HAMMERAMA The Abominable Snowman (1957)

Nigel Kneale's best known contribution to science fiction is, of course, Quatermass. However, he also scripted several other tall tales, one of the best of which, The Creature, was aired as a ninety-minute television play by the BBC in 1955. As with The Quatermass Experiment two years earlier, The Creature was well-enough received to catch the eye of Hammer Film Productions, and was remade as a feature film for in release in 1957.


Like many such early productions, The Creature was not recorded, so we can be very thankful that Hammer chose to buy the rights and develop a cinematic version. The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, to give it its full US title, could like quite clichéd to a modern viewer. Indeed, the English scientist on the trail of a legendary beast wasn't a new story even in the fifties. Professor Challenger was up to this sort of stuff in 1912, and that was a holdover of the classic Victorian explorer trope. Yes, this is all very Boy's Own Adventure stuff, but it's a solid, well-written and well-made example of that genre.


The film is bound to score points with me because it stars Peter Cushing, who reprises his role as Dr. John Rollason from the original. This is still early in Cushing's movie career, only his second film for Hammer, after his big break earlier in the year, The Curse of Frankenstein. The sturdy, gentle and terribly English naturalist Dr. Rollason is a standard Cushing performance, subtly physical and perfectly proper. He outclasses everyone else in the film. He's in a different league to Forrest Tucker, who plays the brash American entrepreneur Dr. Friend. The only reason he's even in this film is to get the film to sell in America. In return for providing an American name actor, co-producer Robert Lippert received the US distribution rights. It's the same reason we got the woefully miscast Brian Donlevy as Quatermass. Still, he might not be the greatest actor, but Tucker fits the arrogant yeti hunter part well.


Keeping the British end up is Richard Wattis, a well-known face in comedy from the fifties and sixties, as Rollason's fretful sidekick Peter Fox. Maureen Connell gets little to do as Helen, Rollason's wife, except exclaim her worries about her husband, until the revised final act, wherein she and Fox mount a rescue. These characters were not in the television version, and while they are a little surplus to requirements for the early part of the film, they allow for a more rounded cast and more complex relationships than otherwise. Arnold Marle is reasonably dignified as the Tibetan lhama, and there are at least some actors of Asian descent in smaller roles. As an aside, I think it's pretty clear that Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln saw either this or the original. Their Doctor Who story The Abominable Snowmen has almost exactly the same set-up and plot beats as this. They added in the alien intelligence and made the yeti robots, but take that away and they're practically the same story.


Very little alteration was made to the script for the movie version, thanks to its already compact running time, although director Val Guest made some uncredited rewrites to speed things up a little. Guest, who had collaborated with Kneale on the two Quatermass adaptations for Hammer, made a good call. While the film is pretty snappy for one of its vintage, it slows down abominably (sorry) in the middle section. Once the premise and location are set-up, the actual hunt for the yeti goes slowly until the final thirty-five minutes, when the Creature itself finally makes itself known.



Wisely, Guest keeps the yeti in the shadows for most of the film, with the explorers only on the cusp of its discovery. This serves the central theme of the story, that of rapacious humans being the true beasts rather than the noble snowmen, and saves them from the impossible task of making a realistic and budget-friendly monster. We receive only glimpses of the Creature, the most significant for much of the film being the huge, hairy hand that rips through the canvas of a tent. Once Rollason finally comes face to face with the beings, a theorised sideline of hominid evolution, we are treated to a glimpse of a face. It's a subtle design and a powerful moment, selling the strength and intelligence of the apelike beings. It's a strong outing for early Hammer, enough of a chill factor to be recognisably theirs but clearly before they had elected which direction they would be following.

WHO REVIEW: The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear

And to think we got overexcited by the discovery of two orphaned episodes of monochrome Doctor Who last year. It's truly one of the great finds – two sixties serials, one complete, one very nearly, discovered in, of all places, Jos, Nigeria. All credit to Philip Morris for his diligence and, indeed, bravery, in travelling throughout Africa in search of archived television materials. This trip really paid off. While the rumours did get out of hand – absurd claims that all missing episodes had been found were doing the rounds – it is the greatest single find of lost Doctor Who material since the archive purges began. Tremendous work by the BBC in keeping their secret. I was particularly dubious about the whole thing; usually, the greater the claims, the less likely they are to be true. For these episodes to have been restored to broadcast standard and made ready for download so quickly is also worthy of praise. One small gripe: while I enthusiastically downloaded the serials from iTunes, they really should have been made freely available in the UK. We have paid for them once, after all.


While the recovery of any two serials would have been met with celebration, to get two such excellent entries in the series makes it a real treat. The Enemy of the World hasn't the greatest reputation, something best ascribed to the previous sole available episode, the third, being a rather slow, filler instalment. The soundtrack has always promised a rather good story, albeit one that really needed to be seen, not heard. Now, with the serial available in its entirety, it looks set to get a major reappraisal. The Web of Fear, which follows on directly from Enemy (indeed, it finishes the final seen, oddly cut short), is one of those stories that has long had a glowing reputation. This can go badly; when The Tomb of the Cybermen was discovered, it rather failed to live up to its reputation. Now, while Web isn't a stone-cold classic, it is a great example of the Troughton era, one of the best of the, admittedly overused, base-under-siege stories (or base-under-siege-by-a-monster-for-six-episodes, to give it the full description).


The Enemy of the World is an atypical story, particularly for the Troughton period. Slap-bang in the middle of the 'Monster Season,' it features no aliens, robots or soap suds, although it is not barren of science fictional elements. It's a near-future thriller – the very near future now – and the commonly applied description of Bondian isn't inappropriate. Set in the year 2017, The Enemy of the World is a political thriller combining espionage with some truly unlikely events and an outlandish villainous plan. While it fails to be as globe-trotting as a James Bond film – this is a sixties BBC budget, after all – it does take in Australia and Eastern Europe to give a feel of a feasible future world that has been divided up into international zones. It's tremendously action-packed, with helicopter escapes, gunfights and plenty of fisticuffs. A narrated soundtrack simply doesn't do it justice.


The most notable element of the serial is, of course, the villain, Salamander, played by Patrick Troughton. The Mexican megalomaniac is a sublime creation, a man of quite incredible ambition and utterly ruthless in his goals. It's Troughton's performance that makes him, of course. While the accent is broad, and the blacking up is a little unfortunate, Troughton excels at portraying four different character combinations. He's the Doctor, Salamander, the Doctor pretending to be Salamander, and, briefly, Salamander pretending to be the Doctor. Troughton creates very clever, subtle differences between the characters, to the point that, while the Doctor's impersonation of Salamander gradually improves, it is still distinct from Salamander himself. While the Doctor plays up his own morality in the face of the politicking, back-stabbing and murder, he doesn't shy away from using his likeness to the would-be dictator for his own advantage. In one seen, he rather callously allows Jamie and Victoria to believe he is Salamander, so that they will confirm their innocence in fear for their own safety. It's a good reminder that the occasionally fluffy second Doctor can be ruthlessly manipulative when he needs to be. “I'm the nicest possible person,” he says. Yeah, right.


While Troughton gets both the lead and the villain role, it's Frazer Hines who gets the Bond part. Jamie Bond, if you will. He sweeps into action to foil a set-up assassination attempt in order to ingratiate himself with Salamander, in one of his most action-packed scenes. There's no doubt about it – Frazer Hines and Deborah Watling make a great team, with or without the Doctor, and they're gorgeous in their matching skirts. While Watling's Victoria does sink to the level of wailing damsel in distress on occasion, this is one of her best stories. Indeed, the largely trying third episode puts her at the centre of an infiltration mission with Jamie, and provides some great comedy moments with the unsung hero of this serial, Reg Lye as Griffin the Chef. Throughout, Jamie and Victoria are portrayed as a couple; not only does Jamie refer to her as his girlfriend as part of his cover story, but the actors play the parts as if they were together. Both this and the following story see Victoria's safety as Jamie's primary concern.


The Enemy of the World boasts a large cast, most of it very fine indeed. Much of the material goes to Bill Kerr as the untrustworthy Giles Kent, who gets some excellent, tense scenes with both of Troughton's characters. Mary Peach is essentially playing a Bond girl as Astrid, but is more than a match for the many male characters she is pitted against, and she holds much of the production together, making some of the most important discoveries to progress the plot. Of particular note is Carmen Munroe as Fariah, Salamander's food taster. Munroe gives a strong, dignified performance in what could have been a shallow role. Instead, writing and acting combine to give a rare example of a strong, black female in a show of this period – I believe Munroe is the first black actress to get a speaking role on the series.


Some of the actors will be familiar to fans of the seventies serials, including Milton Johns, who here plays a particularly nasty little sadist named Benik, and George Pravda, who's just as hard to decipher as Denes as he was as Spandrell (funny that they both came back to play Time Lord Castellans). One of the best characters is Bruce, the security chief played by Colin Douglas. His initially villainous role is subverted as his fair manner and desire for justice win out. It's a decent performance by Douglas, as Bruce pieces things together and comes over to our heroes' side.


As with any supervillain's plan, things get battier as they go along. The complete nuttiness of Salamander's plan becomes apparent as we get to see the cause of the conveniently timed earthquakes that threaten the world. A colony of people living beneath the surface of the Earth, believing Salamander's claims that the world has perished in nuclear war. It's mad, and it's just the sort of absurd twist the serials needs in the second half of the story to give it a kick and keep things interesting. It's a pity that Adam Verney's overly intense performance as underground dweller Colin threatens to derail the whole thing. This stuff needs to be played straight, but good grief, calm it down a bit. Still, once the sheer bizarreness of the coincidence of the Doctor's similarity to Salamander has worn off, things are in danger of becoming a little dull and predictable. After this, anything can happen, and events move forward with increased pace. Finally, of course, comes the final showdown, and the confrontation between the two Troughtons. While technical limitations mean that that the Doctor and Salamander only appear on screen together briefly, it's an astonishingly powerful moment, not least because the now desperate Salamander has breached the safety of the TARDIS itself. The normal rules of Doctor Who break down as the villain escapes from the story's conclusion and almost usurps the Doctor's position. It's a thrilling finale, albeit one that rather stops dead in its tracks once the time's up.