Val Guest, the versatile British director and screenwriter who directed the science-fiction classics "The Quatermass Xperiment" and "The Day the Earth Caught Fire," has died. He was 94.
The Palm Springs resident died of prostate cancer May 10 in a hospice in Palm Desert, said his wife, actress Yolande Donlan.
Guest, whose film career spanned more than 50 years, initially made his name in the 1930s while writing British comedies.
After becoming a director in the 1940s, he made movies in a variety of genres -- including broad comedies, detective thrillers and period musicals -- but was best known in the United States for his science-fiction works.
"The Day the Earth Caught Fire" -- a 1961 drama in which secret, simultaneous nuclear detonations by the United States and the Soviet Union knock Earth off its axis and send it hurtling toward the sun as the world's weather turns chaotic -- earned Guest and co-writer Wolf Mankowitz best British screenplay awards from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. The doomsday drama was told through the characters of two Fleet Street reporters.
Guest later said President Kennedy asked for his own copy and screened it for 200 foreign correspondents in Washington.
Guest "brought a lot of intelligence to a genre that is often sorely in need of it," director Joe Dante, a longtime admirer of his films, told The Times. "Every single one of his pictures is thoughtful and well-done."
"The Quatermass Xperiment" -- a 1955 science-fiction horror thriller about an experimental rocket ship that crashes in rural England with only one remaining crew member, who has been infested by an invisible force and gradually transforms into a monstrous "thing" as he absorbs plants, animals and humans -- was known for its semi-documentary feel.
In an interview for Tom Weaver's 1994 book "Attack of the Monster Movie Makers," Guest said that when he agreed to do the movie for England's Hammer Film Productions, he insisted on doing it his way.
His plan, Guest said, was "to shoot it as though a television company had said, 'Go on out and cover this story.' I wanted it to look as though it was [filmed by] hand-held cameras; we didn't \o7have \f7to frame somebody absolutely in the middle -- make it \o7real."
\f7In the science-fiction movie category, Weaver told The Times last week, "it wasn't quite like anything fans had seen before. The success of the picture helped put Hammer on the road to specializing in sci-fi and horror movies."
