Society is falling apart, with a majority of youths either joining violent gangs or roaming the countryside as part of new age cults. Those who are older are callous, accepting the disintegration of the cities with a shrug. In this setting, retired rocket scientist Bernard Quatermass (John Mills) comes to London in search of his granddaughter. Rescued from thugs by astronomer Joe Kapp (Simon MacCorkindale), he returns to Kapp’s home/observatory in the country in time to see a mass of teens and twenty-year-olds killed in an ancient stone circle by an energy beam. With a bit of his old drive forced upon him, Quatermass sets out to discover what is killing the young, and determine how to stop it.
The last and strangest of the four Quatermass films, The Quatermass Conclusion is a fitting sendoff for the brilliant professor. It is darker and sadder than the others, filled with death and despair, but this also makes it more emotional and more affecting. For all the fantastical situations, it feels real.
The brash, powerful, force-of-nature Quatermass from the earlier films is gone. Age has had an effect, and he is now, as he admitts, an old man who is no longer as sharp as he once was. He doesn’t care about grand adventures or great discoveries any more. He isn’t a broken man, but if he had his preference, he would now be a quiet one. But that isn’t allowed to him. His sixteen-year-old granddaughter has run off, and all he wants to do is find her. That search leads him not only to an unknown menace, but to a possible explanation to her behavior, and the violence of youth. Mills is a wonderful Quartermass. It is easy to see the continuation from Andrew Keir’s version in the previous film. This is the man you would get if you started with Keir’s, and then added twenty years and many failures.
The setting is as good as the lead. Few films have so powerfully presented a world in freefall. Bodies lay in the streets, money is worthless, and the government has little power. Corrupt pay-cops patrol only what is deemed financially worthwhile, and street vendors sell books that are “guaranteed to burn well.” Quatermass is attacked as soon as he steps onto the streets, an event that interests the TV station’s employees only to the extent that the bruises may look bad on camera. There is no hope, which is hammered home by the new age Planet People, who are disgusted by scientists and insist that everyone “stop trying to know things.” It is occasionally frustrating that the few people trying to help underestimate the dangers in this apocalyptic world. I wouldn’t go anywhere without a loaded submachinegun and maybe a few explosives, but on multiple occasions, Quatermass tries to reason with religious fanatics while unarmed. I think he would have learned after the first attempt.
While the first three Quatermass stories were broadcast on the BBC as multipart serials, before being re-shot for the big screen by Hammer Pictures, things worked differently for The Quatermass Conclusion. The four part, 240 minute series, titled simply Quatermass, was filmed simultaneously with the feature. But the movie is not just a chopped-up version of the TV show, nor is the show a padded version of the film. Instead, Nigel Kneale wrote two different, but similar, scripts, molding the development of tension and the pacing for each medium. In some cases, different scenes were shot for the feature. The whole thing was made for the cinema (although I’ve only been able to find “full screen” presentations), and it had a relatively large budget. When effects scenes would have cost too much, we aren’t given shoddy versions. Instead, we’re shown what the characters see, and as they cleverly turn away from things that might kill them, the biggest events happen off screen. We do see Wembly Stadium, covered in the ash of seventy-thousand burnt bodies, and that’s all the effects that are needed.
The development of the project was complicated, and sometimes it shows in the finished picture. Kneale was commissioned to write the fourth entry in the Quatermass sage in 1971, but due to financial considerations, it wasn’t developed. When Thames picked it up almost eight years later, with the understanding that there would be two versions, Kneale stuck with the basic ideas he’d already written. So, the film was dated even before it came out. The new age Planet People are flower children, who would have been prevalent in the early ’70s, but look pretty odd a decade later. Viewed from an additional twenty-five years, they are hard to watch without an occasional snicker.
Everything about The Quatermass Conclusion is seeped in the cultural upheavals of the late ’60s and 70s. It is the thoughts of an older man who does not understand teenagers. Throughout the movie, it is stated that youths are the target, but this almost never means children. Instead, these “youths” are in their twenties and late teens. They are rebelling against society, which was really happening at the time, and it is clear that Kneale didn’t understand why. Anyone under ’30 is given little respect and all their actions are misguided and controlled by strange forces. He wants to think of them, deep down, as children from some mythical golden age. But I shouldn’t be to hard on Kneale. His view of anyone older isn’t much better. The middle-aged are cruel, stupid, and uncaring. And the old are dim, slow, and obsolete. A prevailing theme throughout the picture is that humans suck.
Oddly, his old fashioned view of “youth” doesn’t harm the film. After all, it is the story of an old man. And, unlike the earlier movies, the plot isn’t that important. It is the characters that pull you in. While in the earlier incarnations, Quatermass and his crew solved mysteries, here they suffer.
As this is the end of the journey, this isn’t the best place to start if you are uninitiated into the Quatermass fan club. But you don’t have to start at the beginning. Quatermass and the Pit and The Quatermass Conclusion would make an excellent double feature and give you everything you need to understand the character.
The other films in the series are: 1955’s The Quatermass Xperiment (The Creeping Unknown in the U.S.), 1957’s Quatermass 2 (Enemy from Space in the U.S.), and 1967’s Quatermass and the Pit (Five Million Years to Earth in the U.S.).