Break in the Circle

The very thing asked for is Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo and The Big Sleep, as the basis for From Russia with Love. Guest engineers this so very brilliantly that his Véry flares went off all through the Harry Palmer series and into The Parallax View, with a significant afterimage in Ordeal by Innocence.

Or call it the midpoint between Cloak and Dagger on the one hand and Torn Curtain on the other. Terence Young’s beautiful analysis accepts certain larger aspects of the work as sketches for a general layout mobilized by action sequences. Mike Hodges took another tack in Get Carter by emphasizing the tragic discontinuity of the editing.

The Quatermass Xperiment

Darwin said he never had a day without pain since his voyage.

A solipsistic hallucination gives the strongest possible structural formulation, but there is the fictional narrative as well as a whole host of symbolic understandings based on the antipathy of Chief Inspector Lomax (“a simple Bible man”) and Professor Quatermass, these include the space voyager’s right hand hidden like a leper’s and forgotten like Jerusalem.

Frankenstein is the key film here and in Quatermass 2. Cat People for the zoo, which leads directly and thematically to Altered States.

The Kneale theme is defined a hundred ways on its own terms, the flower craving that turns to cactus, the raid on a chemist’s shop, finally the giant blobby octopus on a scaffold for a BBC live transmission called The Restoration of Westminster Abbey (guide, Sir Lionel Dean).

Quatermass perseveres.

Quatermass 2

Frankenstein again, also Gog.

Winnerton Flats, or perhaps rather the recent dwellings adjacent to its former location, forms the basis of Fahrenheit 451 and The Offence, in a certain way.

Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers is strongly indicated.

The “multiple organism” utilizes Her Majesty’s Government to construct Professor Quatermass’s rejected moon base here on Earth, for its own purposes.

The clarity of Guest’s film version is its main, irresistible force when compared with Cartier’s brilliant live production for the BBC.

The Day the Earth Caught Fire

The theme is the Axis, on two fronts.

One of the great films, also as a study of tempo rivaled by such things as Stevens’ Swing Time. The first twenty-five minutes are a great newspaper film, then in five more comes the shift to London in heat mist and Whelan’s The Divorce of Lady X, cyclone and drought, always continuous.

The divorce motif is labeled “IMPACT!”, courtesy of Arthur Lubin.