There are filmmaker who deserve further analysis, but who are forgotten for being artisans dedicated to genre films made with small budgets. However, some made a handful of films exceeding their limitations, and are better than overrated directors. Val Guest is one of them. Judging by his statements, he was a man of no pretensions who wanted to do his job well.
Born in London, Guest worked for many years with Gainsborough Pictures and Hammer Film, but he made movies through his production company. He put Hammer on the international map with «The Quatermass Experiment» (1955) and in 1961 his name was cemented with the sci-fi classic «The Day the Earth Caught Fire.»
Apart from works for Hammer, as the remarkable «The Abominable Snowman» (1957), or his participation in big productions as "Casino Royale" (1967), Guest remained in low-budget films, in which we sometimes discover his ability to enhance them and give the public good entertainment, often in black and white and wide-screen.
In this format, he produced and directed the drama «80,000 suspects», which presents a group in crisis, as in «The Day the Earth Caught Fire», but here there is no global alert, rather the alarm is limited to the city of Bath. Based on the novel «The Pillars of Midnight» by Trevor Dudley Smith, Guest recounts the drama of a smallpox epidemic that suddenly breaks out, causing numerous deaths during the collective struggle to control it.
The situations of the operation with health personnel, police officers and journalists are handled at a good pace and efficiently, even with a couple of image transitions planned on set, with very good use of the CinemaScope format, as he did on other occasions. The theme of adultery between doctors and wives, plus the participation of a priest, do not obstruct the drama of the epidemic, but are revealed as key elements of the story, although the dialogues slow down the plot, by today's dramatic standards.
All in all, Val Guest's «80,000 suspects» is a good contribution to the British film industry of those years, in which he combined current issues (smallpox killed about 300 million people in the 20th century), the ethics of life in couple, and the good effect that religion can have on people's lives, instead of bothering them with old-fashioned and obscurantist notions.
(*) Now I realize that, with «The Day the Earth Caught Fire,» Guest and his collaborators anticipated the current alarming global warming; and «80,000 suspects» describes a situation similar to the covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
