with them the Inspector begins to question them one by one and as it turns out each of them knows the young girl independently of the other. And each of them ultimately treated her quite poorly due to her class and station in life.

Mr. and Mrs. Birling stand by the idea that they did nothing wrong. They treated a woman of her class and station as she should be treated. He fired her for demanding a raise, she denied her charity because she was too uppity and should be able to find means elsewhere.

But the younger people, Eric and Sheila become appalled by their (and their parents) behavior. They treated the poor girl terribly and could therefore be seen as responsible for her death.

In the middle of this is the Inspector. He is from the lower classes which puts him beneath the Birlings in social standings, but as an inspector, he is granted certain powers. He is allowed to question the family but is expected not to push. When he does they push back.

Alastair Sim is magnificent. You can tell the actor was having a glorious time and we do too, just watching him. He seems to know the answers to all of his questions before he asks them, but he wants the Birlings to answer them anyway. He wants them to understand how their behavior affected the young woman (and will continue to affect others.). He pushes just far enough to get their cackles up, but not enough to have them throw him out (or to call his superiors.). A sly little grin periodically appears on his face showing how much he’s enjoying himself.

It is a wonderful little film. As an American class distinctions of the type they have in England are fascinating to me. I love films like this that dig into those social standings and play with them.

I highly recommend seeking it out and watching.

Great British Cinema

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I haven’t done a theme of the month in a while. I spent the summer sort-of casually going through my life in movies chronologically, but I haven’t been steadfast about it. I’ll probably continue to do that for the remainder of the year (or until I’m finished whatever comes first) but again I’m not gonna try that hard. But before we move into 31 Days of Horror and then Noirvember I did want to do one more new theme.

A few months back the Criterion Channel did a thing where they showed a bunch of British Noirs. I really liked the ones I watched. I’m obviously a big fan of film noir but in some ways, it seems a very American genre. And yet it is also very nebulous. No one seems to be able to completely define exactly what a film noir is and thus it is a genre that can fairly easily be applied to all sorts of films from all sorts of places.

What I loved about those films is that they were very much film noirs, but they were also distinctly British. That got me thinking about British films and that led me to make this month’s theme.

For the month of September, I’m going to watch as many British films as I can. Now British cinema is a very big box to play in so I’m going to try and narrow it down a bit. I do mean films financed by, produced by, made by, and starring British people. I don’t want American films set in Britain.

I’m looking for films that feel distinctly British, even if I don’t know exactly what that means. I’m less interested in Harry Potter and James Bond and more interested in Ealing comedies and Hammer horror.

But honestly, we’ll just see how it goes. Who knows what I’ll wind up watching and talking about. If you are British or are just a fan of British cinema please chime in and let me know your recommendations.

Also, yes, that is my title for this theme “Great British Cinema”. I was aiming for a play on Great Britain but couldn’t quite make it work. Nothing else worked either. My wife suggested Brit-ember like British and September bumped into each other but that seems silly. If anybody has a suggestion, I’m all ears.