The actor Brian Donlevy (1901-72) was past-his-prime when he signed on to portray Professor Bernard Quatermass in “The Quatermass Experiment” (1955), a film version of the popular BBC television series. Donlevy had been acting in films and on Broadway since the mid-1920s, and had been a model, along with Frederic March and John Barrymore, for the illustrator J.C. Leyendecker.

Donlevy was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the Gary Cooper vehicle “Beau Geste” (1939), had an inspired comedic turn as the title character in Preston Sturges’s “The Great McGinty” (1940) and became a fixture of the film noir canon.

By the 1950s, Donlevy was middle-aged and paunchy, drinking too much and decidedly not to the liking of Nigel Kneale, the screenwriter who created the Quatermass character. Donlevy, Kneale stated, “was then really on the skids and didn’t care what he was doing . . . it was a case of take the money and run. Or in the case of Mr Donlevy, waddle.” Ouch. 

The higher-ups at Hammer Film Productions, eager to cast an American actor in an otherwise British production, had no such qualms: they wanted a picture that would appeal to the Yanks. Director Val Guest was sanguine about the casting decision:  “Brian was all right, no problem at all once you kept him sober.” Re-watching “The Quatermass Experiment,” available on December 12th as a Blu-Ray from Kino Lorber, you can’t help but agree, to a degree anyway, with Kneale.

In the television series, Quatermass was an intellectual eager to expand the bounds of knowledge. As portrayed by Donlevy, Quatermass is a put-up-or-shut-up authoritarian for whom the ends justify the means. The screenplay was adapted by Richard Landau and Guest, the latter of whom tailored much of the dialogue to suit the actor’s delivery. There is more than a hint of rat-a-tat-tat noir in Donlevy’s performance. Guest, wise to the actor’s established screen persona, kept things pithy.

Still, Donlevy is, if not the best thing about “The Quatermass Experiment,” then key to its appeal. Sure, the performance can seem like the actor can’t get from Point A to Point B fast enough. Kneale’s crack about waddling is diminished considerably by Donlevy’s expeditiousness.

But Donlevy as Quatermass is a force of nature — as sure as he is arrogant. He has no patience for bureaucracy and though he is capable of fleeting moments of compassion, he’s pretty much all business. When the ingenue’s husband is put in danger by Quatermass’s decree, he tells her that “there’s no room for personal feelings in science, Judith.” Boom! Cue the mic drop.

“The Quatermass Experiment” begins in a picturesque corner of the British countryside with two young lovers flirting, running and, ultimately, getting busy next to a haystack. They’re interrupted, as they must be, by a huge explosion that turns out to be a rocket crashing to earth.

This vessel was launched illegally by the British Experimental Rocket Group on the orders of, you guessed it, Bernard Quatermass. “If the whole world waited for official sanction, it would be standing still” he tells the stuffy Brit from the Home Office. You can’t help but raise a glass to the professor.

Of the three men who went up in the rocket, only one emerges from the wreckage and he’s not in good shape. Victor Carroon (Richard Wordsworth, great grandson of the poet) is ashen and uncommunicative, but alive. Upon medical inspection, it is discovered that Carroon’s skeletal structure has been altered and his skin is undergoing some form of waxy mutation. 

He is cognizant, however, and oddly feral. When Carroon’s wife, Judith (Margia Dean), pays a friend to break her husband out of the hospital, things go south in quick order. In the meantime, Quatermass and Dr. Briscoe (David King-Wood) have isolated a gelatinous lifeform–a virus, of sorts–culled from Carroon’s body. All the while, Carroon strides through London, recalling the Frankenstein monster in its helplessness and desperation.

“The Quatermass Experiment” is a deft sci-fi thriller, as involving as it is humble. The denouement can’t hold a candle to the buildup–a trait typical for fare of this kind–but setting Westminster Abbey in flames and shutting down the electrical grid of London was a provocative conceit, particularly for a country whose memories of the Blitz were still fresh. 

Guest’s direction strikes a nice balance between the documentary and the fanciful, and he was wise enough to allow Quatermass/Donlevy the finishing bon mot. What else does a semi-mad scientist do after his machinations have almost rent asunder the United Kingdom? “I’m going to start again.” Perfect.