In a slightly better world, Cushing would have replaced Brian Donlevy as the movie Quatermass.
Hah! This is the bit I couldn't find a place for in this writeup, because I was tired and it already felt sprawling:
"It's neat to see him playing another role in the same year as his star-making part, because I really don't think Rollason would have been. He's the most interesting character and the most excitingly played (there is good supporting character action from Richard Wattis as the fellow-botanist Foxy, but he has a very clear plot function and it is to be as wrongheadedly British—complaining about the greasy Tibetan tea and the childlike backward natives with all the ineffectual snobbery of fading Empire—as Friend is objectionably American, because the film is making a point about humanity), but he is simply not as compelling as Baron Victor von Frankenstein, who has magnificent bastard charisma coming out his fingernails even when he's pushing visiting scholars off balconies and dispatching pregnant lovers by Creature-proxy. Rollason is just a good scientist and a decent human being who finds himself running up against the limits of his species in a spooky cautionary tale that fits somewhere between The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Phase IV (1974) without being as radical as either of those two films; he should maybe have been Professor Quatermass, except then André Morell would have had to play him."
no subject
Hah! This is the bit I couldn't find a place for in this writeup, because I was tired and it already felt sprawling:
"It's neat to see him playing another role in the same year as his star-making part, because I really don't think Rollason would have been. He's the most interesting character and the most excitingly played (there is good supporting character action from Richard Wattis as the fellow-botanist Foxy, but he has a very clear plot function and it is to be as wrongheadedly British—complaining about the greasy Tibetan tea and the childlike backward natives with all the ineffectual snobbery of fading Empire—as Friend is objectionably American, because the film is making a point about humanity), but he is simply not as compelling as Baron Victor von Frankenstein, who has magnificent bastard charisma coming out his fingernails even when he's pushing visiting scholars off balconies and dispatching pregnant lovers by Creature-proxy. Rollason is just a good scientist and a decent human being who finds himself running up against the limits of his species in a spooky cautionary tale that fits somewhere between The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Phase IV (1974) without being as radical as either of those two films; he should maybe have been Professor Quatermass, except then André Morell would have had to play him."
I like your solution better.