The other night, one of my cable channels, MGM-HD, had the movie "The Creeping Unknown" (1955) listed. Thinking I had never seen it, I tuned in only to see "The Quatermass Experiment" come on. I checked IMDb this morning, & I see the movie is listed as "The Quatermass Experiment (aka The Creeping Unknown)". Does anyone know why this, and some other older movies, have alernative titles?
shareFrom the 1930s into the 1960s, changing the title of a British film for its American release happened a lot -- so much so that it was almost the norm. (The same was true for many American films retitled for the U.K.) In either direction, titles were usually changed to something the distributors of a film felt would appeal more, or make more sense, to American audiences (for British films), or British audiences for American movies.
The Quatermass Experiment was originally a six-part BBC television play in 1953. It was hugely successful and so a film version was made in 1955. (The film's title was altered slightly to The Quatermass Xperiment. Spelling "experiment" with a capital X emphasized the film's X rating in Britain, which at that time signified a movie deemed too violent for those under 18.)
But the name "Quatermass" meant nothing to Americans, since the TV program was never shown over here, so for its U.S. release in 1956 United Artists (which distributed the movie in America) retitled it The Creeping Unknown. The American print was also shortened by three minutes, which was also an extremely common practice back then for British films being released in the U.S.
This is why the two other Quatermass films were also given different titles in the States: Quatermass 2 became Enemy From Space (both released in 1957), and Quatermass and the Pit (1967) was retitled Five Million Years to Earth for its 1968 U.S. release.
Many other British sci-fi films of the 50s were given different titles in America. Thus: The Abominable Snowman became The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas, along with The Trollenberg Terror/The Crawling Eye, The Strange World of Planet X/The Cosmic Monster, Night of the Demon/Curse of the Demon, and so on. Offhand I can think of only two British sci-fi films of the period that retained their titles in the U.S.: Spaceways and X The Unknown.
Other non-sci-fi examples of films getting new titles because the original ones would have baffled moviegoers in the other country include the 1955 American film The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell, which was called One Man Mutiny in Britain because few Brits had any idea who Billy Mitchell was. Similarly, the 1959 British adventure film North West Frontier became Flame Over India for its 1960 U.S. release. While for post-colonial Britons the original title clearly referred to the North West Frontier province of colonial India (and it's still called that in present-day Pakistan), to Americans it would have sounded like a western, or been confused with the film Northwest Passage or some other movie with a similar title. Also, American distributors tended to give films more "exciting", "jazzy" names, while most British distributors resorted to quieter, more restrained titles, which both sides obviously assumed reflected their respective customers' sensibilities.
It's actually pretty fun to read through lists of title changes and observe the different cultural mind-sets at work. But this practice rarely happens anymore. Mr. Mom became Mr. Mum in Britain, where they say "mummy" instead of "mommy", but such changes are few these days.
Nice exegesis of the US/UK market differences - I have just 2 rather pedantic comments - the X rating given to particular UK films by the (very powerful and influential) British Board of Film Censors was, until the re-jigging of the ratings system in the 1970s, given to films deemed to violent to be viewed by young people under 16, not 18. But plenty of us bluffed our way past stern box office ladies to see "X films" when we were 13 or 14. The rules weren't really imposed too stringently by theatres, unless the film was rated 'X' because of sexually/narratively adult content (i.e. Dirk Bogarde's marvelous 'Victim' or Schlesinger's 'A Kind of Loving', Bunuel's 'Viridiana' etc.) The BBFC eventually became the Board of Film *Classification*, and now rarely demands cuts in movies, which the old BBFC did frequently, particularly when dealing with Horror Movies. Although even now, films are occasionally banned in the UK - Nick Palumbo's 'Murder-Set-Pieces', the Japanese 'Grotesque', the grueling 'The Bunny Game' are recent examples.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBFC
My other pedantic point is that 'Strange World of Planet X' became 'Cosmic Monsters' in the US. Plural, without a definite article.
:-)
Thank you, and thanks also for further insight into the old BBFC rating system and the ways in which you young incorrigibles dodged its creeping reach!
Censorship in the US was always a matter left to localities. There was an old saying that such-and-such a film or play or book was "banned in Boston", a kind of catch-all phrase indicating some work deemed too sexy (usually: violence was just fine) for the residents of some staid city to view without having terrible damage inflicted on their tender psyches. Such things occurred in most US cities up into the 1960s. We never had a letter-rating system until the MPAA came up with the first one around 1968 -- G, M, R, and X. M ("Mature") soon became PG ("Parental Guidance"). But overall it's been fairly meaningless. You can pretty much get into anything you want.
No offense taken to your second bit of pedantry, but to correct your information about the US retitling of The Strange World of Planet X: Cosmic Monsters is the way the film is titled on American movie posters -- but not on screen. In all prints of the film, its title appears as The Cosmic Monster -- with the definite article, and singular. This has always led to some confusion.
Technically, a title is usually deemed to be what appears in the actual film itself...though there have been some exceptions, such as The Story of G.I. Joe and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, for two. Neither title page of either film specifically contains that precise wording.
The "correct" -- perhaps "intended" is a better word -- re-title of this film was probably Cosmic Monsters, only because that makes a lot more sense -- there are lots of monsters, not just one. The posters all read that way. But for whatever reasons, the film itself says The Cosmic Monster. I guess it's viewer's choice.