If I Had a Hammer, Part I

Don’t be fooled by the fact that only one of their movies made it into the B100 (see “My Filmic Valentine”)—I love Hammer. It’s just that with so many to choose from, it was hard to single out any favorites; I own at least fifty of them in various home-video formats, so that should speak for itself. Interestingly, when I was a wee bairn and a die-hard fan of Universal Horror, I had a vituperative bias against Hammer, and couldn’t figure out where these pretenders from across the Pond got off remaking our beloved Karloff, Lugosi, and Chaney classics.

Well, live and learn: by the time I befriended my future spouse in high school, where we drove our poor music teacher nuts by chatting away during choir, Hammer was a big part of our common ground. Since Loreen loves vampire movies in general and Christopher Lee’s interpretation of Dracula in particular (this is, after all, a woman whose favorite film is Dracula—Prince of Darkness), we had lots to talk about there. We even ended up appearing in supporting roles in a junior-year production of Dracula, which marked my stage debut, and was no doubt inspired by the success of the then-recent Broadway revival with Frank Langella.

For anyone unfamiliar with the canon, England’s Hammer Films, Ltd., revived Gothic horror in the late 1950s with adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula (just as Universal had initiated the Golden Age in 1931). For twenty years, they dominated the genre with a familial team including actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, directors Terence Fisher and Freddie Francis, screenwriters Jimmy Sangster and John Elder (aka producer Anthony Hinds), cinematographers Jack Asher and Arthur Grant, makeup artists Phil Leakey and Roy Ashton, composer James Bernard, and production designer Bernard Robinson, whose work belied his tight budgets.

Although the studio dabbled in genres such as science fiction, costume dramas, and comedies, Hammer Horror was its best-known output, most notably with long-running series featuring Lee’s Count Dracula and Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein. They also reinterpreted other venerable literary and cinematic properties, including The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Mummy, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and The Phantom of the Opera, all in color with then-shocking doses of gore and, later, nudity. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, many of Hammer’s personnel (e.g., Lee, Cushing, Francis, and director Roy Ward Baker) were routinely borrowed by a British competitor, Amicus Productions, albeit with less success.

What follows is a typically idiosyncratic survey of some noteworthy efforts and related items.

The Quatermass Xperiment (aka The Quatermass Experiment, The Creeping Unknown; 1955): After years of making mostly mysteries and other thrillers, Hammer dipped its toe into SF waters with two 1953 films directed by Fisher: Four Sided Triangle, which in some ways formed a template for The Curse of Frankenstein, and Spaceways, based on the radio play by Charles Eric Maine. The studio had its first big hit in the same genre with this seminal film, adapted by Richard Landau and director Val Guest from Nigel Kneale’s eponymous BBC-TV serial, with the spelling of its title slightly altered to emphasize its X rating (then used for horrific films in England). Allegedly red meat for U.S. viewers, Brian Donlevy is single-minded and driven as Professor Bernard Quatermass, whose remote-control rocket comes back to Earth minus two of its three astronauts but plus an alien organism that gradually turns the third (Richard Wordsworth) into, well, a creeping unknown. Indeed, Quatermass can be seen as a modern-day dry run for Peter Cushing’s Baron Frankenstein, just as the popularity of Wordsworth’s “human monster” helped lead to Curse. Admittedly, the special effects in the climactic scene in Westminster Abbey are cheesy beyond description, but the beauty of it is that the ideas transcend the limits of the budget. Kneale (recently profiled here) wrote three sequels, two of which were also filmed by Hammer.

Quatermass 2 (aka Enemy from Space; 1957): Intended as a sequel to the above, X the Unknown (1956) suffered from two big problems: first, Kneale denied permission for the use of the Quatermass character, forcing screenwriter Jimmy Sangster to transform him into Dr. Adam Royston (Dean Jagger), and second, Jagger reportedly refused to work with blacklisted director Joseph Losey, resulting in the latter’s replacement with Leslie Norman. Not surprisingly, Sangster’s tale of a radioactive blob was less successful, but Hammer got right back on track with this big-screen version of Kneale’s second Quatermass serial. It reunited Donlevy and writer-director Guest, but this time Kneale got to co-write the script, a riveting tale of an alien takeover.

The Abominable Snowman [of the Himalayas] (1957): Like the first two Quatermass films, this was directed by Guest and based on a BBC-TV script (entitled The Creature) by Kneale, who this time had sole screenwriting credit. Once again, it transcends its limited budget—despite some effective exteriors—with the power of its ideas. Peter Cushing (repeating his TV role) and Forrest Tucker of F Troop infamy star as, respectively, an idealistic scientist and an unscrupulous entrepreneur who seek the titular Yeti.

The Curse of Frankenstein (1957): More than any other single movie, this began a twenty-year renaissance in the fantasy film genre. Jimmy Sangster’s script bears very little resemblance to the book by Mary Shelley, but with Fisher’s excellent direction and the star power of Cushing, Christopher Lee as the Creature (whose makeup was drastically different from Universal’s copyrighted version), and heavenly Hazel Court as Elizabeth, you won’t hear me complaining a bit.

Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula; 1958): The success of this and The Curse of Frankenstein really kicked off the Hammer revolution. Lee instantly became one of the screen’s greatest Draculas, although I’ll always consider Lugosi definitive, and the athletic Cushing is a far cry from wizened old Edward Van Sloan as Van Helsing. Featuring a radically revisionist script (don’t let Phil Hardy or anyone else tell you differently) in which Harker is vampirized, a slam-bang climax expertly orchestrated by Fisher, and a splendid score by James Bernard, whose main theme was reused in the many sequels.

Tales of Frankenstein (1958): “The Face in the Tombstone Mirror” was the shelved pilot for an abortive series to be co-produced by Hammer and Columbia’s Screen Gems television arm, with Anton Diffring (Where Eagles Dare) as Baron Frankenstein (a series with the Baron as a continuing character? Nah, no chance!), directed and co-written by Curt Siodmak. It’s a bit of a shock seeing in black and white what looks like a typical Hammer production in every other way, even if Diffring lacks Cushing’s charisma as the Baron. Interestingly, he also pinch-hit for Pete the following year when Cushing turned down the lead in Hammer’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959), a remake of Paramount’s The Man in Half Moon Street (1945). This is otherwise a respectable, if familiar, effort, with Big Don Megowan stumping around in Karloffian makeup as an uninteresting Monster.

To be continued.