Bunker Mentality

I was in the mood to see some more of Rudolph Cartier’s work — I’ve decided to insert him into my next novel — the director of the first three Quatermass serials and Nigel Kneale’s 1984 adaptation — also the producer of the remarkable CORRIDOR OF MIRRORS. Pushing the boat out ever so gently I looked for more of his science fiction work, and found the surviving episode of two he made for Out of the Unknown, a classy sf anthology show. (Huge amounts of Cartier’s work is either lost or unavailable due to the BBC’s formerly feckless preservation policies — a lot of his work went out live with no recording made, or the recordings were junked.)

Level 7 (1966) is adapted from a Mordecai Roshwald story by J.B. Priestly, of all people, and is set almost entirely in a bunker thousands of miles deep, designed to withstand nuclear attack, and it’s simultaneously an attack on police states and on the idea of the survivable nuclear war. Cartier does a little “It’s me!” wave to us by using Mars from Holst’s Planets Suite on the soundtrack.

Nice, stark design makes this dystopia oppressively claustrophobic, and avoids the sillier elements of TV-sf. The fuzzy kinoscope look suits the grimness.

The acting is… variable. We have a lot of characters with speaking roles, and numerous of them go for an overly fervid approach. Even when they don’t, the acting often has quotation marks around it, or feels like it’s happening in the past tense, or you feel the actor’s self-consciousness. Stand-out player is the mighty Michelle Dotrice, famous mainly as sitcom imbecile Frank Spencer’s hapless Betty in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em, which may give the viewer dramaturgical whiplash, but I’ve already seen her officiate at a satanic rape rite in BLOOD ON SATAN’S CLAW so I feel nothing she does will surprise me in a distracting way. She’s just persistently true, in her jumpsuit and beehive.

I was waiting for a big plot-twist ending whereby the whole troglodytic society would prove to be a test of endurance, but such cop-out fake-outs are avoided, even though Priestley, we know, love twists. Instead we just have this awful, inhuman society gradually destroyed by radiation sickness. The reality of what that would be like is simply too unpleasant for TV at this time (The War Game would get banned for going anywhere near it) so our characters gradually go blind and freeze like statues, which is disturbing as hell but slightly absurd too. “He’s gone completely rigid!” a bit player exclaims.

I think that, when your excuse for being depressing is that you’re following the truth, you need to signal clearly whether it’s a poetic or a documentary truth. I guess the whole Level 7 setting is science-fictional enough to allow some latitude.

I’ve just discovered the existence of The Fanatics, a Cartier-directed teleplay starring Leonard Rossiter as Voltaire and Alan Badel as a torturer and I am delighted to be watching that RIGHT NOW.