I don’t see any patterns in my choice of review subjects this month. Where did you get an idea like that?
Hammer’s run of Sci-Fi movies began in 1955 with their adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment, and they apparently wanted an immediate follow-up, which Kneale decided not to participate in (the next Quatermass movie would be released in 1957.) So, rather than continuing the exploits of master scientist Bernard Quatermass, they got together their usual gang (including writer Jimmy Sangster, who also scripted many of Hammer’s Gothic horror movies) and made up their own master scientist with a bizarre science mystery to solve (and maybe there was blackjack thrown in as well), which is what gave us X the Unknown. Despite kinda being a bootleg appropriation of Kneale’s influential SF/horror hybrids, X does capably capture a bit of the cosmic existentialism that makes productions like Quatermass (or even The Abominable Snowman, another movie based on a Kneale TV production) resonate—the idea of a unknowable, and possibly hostile, universe being unleashed upon us by pure happenstance. Its featured menace, a blob of radioactive mud that surprisingly predates The Blob, skirts the line of plausibility just enough that you really get the sense of it as a disaster unfolding, and the movie’s violence approaches the grossness of Caltiki without quite getting there, but is impressive nonetheless.
As with the Quatermass films, X is an example of a time where an old intellectual with a cane could be the star of a genre movie—in this case, Dr. Adam Royston, played by Academy Award-winning actor Dean Jagger (who may or may not have had original director Joseph Losey removed from the production because he was blacklisted at the time), an American employed at an atomic energy research lab in Scotland. Aside from his signature cane, Royston is notable for being a bit of a headstrong eccentric who works on his own secret projects while playing loud classical music (the movie’s actual music is sometimes so loud that it makes the dialogue hard to hear), much to chagrin of his stuffy, by-the-books superiors. It is a bit weird to have an American lead in an otherwise very British movie, and it’s hard to say if this was done to differentiate it from Quatermass, to say something about the increasingly international reality of scientific research, or just to bolster the international box office. In any case, this being a proper British movie with actual English and Scottish actors in it means that we have much more believable accents than what we found in The Man From Planet X, and I also get a few laughs from hearing the Scots pronounce “out” as “oot” (I’m of Scottish descent, so I’m allowed to laugh at it.)
During a military exercise training soldiers on how to use a Geiger counter, a mysterious crack forms in an empty field, and the soldiers who were near it are horribly burned by whatever came out. While an investigation is begun by Dr. Royston alongside members of the military hierarchy and UK Atomic Energy Commission rep McGill (Leo McKern, who would later appear in The Omen and Ladyhawke), who Royston calls “Mac” because he’s such a wacky informally-speaking American, we see multiple encounters with some mysterious something: a boy is chased by it when he explores an abandoned tower (and later dies from radiation exposure), and a doctor in the hospital where the victims are kept is straight-up melted when he tries to initiate sexytimes with a nurse in the radiation room, a scene that is almost exactly the same as a scene in previous Creature Canon subject Blue Monkey. In some scenes, the victims of the mysterious something are off-camera, which only makes the few times they do show the full effect even more gruesome—especially when they show their hands swelling up, a nicely disturbing visual. I’m still surprised when special effects this lurid show up in a fifties movie, but I guess that’s the Hammer Films Difference.
After Royston finds the lab where he works on his personal project ransacked, with his stash of radioactive material stolen and sucked dry (he discovers the container among the possessions of your usual random vagrant living in an abandoned tower), he begins to theorize about what they’re dealing with: a semi-intelligent organism (the way they portray it, it seems barely alive—it gets out of its hole, beelines to the nearest source of radiation, and then goes back) from Earth’s distant prehistory that is trapped underground most of the time, but periodically has the opportunity to come to the surface. Being something of pure energy, from a time when the Earth’s surface was entirely molten, its source of sustenance is other forms of energy, which in this case is radiation. As he explains, that means that during previous times when it came to the surface, it quickly died off—but now, oh boy, there’s a whole helping heaping of radiation for it to gorge on. It’s an intriguing idea, that something otherwise completely natural (if unusual) only becomes a problem because of the way it interacts with human technology, a completely accidental disaster that was impossible to predict.
There is a bit of an ambivalence about science in this that is also intriguing—the grieving parents of the dead boy blame scientists like Royston for loosing the radiation genie upon the world, and the sheer number of easily-accessible food sources for the thing shows how prevalent it had become since World War II. The plot is definitely playing on fears about where atomic energy research was going to lead civilization, and in a way that feels less abstract or goofy than, say, creating some giant talking crabs. On the other hand, Royston’s secret project turns out to be an attempt to dampen radiation using radio waves, a process that if it works (spoiler: it does) would be one of the most important and beneficial discoveries in modern history. Science technically caused the problem, but it also solves it—even so, there isn’t that sense of triumphalism found in some contemporaneous Sci-Fi movies, but something rather more sober and ambiguous.
Of course, part of the problem isn’t the science itself, but the decision-makers outside the process. The ceaseless reticence of Royston’s superior at the atomic lab makes him a perfect example of a stuffed shirt bureaucrat, to the point that it becomes borderline cartoonish, especially when they have to mobilize against the thing (is it the X, or the Unknown? Good question, me) and he still seems more irritated that Royston was doing a side project on company time. Another fairly amusing aside comes from the army lieutenant, in the scenes following a trip down into the mysterious chasm home of the blob (where we see a melted body, as if the claustrophobic nature of the scene wasn’t tense enough), who decides to simply blow the hole up and fill it with cement, and comments that the problem with scientists is that they “can’t see the easy way out of anything.” It feels like real pointed commentary in the script, which can apply to both the cliches of these movies or reality, especially since both our protagonist and the audience knows that it won’t work.
Not unlike The Abominable Snowman, the movie makes it so that the monster always has a presence throughout, even if it doesn’t appear in full until much later—the sentient mud and the ways it gets in and out of buildings is described before we ever see it. There are, of course, all the scenes where people see it off-camera, and either run away or scream as it approaches with the static noises that it makes, and we hear about the residue that it leaves behind, but the Unknown X is kept under wraps for quite a while. Much like with the melted people, it does benefit the shock factor of the movie when they alternate between withholding and definitely-not-withholding—it doles out the thrills at a pace that means it never really gets particularly slow or boring, no matter how talky is—and I imagine that when the blob finally breaks through the concrete at the climax of the movie, the audience was not expecting it. I can also imagine that at least part of this was keeping to a strict budget, and not showing the monster also meant that it could technically do a lot of things that their special effects wouldn’t allow, even though the later blob effects are perfectly fine. Maybe a smaller blob is much harder to portray in 1956 than a massive one? In any case, aside from the off-screen death of two comic relief soldiers halfway through the movie (which was surprising given just how much screentime their mundane conversations had been given before then), the most cliche monster movie scene is when a rural population hides in the church and a little girl is saved at the last minute from the rampaging blob. People who aren’t scientists, commissioners, or the military make up the majority of the victims, but aside from that scene and the scenes in the hospital, they don’t have much of a presence.
The difference between X the Unknown and many of the American monster movies of the era is in what they choose to grow broad with—the ideas in the latter are often much sillier (although rooted in the same outlandish interpretations of reality), and their messages much less ambiguous and cynical. In that sense, they have the same ideology as the army does, looking for easy answers. X, however, gets to be a bit more of a proper Sci-Fi story, pursuing ideas about how our discoveries have altered our world around us, while also dealing in ghoulish imagery, some of which is much more intense than what the American industry would allow. It’s still meant to be a lurid thriller rather than anything truly deep, but the influence of Nigel Kneale’s work on its production is very clear, making them give the story a higher base level of intelligence than a radioactive blob movie would usually get.
A Scrapbook of Infinite Noise 