Val Guest

It is, of course it is, but I loved it, and I watch it probably once a year.

But there's a link, you see, because it was directed by Val Guest.

Now, Val Guest is one of my favourites.

Val Guest directed Confessions of a Window Cleaner.

He directed Au Pair Girls.

He directed a couple of the Quatermass films, I think.

But he co-wrote some of the Will Hay films with Marriott's Edgar.

And so obviously the reason he did Boys in Blue is because it's based on Ask a Policeman with Will Hay that he co-wrote.

So what happens is he commissions these treatments of the script.

And people like Val Guest, who we know and love, he said he was given three competing scripts to look at.

There was one by Ben Hecht, another by Terry Southern.

Wolf Mankiewicz then comes in to do another treatment.

Honestly, this just gets more and more confusing, as you say, Hal, as it goes through.

And then in the end, according to Val Guest, what Feldman then decides to announce is the picture's going to be what he called a kaleidoscope, right, with 18 James Bonds and six directors.

How on earth that's going to work, we don't know, because it doesn't work with the six James Bonds in this movie that we've already

got.

I've used reviews from him before.

This one is dated January 5th, 2009. a slight black-and-white shot B-horror film produced by Hammer Studios and intensely directed by Val Guest.

It's based on Nigel Neal's 1955 BBC teleplay The Creature and tells of the legendary search for the mysterious Yeti by a team of Westerners in the Tibetan Himalayas, with the French Pyrenees and Pinewood Studios standing in for the Himalayas.

Wow.

The Alphoids' glimmering ship is like Superman's Fortress of Solitude on ecstasy, one of the film's highlights.

Directed and written, I find this really interesting, by great British filmmaker Val Guest, who did a lot of interesting genre work, including the first two Quatermass films, which are excellent, and The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which is also really, really great.

Um, he did The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas.

I- that's one of my favorites, uh, which got a 4K from Hammer recently.

Uh, her slang dialogue of, "Not you, you drongo," is [chuckles] a great throwaway nod to her Aussie roots.

Uh, released for barely a week on its original 1970 run and unseen for decades, Tomorrow has been restored by the British Film Institute and Def Crocodile from the original 35 negative for the first time.

So archival ins- special features include an archival interview with director/writer Val Guest, um, but conducted by The Guardian newspaper.

That's 60 minutes.

Okay.

So it's directed by Val Guest.

Yeah, who we discussed in the previous episode.

Yeah.

[laughs]

Okay.

As I mentioned, it was directed by Val Guest, who I would argue is undervalued as a British film director, although this film doesn't help and was his last directing job.

Yeah.

I was very pleased to hear All the Tremors Love.

um and and like tremors this is a film that i'm very excited when i speak to people about it and they haven't seen it and i go then i must introduce you to it which is why i had the terrible experience of this week of realizing that the the good dvd i had of this i've clearly lent to someone oh no uh and it's the it's the one with the yellow cover that had it had an interview with uh neo mccurn it had a a commentary with val guest and i remember uh uh, it was one of the first DVDs I ever got back in those old days, uh, because I love the film so much.

Um, and, uh, and, and I got my DVD out and it's a sort of vanilla-y thing that's got no extras on at all.

Um, and, uh, and I was getting a bit cross watching it.

So I thought, damn this, I'm going to, I'm going to look, even if I have to pay through the nose, I'm going to get the old one back again.

I want that interview with Leo McKern.

I want that commentary with val guest uh and then i noticed they were doing a blue they've done a blu-ray of course they've done a blu-ray my mate john kelly made an extra on it and i remember thinking at the time but there's a character in it called john kelly this is meant to be um and but uh but i but i thought so i should buy it now i should buy it now and i went on amazon and i clicked on the blu-ray and it said you bought this in june 2020 so but my blu-ray shelf is different from my dvd shelf so i went to my blu-ray shelf and there it was still in its cellophane so I got it out.

Yay.

Well, let's move on to 1961, which brought us any number of giant monster movies, Gorgo and Konga from the UK, Mothra from Japan, and Reptilicus from Denmark.

But my choice for this year has to be one of Val Guest's greatest films, the bleak and possibly terrifyingly prescient The Day the Earth Caught Fire.

It begins with journalist Edward Judd walking through an abandoned London, imaginatively shot by Guest with the use of orange-yellow filters, who begins to dictate what might be his final story.

Guest co-wrote the script with Wolf Mankowitz, indeed they were co-nominated for a BAFTA, and brings an almost documentary feel to this story of what happens when science goes wrong.