The Dalek Invasion of Amicus

Before Steven Moffat was elevated to the sacred office of showrunner, Peter Cushing was the pre-eminent Grand Moff of Doctor Who by dint of his appearance in two mid-1960s adaptations of the show to the big screen. These were undertaken by Amicus – at the time a fresh new production company out to challenge Hammer on their own turf – who’d approached Terry Nation and the BBC and paid £500 for the movie options for the first three Dalek stories. They were, perhaps, inspired by Hammer’s own success in adapting the Quatermass TV serials – Hammer having done The Quatermass Xperiment and Quatermass II in the 1950s.

Amicus assigned Graham Flemyng to direct, and casting Cushing as the Doctor was probably a no-brainer, since he was their most heavily featured actor at the time. (Amicus put out three movies in 1965 – this one, The Skull, and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors – and Cushing had top billing in all of them.) Screenwriting duties fell largely to Milton Subotsky – one of the two chiefs of Amicus – though for the second movie he got regular Doctor Who writer David Whitaker in for a bit of assistance.

Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, prior to founding Amicus together, had collaborated on The City of the Dead, and Amicus itself had previously put out a couple of youth-oriented musical comedies (It’s Trad, Dad! and Just For Fun), but this was their first push into science fiction. Would this be a triumphant entry into a new genre, riding high on the coattails of a pop culture craze, or would they stumble trying to jump onto the bandwagon?

Dr. Who and the Daleks

As the title implies, this is a movie adaptation of The Daleks in full colour, nearly 60 years before the BBC issued a colourised, edited-down version of the original serial. Released as it was in the gap between Season 2 and Season 3, it emerged at a period when the show had vastly less established canon, and the movie had no qualms about departing rapidly from it. The most infamous decision here is that the Doctor is a human being called “Doctor Who”, living in a conventional house, whose Victorian getup is an affectation. (He built the TARDIS in his back garden.) Susan (Roberta Tovey) is still his granddaughter, but she’s much younger than in the show. Barbara is now the Doctor’s older granddaughter (Jennie Linden), whilst Ian (Roy Castle) is her boyfriend and is mostly used for comic relief.

Some of these tweaks make sense – simplifying the relationship between the companions means the movie doesn’t need to re-enact the first episode of An Unearthly Child, which would eat into the running time somewhat. On the other hand, maybe that would have been a good idea? Despite the brisk pace adopted by the movie – necessary due to trimming down a 7-episode television story into less than an hour and a half – the last half hour or so of Dr. Who and the Daleks still seems crammed with filler, and perhaps trimming that back and doing a condensed version of An Unearthly Child at the start would have helped.

Certainly, that’s the tack that David Whitaker took when he did the novelisation of the original TV story (delightfully entitled Doctor Who In an Exciting Adventure With the Daleks, which I guess helps distinguish it from Planet of the Daleks or Death To the Daleks), and keeping the Unearthly Child section in there helps establish character just as skipping straight to Skaro means that the Tribe of Gum nonsense can be nicely elided. By comparison, the movie has much less chance to establish character before getting into the action, and so has to rely on shorthand.