Cold War Climate Change: The Day the Earth Caught Fire

Now Playing: The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961)

Pros: A prescient story of superpower miscalculations leading to global catastrophe; Believable, complex characters portrayed by a top-notch cast
Cons: A scene depicting young Londoners rioting over water restrictions is too tame to be believed

This post is part of the Second Disaster Blog-a-thon hosted by the always entertaining Dubsism and Pale Writer. After you’ve sweated it out here at Films From Beyond, head on over to their blogs for more cinematic disasters, catastrophes, fiascos and debacles than you can shake your head at.

Back in the late '50s and early ‘60s, there was no doubt about it -- if we were going to do ourselves in, it would be through nuclear war. The two hyper-powers that emerged from the ashes of WWII were testing the ultimate doomsday weapon, the H-bomb, that made the atomic bombs dropped on Japan look like firecrackers.

Anxious Americans were busy building backyard bomb shelters, practicing duck and cover drills and waiting for the sky to fall in. At the movies, they watched all kinds of rampaging creatures spawned by nuclear testing, or if they were in a particularly masochistic frame of mind, films like On the Beach (1959) or The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) that depicted small groups of survivors dealing with the aftermath of nuclear war.

Somehow, even with all the strategic tensions and the collective pessimism hanging around like a shroud, we managed to stumble through without blowing ourselves up (although the Cuban missile crisis was a terrifyingly close call).

Who would’ve thought that something as prosaic as belching billions of tons of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere would eventually take the place of the awesome and terrible H-bomb as the source of sleepless nights?

The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a film with a unique science fiction premise that presciently bridges the gap between nuclear and climate change nightmares.

Edward Judd stars as Peter Stenning, a newspaper reporter whose life has become a walking disaster area. Stenning recently went through a bitter divorce in which his ex-wife got custody of their 7-year-old son, and as a result he has taken to drinking.

Stenning strolls down a deserted London street. In some of the film's original prints, the opening and closing scenes were tinted yellow to convey the extreme heat of a dying world.

As a result, the once star reporter has been reduced to being a glorified gopher and writer of lifestyle puff pieces. Amid the usual newsroom hubbub over beauty pageants and pregnant royals, some unusual news items begin to draw the attention of the staff: sunspot-like interference with TV and radio signals; severe earth tremors in previously quiet zones; and unseasonably high temperatures and monsoon rains.

Stenning is assigned to contact the Met Office (the UK national Meteorological Office) to get background information on sunspots and climate data, but is initially blocked from speaking to the head honcho by a new employee in the office’s phone pool, Jeannie Craig (Janet Munro).

Later, when he visits the office in person on the pretext of picking up a press release, but with the intent of ambushing the Office chief to get a statement, he finds out Jeannie is a very attractive young woman who is not afraid to stick up for herself.

Jeannie and Stenning take a relaxing bus ride through climate change-generated fog.

Stenning and his colleagues at the Daily Express figure something is seriously amiss when a solar eclipse occurs 10 days before it’s due, and reports come streaming in from around the world on unprecedented flooding.

At an editorial meeting, a staffer brings up the recent tests of the most powerful H-bombs ever, one by the Russians in Siberia, the other by the Americans in Antarctica, that somehow, against all odds, had gone off almost simultaneously. Could the double bombs have anything to do with it? Nahhh….

Stenning tries to strike up a relationship with Jeannie -- he’s very attracted to her, and at the same time she’s a possible source of insider information. At one point he’s forced to camp out with her in her flat due to an unusually heavy fog (described as “heat mist”) that rolls into the city and causes everything to grind to a halt. Things start to heat up, literally and figuratively, for the two.

Soon, fog is the least of London’s worries. Unheard-of tornadoes blow half the city to kingdom come, then brutal heat and a withering drought dry up what’s left.

London is treated to Mother Nature's Tilt-A-Whirl ride.

The one good thing in a dust bowl of troubles -- Stenning’s and Jeannie’s budding romance -- is endangered when Jeannie confides to Stenning something she overheard at the ministry. Not only has the tilt of the earth been affected, but its orbit is now taking it dangerously close to the sun. In the heat of the moment (pun intended) Stenning promises Jeannie he won’t say anything, but his reporter’s instincts won’t allow him to be quiet.

The next day’s headlines blare “World Tips Over,” which also says it all for the couple’s relationship. Jeannie is taken into custody as a security risk, while the Daily Express staff grapple with the possible end of the world.

This being a serious treatment of a science fiction subject, Stenning does not come off as your typical sci-fi hero. He’s a complicated mess: at times cocky, at other times pathetically self-pitying, he tries to hide his insecurities behind a veneer of false bravado and cynical quips (example: “Why don’t I do 500 steaming words on how mankind is so full of wind it’s about to outblow nature?”).

His best friend at the paper (and seemingly only friend), veteran newshound Bill Maguire (Leo McKern), can only do so much for the self-destructive journalist. Maguire alternates between gentle chiding and ignoring him altogether when Stenning goes into his petulant teenager mode.

"I'd like to cancel my steam bath appointment."

Maguire is not only a sounding board and emotional backstop for Stenning, but serves as the conscience of the newspaper and a one-man Greek chorus. It’s Maguire who starts to piece things together as accounts of disparate disasters flood into the newsroom, and he is the one who adds the exclamation point to the hubristic folly that has sent humanity to the brink of extinction: “They’ve shifted the tilt of the earth. The stupid, crazy irresponsible bastards… they’ve finally done it!”

The Daily Express newsroom becomes a sanctuary/citadel for Stenning and Maguire as London turns into the equivalent of an overdone Shepherd's pie. Where once the paper was a busy hub for disseminating celebrity “news” and junk lifestyle pieces (“Thrombosis: How to be the death of the party”), as the crisis takes hold it becomes one of the last bastions of working civilization as the newspapermen grimly bang away on their typewriters. In one scene, Stenning, drenched in sweat and exhausted, sits down at his desk to compose one last story, only to find that the typewriter ribbon has melted.

But the show must go on, and the crusty old editor-in-chief "Jeff" Jefferson (Arthur Christiansen) continues to bark orders to his depleted staff: “Bill, get moving! I want a pictorial panorama of the world as it’s going to be with the new climatic zones and all the rest of it!” (Interesting side note: The Daily Express is a real newspaper that is still being published. Christiansen had been retired just a short time from his position as the paper's chief editor when he was talked into doing the role.)

"And get me a list of all the places in London that are still selling ice lollies!"

The newspaper is even a refuge for Jeannie, who has been released from custody (think of that -- she isn’t hauled off to a secret interrogation site, never to be heard from again!). The editor gives her a job in the newspaper’s library as a small recompense for Stenning’s broken promise. This gives Stenning the opportunity to try to make amends and win her back. Maguire urges him on, just wanting to see his friends happy in the little time that’s left.

There aren’t any heroes per se in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, just typical, flawed human beings who stubbornly and stoically cling to the last shreds of their normal lives as the world collapses around them. There is so much that rings true: government denials, then partial acknowledgements, then “let us pray” when the whole truth gets out. Adding to the misery are secret government plans to ration water, and outbreaks of disease as the depleted water supply gets contaminated. (One unintentionally comic scene is a water riot by juvenile delinquents that plays more like a fun day at the water park; look for Michael Caine in a bit role as a policeman.)

Fans used to disaster movies with epic CGI effects and droves of extras dying in spectacular fashion may be disappointed. There are effects -- the thick “heat mist,” cyclones, earthquakes, etc. -- that are crude by today’s standards, but effective enough for the time (see below). But in The Day the Earth Caught Fire, it’s the characters and their relationships that count. The ending is famously ambiguous, but there is more than a glimmer of hope in the depiction of average people who find deep reservoirs of courage in the face of calamity.

The survivors from the Daily Express wait for the end of the world at
the ultimate British sanctuary - the local pub.

Where to find it: Streaming | DVD/Blu-ray

A Passion Project

In an interview conducted years later, Val Guest, who produced, directed and co-wrote the screenplay, described how the film was a very personal project for him, one that took eight long years to secure funding:

“It was something that had been going around my head for a long time, that gradually we were f*cking up the whole planet. I had always been very interested in what we were liable to do to ourselves without realizing it. … [E]very time I made a movie and the [producers] said, ‘What do you want to do next?”, I’d tell them my idea and they’d say [disdainfully], ‘Oh, Christ! No one wants to know about the Bomb!’” [Tom Weaver, Attack of the Monster Movie Makers, McFarland, 1994, pp. 113-114]

He finally got British Lion films to cough up some money, but only on the condition that he put up one of his money-making films, Expresso Bongo (1960) as collateral. The film was made on a “ludicrously cheap” budget of $500,000.

The Fog of Filmmaking

For that money, Guest was somehow able to build an exact copy of the Daily Express office at Shepperton Studios “right down to the last piece of paper on the floor.” Only a few interior and exterior shots were required at the building itself.

Ironically, the weather was cold for much of the location shooting. At Battersea Park, the actors had to pretend that it was brutally hot: 

“[W]ith everybody sunbathing, it was about fifty-eight, sixty degrees at most. And everybody was freezing -- in bikinis! We told them to keep their coats on until we were ready to shoot. That whole scene of Janet and Eddie Judd on the grass -- it was very cold weather. On the other stuff, Fleet Street and things like that, it wasn't at all cold, but the scene where it was supposed to be the hottest day of the century, it was a very cold day!” [Weaver, p. 119]

To add insult to irony, the day they shot the scene of the heavy fog enveloping London, the crew almost sparked a national incident:

“We had all these [fog] machines going, hundreds of extras -- the whole idea was that this strange mist was coming up the Thames and covering the whole of London. When we were very near the end of the shooting, we were suddenly invaded by about three or four police cars; the cops came up and said, ‘You must stop this immediately!’ What was happening was, just on the other side of the Thames was the Chelsea Flower Show, which the Queen was opening. And they had all this fog, pouring all over Her Majesty [laughs].” [Weaver, p. 119]

Validation from an unusual source

According to Guest, John F. Kennedy asked for a copy of the film and screened it for a gathering of foreign correspondents in Washington. In the interview, Guest didn’t mention (or perhaps wasn’t aware of) the context of the president’s interest: JFK came into office wanting to finish the work on a nuclear test ban treaty that Eisenhower started. The film may have helped in its small way, but it was the close call of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 that finally got the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty signed the following year.

The British film community also weighed in, awarding Guest and his co-writer Wolf Mankowitz the 1962 BAFTA award (the UK equivalent of the Oscars) for Best British Screenplay.

In his autobiography, Guest marveled at all the attention his “cheap” passion project received from various dignitaries after it came out. It makes a fitting postscript not only for him, but for the characters in the film:

“I mean, come on, for someone still in the throes of struggling to get it [the film] set up this would have all sounded like demented pipe dreams from the opium den. Which merely proves the worth of that sterling British Army advice in World War I: ‘Come what may, we press on regardless.’” [Val Guest, So You Want to be in Pictures, Reynolds & Hearn, 2001, p. 140.]

Fabulous Faceless Foes of Fifties Sci-Fi: Special CMBA ‘50s Blogathon Edition

Note to my readers: This post is part of the Classic Movie Blog Association's (CMBA) Fabulous Films of the Fifties blogathon, running May 22 - 26. Check it out for some truly fabulous films covered by a group of very talented bloggers (there are even a couple more sci-fi entries besides this one).

Here we are at the beginning of summer 2014, and to quote one of the great boys of summer, Yogi Berra, “it’s deja vu all over again!” As temperatures heat up, here comes another Cold War front, blowing from West to East and back again, chilling relations between the world’s singular hyperpower and new-old rivals who are reluctant to take orders from Uncle Sam.

Even as his own house is falling down around his ears, the old red, white and blue coot apparently can think of nothing better to do than to grab a pointy stick and go looking for Russian bears and Chinese dragons to poke in their lairs. It’s not enough for the old man to clench his teeth, shake his fist and yell at the rest of the world to stay off his lawn. He insists on telling the rest of world how to tend their own lawns.

It’s gotten me thinking about the ‘50s again, and the sense of deja vu is overwhelming. It’s been a long time since I worried about The Bomb, but now visions of shelters and duck-and-cover drills have come flooding back into my sleep-deprived brain. I’ve been eyeing my backyard -- being mostly cement deck and landscaping rock, it doesn’t seem like a good candidate for a homemade bomb shelter (and I think the neighborhood association would look askance at that as well).  Maybe the better course would be to put in a hot tub to give us the option of one last, comforting soak before the ICBMs strike.

I don’t know about you, but today’s Cold War redux makes me doubly nostalgic for the ‘50s, when at least we had reasonably competent adults in government who knew the horrors of war and could respond to crises without constantly barking about military action. Ike, we miss you!

So here we are -- everything old has become new again. The films covered here mirror the public angst occasioned by the burgeoning atomic/space age, when it was hard to avoid visions of mushroom clouds and missiles raining down on defenseless cities. Some ‘50s sci-fi dealt directly with atomic war: Five (1951), World Without End (1956), The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959), to name a few. Others, like the films below, presented the challenges of out-of-control science and politics more obliquely, with atomic-age threats that were faceless and amorphous, and all the more terrifying for it.

In today’s neo-Atomic, hair-trigger world, there are more apocalyptic TV series and movies than you can shake a pointy stick at. Lately zombies have been the preponderant pop culture stand-ins for decline and disintegration, but with the success of the recent Godzilla reboot, it seems the time is ripe for bringing back old familiar faces from the first atomic age. So, is the time also ripe for bringing back faceless, radioactive blobs? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Now Playing: X: the Unknown (1956)

Pros: Dark, imaginative, and well-acted, especially by American Dean Jagger
Cons: Hammer's early black and white sci-fi offerings should be more widely available on video or online

In brief: During an army training exercise in the Scottish hinterlands, a fissure violently opens up in the earth, wounding two soldiers. Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger), a scientist with the nearby Atomic Energy lab is brought in to investigate, and immediately recognizes the soldiers’ wounds as radiation burns.

A short while later, two local boys are hiking through the woods at night. One of them sees something that terrorizes him as his companion flees. He’s brought in to the hospital with severe radiation poisoning and burns, and soon dies. Police inspector McGill (Leo McKern) joins Royston in investigating the mysterious radiation plague.

The mysterious force soon ups the ante. A hospital radiation lab technician is melted by the thing right in front of his girlfriend, and two more army sentries fall prey to it. A brave volunteer rappels down into the fissure and is pulled out just in the nick of time, but not before he catches sight of something utterly unearthly and terrible.

The army’s solution is to bomb the thing and seal up the chasm, but Royston realizes that conventional military action won’t stop something that can change its shape and grow ever bigger and more powerful as it gobbles up every radiation source it can find. Royston sets an elaborate scientific trap for the thing before it can get much farther in its quest for larger atomic installations to eat.

X: The Unknown is dark, atmospheric, and a great example of how, even with a limited budget, you can create mounting suspense by keeping your monster in the shadows and letting your viewer’s imagination do the work. This British version of the blob predated the Steve McQueen classic by a couple of years.


Key Cold War Confrontation: “American Joseph Losey, [then a] resident in Britain after being labelled a possible Communist sympathizer by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee, was hired to direct. (Losey was possibly attracted to the script’s ‘ban the bomb’ ethos, most explicit in the scene where Royston is told: ‘you meddle with things that kill!’) Under the pseudonym Joe Walton, Losey supervised casting and set construction, only to contract pneumonia while location scouting (conveniently, given that his presence riled McCarthyite Dean Jagger and jeopardized American distribution prospects). Days before filming commenced, Anthony Hinds found a last-minute replacement in Leslie Norman…” [Marcus Hearn and Alan Barnes, The Hammer Story: The Authorised History of Hammer Films, Titan Books, 2007]

Key screenwriter: Beginning in 1949, Jimmy Sangster worked his way up the ladder at Exclusive/Hammer films from assistant director to production manager to hot-shot screenwriter. X: The Unknown was his first sci-fi/horror script for Hammer, and its success led to the career-changing gig writing Curse of Frankenstein (1957), which made Hammer’s worldwide reputation. He would contribute many more classic scripts to Hammer, including Horror of Dracula (1958), The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula (1960) and Paranoiac (1963), among others.

"The menace that can kill, but cannot be killed!"

Now Playing: Quatermass II: Enemy from Space (1957)

Pros: Thoughtful, suspenseful adaptation that combines alien infiltration with a creepy, mostly unseen monster
Cons: Ditto: Hard to find on video or online

In brief: Undaunted by the dramatic failure of his first piloted space mission (The Quatermass Xperiment, 1955), the irrepressible Prof. Bernard Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) is busy planning to build a colony on the moon. Informed by higher-ups that the project has been canceled, his attention is diverted by reports of meteorites falling in the vicinity of the rural town of Winnerden Flats. Quatermass and his assistant Marsh (Bryan Forbes) drive out to a bluff overlooking the remote area. Below is a newly-built complex that looks suspiciously like Quatermass’ moonbase. Embedded in the ground all around them are mysterious rocks that look like recent arrivals.

March digs one out and it fractures, blowing something into his face as he collapses. Armed soldiers drive up and quickly surround the scientists. As the soldiers carry Marsh away over Quatermass’ strident objections, he notices that both Marsh and one of the soldiers have odd V-shaped marks on their faces.

Quatermass can’t get any help or information about the facility from the close-mouthed locals. Quatermass deduces that the aerodynamic meteorites are containers designed to harbor something living, something that breathes a completely different atmosphere.

Quatermass learns from Scotland Yard that the facility houses a secret government project to produce synthetic food. The rocket scientist persuades a curious MP, Vincent Broadhead (Tom Chatto), to allow him to join a group of government officials for a tour of the project.

At the facility, Quatermass and Broadhead peel off from the group to look for Marsh. Broadhead manages to get inside a containment dome at the cost of his life-- he comes stumbling out covered in a burning, acidic black slime. Quatermass manages to escape by the skin of his teeth.

Quatermass raises the alarm with Scotland Yard and whoever else will listen. But it quickly becomes evident that an alien intelligence has captured the minds of many police and government officials who are covering up the real purpose of the supposed synthetic food factory. Quatermass himself manages to steal a peek at a gigantic, pulsating protoplasmic thing housed in one of the containment domes.

An angry mob of locals storms the alien-run facility -- a human counter-revolution. But there’s also the original source of the alien contamination to deal with -- an asteroid in close earth orbit. Perhaps Quatermass’ moon rocket can be repurposed to deal with the threat…

Based on Nigel Kneale’s hit six part series for the BBC, Quatermass II is considered by many to be superior to Hammer’s first Quatermass adaptation, The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), and one of the very best films in the Studio’s entire catalog. Like X: The Unknown, it excels at creeping out audiences with the suggested and the unseen, while adding an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like layer of alien infiltration and conspiracy.

One scene in particular, where alien-controlled humans use their non-infected brethren to stop the flow of deadly oxygen to the alien domiciles, uses the viewer’s imagination, rather than gore, to great effect.

Key Player: Depending upon who you ask, American Brian Donlevy was either the worst thing that ever happened to the Quatermass movies, or he was down-to-earth and a delight to work with. The American distributor insisted on a recognizable American name to help market the films in the States, so Donlevy was brought in to play the lead in the first two adaptations.

Writer Nigel Kneale hated, hated, HATED Donlevy in the role of his cherished Prof. Quatermass: “He really was very drunk indeed. He used to take a liquid lunch up in the village, and when he got back he’d sunken half a bottle of whiskey. They had to tell him the name of the film, the scene he was in and then raise the ‘idiot board’ so he could read off it.” [Quoted in Hearn and Barnes, The Hammer Story]

Director Val Guest, on the other hand, had nothing but kind words for his star: “[W]ho could be more down-to-earth than the Oscar-nominated Brian Donlevy? Brian had been-there-done-that and, he told us proudly, ours would be his 57th motion picture. What’s more he was a delight to work with, being sure enough of his trade to realise, unlike so many other ‘names,’ that he didn’t have to be difficult to hide his insecurity.

In fact, the only trouble I had with Donlevy was trying to keep his toupee on, or as he used call it, his ‘rug.’ … Twice Brian’s ‘rugs’ had taken off into the dust-filled yonder and we were now down to the last one hairdressing had with them on location. ‘Whatever you do,’ I instructed Brian, ‘keep facing the propellers and we’ll be okay.’ He did just what he was told and we got one of the best shots of the day. ‘Great. Cut. Print. We got it!’ Whereupon a jubilant Brian turned to grin at me and away went his last rug!” [So You Want to Be In Pictures: The Autobiography of Val Guest, Reynolds & Hearn, 2001]

"If you ever hear a sound like this, run for your life!"

Now Playing: The Flame Barrier (1958)

Pros: B veterans Kathleen Crowley and Arthur Franz generate some sparks
Cons: Confusing mash-up of jungle adventure and sci-fi; Obviously rushed into production to take advantage of Sputnik headlines; Also hard to find a reliable copy

In brief: It’s the dawn of the space age, and America has just launched its latest wonder, the X117 satellite. Even with the most powerful rockets, the X117 proves the old adage that what goes up must come down as it encounters what the film’s grim narrator calls the “flame barrier” -- the fictional boundary where the last of earth’s atmosphere and the vacuum of space meet, supposedly preventing man-made objects from completely escaping the earth. Back in the ‘50s, if it wasn’t jealous aliens, it was flame barriers that were going to kick us in the pants if we tried to reach for the stars.

Cut to beautiful, feisty Carol Dahlmann (Kathleen Crowley), wife of a wealthy industrialist and amateur satellite tracker who has disappeared in the Mexican Yucatan jungle trying to find the downed spacecraft. Carol is determined to find her husband, and has been given the name of American expatriate, entrepreneur and handy jungle guide, Dave Hollister (Arthur Franz) to help her in her quest.

In a remote Mexican village on the edge of the jungle, Carol first runs into Dave’s younger, free-spirited (and seemingly alcoholic) brother Matt (Robert Brown). Matt takes an immediate shine to the attractive but earnest blonde -- not so older brother Dave, who gruffly spurns Carol’s offer to pay him handsomely for help in searching the jungle for her missing husband.

Dave, a cynic to the core, tells Carol that he thinks she’s more interested in finding hubby dead so she can inherit his fortune. After getting slapped, he coolly negotiates a deal wherein he gets a big cut if they find the industrialist alive, and even more if they can prove he’s dead.

As they set out into the jungle, Dave callously hones in on all of Carol’s pampered ways and naivete. But as she perseveres despite encounters with tarantulas, poisonous snakes, iguanas, creepy skeletons, and panicked Indian guides, he develops a grudging respect for the plucky woman.

An awkward triangle develops between the brothers and Carol, which is quickly set aside when they stumble upon Dahlmann’s abandoned camp. In a nearby cave, they find the X117 satellite and Dahlmann’s corpse enveloped in a mysterious, gelatin-like mass. Bad enough, but the mass seems to be generating a deadly energy field that doubles in size every several hours. If they let it go, it could potentially envelop the world!

This spherical hunk of metal was directly responsible
for giving us The Flame Barrier!

The Flame Barrier plays like a mundane jungle action-adventure yarn that had space-age/sci-fi elements tacked onto it at the last minute to take advantage of the day’s headlines. (Indeed, it was released just several months after the Soviets launched the first orbital satellite Sputnik, rattling America’s confidence in its technological superiority.)

The few critics who’ve paid attention to Flame Barrier over the years have been hard on it, decrying the lame love triangle that takes up so much of the movie, and the crazy pseudo-scientific premise that generates confusion rather than suspense at the climax. The best thing Flame Barrier has going for it is Kathleen Crowley, who lends a lot of life and determination to her character. In spite of all the humiliations and frights courtesy of Dave and the jungle, she sees her mission through and emerges all the stronger.

Key player: Energetic, attractive Kathleen Crowley started in TV at the beginning of the ‘50s. Her other notable sci-fi/horror credits include Target Earth (1954) and Curse of the Undead (1959; featuring a vampire gun-fighter). By the 1960s she was almost exclusively doing television, including a stint in the Boris Karloff-hosted Thriller series.

Key writer: George Worthing Yates, credited with the story, was the nephew of the legendary founder of Republic Pictures, Herbert J. Yates. George lent his prodigious imagination to some of the iconic sci-fi films of the ‘50s and ‘60s, including Them! (1954), It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and Attack of the Puppet People (1958). He also penned another obscure but highly original faceless foe pic, Space Master X-7 (1958). But that wasn’t all. His story “King Kong vs. Prometheus” inspired the Toho super-hit King Kong vs. Godzilla (1962).

All Creatures Great and Tall

The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Ever since seeing the creepy docudrama The Legend of Boggy Creek in the mid-70s, I've been intrigued with the idea of Bigfoot and other crypto-zoological mysteries. Considering that no "civilized" westerner set eyes on a live gorilla until the mid-nineteenth century, I'd like to think that there's at least a small chance that some bipedal remnant of an unknown evolutionary path still survives in the ever-dwindling, unexplored wild places of the globe.

I'm not alone, since interest in Bigfoot, Sasquatch, the Yeti, and other legendary variations seems to be at an all-time high in spite of (or perhaps because of) the continuing lack of any credible evidence. It's hard to channel-surf these days without coming across some Bigfoot pseudo-documentary with fringe academics speculating about the distribution, diet, and habits of the elusive creatures, and men outfitted in camouflage, night-vision goggles, and other tech-toys tramping around the woods of the Pacific northwest desperately trying to record a sighting.

And then there's the hilarious Jack Link's Beef Jerky "Messin' With Sasquatch" series, where a poor, trusting reject from Harry and the Hendersons is the perpetual butt of 20-something hipsters' practical jokes (although the beast always gets the last "word" in various and hilarious ways). We might look at such humor as society's ultimate acceptance of a myth like Sasquatch. (Similarly, we might make a case that Frankenstein didn't truly become a household name and the prototypical poster child for the consequences of scientific arrogance until he met Abbott and Costello in 1948.)

Whatever the status of the Bigfoot myth in the 21st century, there's no denying the enduring popularity of shaggy, elusive, often homicidal hominids in popular film. The first wave of such films in the 1950s focused on the Yeti and his exotic locale of the Himalayas. Some credit W. Lee Wilder's Snow Creature (1954) as the first feature-length fictional account of the Yeti. Toho and Ishiro Honda (of Godzilla/Gojira fame) followed quickly with Jû jin yuki otoko in 1955. (It would be released in the U.S. a couple years later as Half Human, cut down to 63 minutes, with American scenes added. Sadly, the original highly-rated Japanese version was never released in the U.S., and Toho withdrew it from their catalog for legal reasons.) Schlockmeister Jerry Warren did his take, Man Beast in 1956. 1977's Snowbeast with Yvette Mimieux would transplant the Yeti to a Colorado ski resort.

Over the years, with the impact of unexpected low-budget hits like Boggy Creek, the film industry's interest in hairy hominids shifted to North America and Bigfoot/Sasquatch. One oddball measure of the enduring popularity of backwoods beasts is the presence of character actor-extraordinaire Lance Henriksen in three (count 'em!) Bigfoot flicks in the space of five years: The Untold (aka Sasquatch; 2002), Abominable (2006), and Sasquatch Mountain (2006). (The perfectly mediocre Sasquatch Mountain, a Sci-Fi channel original, started out life as Devil on the Mountain, and was slated for location shooting around my hometown, Flagstaff, Arizona. Regrettably, local red-tape pushed the production 40 miles to the west, to the small town of Williams. I would have loved to run into Lance in downtown Flagstaff!)

Predictably, recent Bigfoot film appearances have featured slavering, unthinking, homicidal beasts, instead of the shy, elusive, canny creatures that more thoughtful Bigfoot fans prefer to believe in. No gory special effects have been spared--  Bigfoot in 21st century film is Mother Nature's hit man, punishing city folk in all kinds of bloody ways for trespassing on her territory.

Thoughtful fictional treatments of Bigfoot and  the Yeti are as rare as sightings of the creatures themselves. The most thoughtful, intelligent treatment of all is Hammer's The Abominable Snowman (1957). This elegant black-and-white production was released around the same time as Hammer's wildly popular color hits Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula, and was promptly lost in the gothic horror wave.  While not perfect -- Snowman is talky and set bound -- it's worth a look for its unusually intelligent use of science fiction to comment on the human condition.

Botanist John Rollason (Peter Cushing), and his wife Helen (Maureen Connell) are staying at a remote monastery in the Himalayas to study native plants. A brash, ambitious American explorer, Tom Friend (Forrest Tucker) arrives with a group and seduces Rollason into accompanying him on his quest to track down the elusive Yeti. Rollason had been on an earlier ill-fated expedition looking for the snowman, but his scientific curiosity gets the better of him and he sets aside his reservations. Helen and the monastery's High Lama try to talk him out of joining Friend's expedition, to no avail. Another member of Friend's group, Andrew McNee (Michael Brill), is haunted by his previous experience of having actually seen the creature. As the expedition makes its way up the Himalayas, the high-strung McNee struggles with the ascent, but at the same time seems to almost sense the presence of the Yeti. At one point, he becomes convinced that he sees something among the rocks and crags. Chasing after it, he falls to his death.

In the midst of the chaos and tension, Rollason discovers that Friend's motives are less than pure or scientific-- he wants to be the first to bring back a Yeti, dead or alive, for exhibition. As luck would have it, the expedition stumbles upon one of the creatures and shoots it dead. As the group tries to take its prize back to civilization, they soon discover that the creature was not alone, and its companions want it back. With the exception of Rollason, the remaining expedition members fall prey to the cunning of the otherworldly creatures, and ultimately to their own fears.

Monster, or member of an ancient, wise race?

The screenplay by the brilliant Nigel Kneale (based on his teleplay "The Creature") inverts the typical Yeti story and makes Man into the unreasoning, monstrous brute. As the surviving expedition members hole up in a cave with the creature's body, Rollason remarks on the gentle, anciently-wise features of the snowman. He wonders aloud to the uncomprehending Tom Friend if perhaps the Yeti aren't the wiser, superior race waiting in the remote regions of the Himalayas for brutish mankind to die out.

Snowman marked the third (and last) Hammer film pairing of Kneale's thoughtful ideas with Val Guest's talented direction. The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) was a lean, effective adaptation of Kneale's BBC mini-series The Quatermass Experiment. It's success led quickly to Quatermass II: Enemy from Space in 1957. Kneale adapted the screenplay from his own teleplay. Much to the chagrin of Kneale, both featured American tough guy Brian Donlevy as Prof. Bernard Quatermass (Donlevy's participation was strictly to grease the wheels for American distribution). Years later, Kneale would be much happier with Scotsman Andrew Keir's portrayal of Quatermass in Five Million Years to Earth (aka Quatermass and the Pit; 1967).  Kneale's Hammer thrillers all share a theme: man as his own worst enemy in the face of forces he only dimly understands.

While the pairing of urbane Peter Cushing with rough Forrest Tucker of F-Troop fame might seem like casting decision made after a 4 martini lunch, the two very neatly represent Kneale's dichotomies of scientific curiosity vs. greed and empathy vs. fear. Tucker, like Donlevy, lent his modest talents and somewhat bankable name to a couple of other UK sci-fi thrillers: The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror; 1958), and The Strange World of Planet X (aka the Cosmic Monsters; 1958).

Nigel Kneale's thoughtful science fiction deserves a revival. America's leaders, committed to endless war and endless foreign quests in search of monsters to destroy, might do well to heed Kneale's admonition, voiced by the empathetic, rational Rollason:

It isn't what's out there that's dangerous, as much as what's in us.

"The world's most shocking monster! No one's ever lived who's seen him!"