Film / News
80,000 Suspects as an epidemic threatens Bath
Best known for his Hammer movies (The Quatermass Xperiment, The Abominable Snowman, When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth), director Val Guest spent a lot of time in the west country during the early 1960s. His 1964 drama The Beauty Jungle was an expose of the beauty pageant game in which a pretty, working class Bristol typist is seduced with dreams of glamour by a sleazy photographer from the evil Western Daily Press while on holiday in Weston-super-Mare.
A year before that, Guest had followed his much acclaimed apocalyptic 1961 science fiction flick The Day the Earth Caught Fire with another expertly crafted disaster movie. In 80,000 Suspects, starring Richard Johnson and Claire Bloom as a doctor and nurse couple, a smallpox epidemic threatens Bath.
The film actually makes great use of the Georgian city and is beautifully photographed in monochrome Cinemascope by Arthur Grant, who went on to becomes Hammer’s most prolific cinematographer. The opening shot comprises a pan from the Abbey to the Pump Rooms, where lots of posh medical folk are grooving at a New Year’s Eve Party. One tipsy character then makes her way to the ‘Great Roman Bath’ (before it underwent a makeover) and dives in fully clothed. The Theatre Royal is the scene of one of the earliest outbreaks and the Assembly Rooms are converted into an emergency clinic. Other locations include the Bath Chronicle offices and, inevitably, the Royal Crescent. This being Bath, virtually none of the architecture has changed over the last half century or so, although it’s now somewhat cleaner. The fashions, cars and social mores depicted also underline L.P. Hartley’s ‘foreign country’ quote. Yep, those doctors really are chain-smoking on the wards. And, of course, there’s much fun to be had in comparing and contrasting with responses to the Covid pandemic. Interestingly, Guest arrived with mountains of fake snow but didn’t have to use any of it since he was filming over the winter of 1962/63 – one of the coldest of the 20th century.
is needed now More than ever
Hunting the infected in a snowy Bath
Now this oft-overlooked classic of local filmmaking is making a rare return to the big screen, courtesy of FilmBath, who’ve teamed up with Off the Wall Films to show it at their next FilmBath Club night at Widcombe Social Club on Sunday 28 July. It’s being screened with Audrey, Tashan Bahar’s short film about her grandmother, who was instrumental in setting up the Bath Postal Museum. Go here for tickets.
All images: FilmBath
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