--- name: "Val Guest" canonical: "https://film.one/person/val-guest" roles: ["Additional dialogue","Director"] born: "11 December 1911" died: "10 May 2006" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 average_over: 0 updated: "2026-09-18T11:52:48.475117+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Val Guest Additional dialogue and director. Born 11 December 1911 in London, England, UK. Died 10 May 2006. ## Details - **Work:** Additional dialogue, Director - **Born:** 11 December 1911, London, England, UK - **Died:** 10 May 2006 - **Also known as:** Valmond Guest - **Elsewhere:** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Val_Guest, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1351727, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0346436/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/39853 ## Fi1m on Val Guest > Val Guest shot science fiction as though it were the evening news, with hand-held cameras, real streets and people talking over one another, and for a few years either side of 1960 it worked. The rest of the career is a long, uneven afterwards. The thing Val Guest did that most British directors of his day did not was treat science fiction as a job for a news camera. He shot on real locations, let his actors talk over one another and carried the camera by hand, so that the impossible turned up on screen looking like something from the evening paper. It is a plain idea, and it gave Hammer its first big success: *The Quatermass Xperiment* (1955), taken from Nigel Kneale's television serial and made as though a reporter had happened to be standing there when it began. He came to it sideways. He was an actor first, then a journalist, then in the mid-1930s a staff writer at Gainsborough turning out comedies for Marcel Varnel and Will Hay, and his own first features in the early 1940s were comedies too. From the mid-1950s he directed fourteen films for Hammer, and around them the run that matters: *Quatermass 2* (1957), again from Kneale; *Expresso Bongo* (1959), a satirical musical with an early part for Cliff Richard; *Hell Is a City* (1960), a Manchester crime story made on the streets with the police's help; and *The Day the Earth Caught Fire* (1961), which he wrote as well as directed and which turns the dread of nuclear testing into a story about the end of everything. The virtue across all of them is conviction. He worked fast, usually with his own script, and he never let a film suspect it was silly. The documentary habits are not decoration; they are the reason a Kneale plot plays as though it might be in tomorrow's paper, and why the Manchester of *Hell Is a City* is a place and not a set. Then comes the long afterwards. Guest is one of five credited directors on *Casino Royale* (1967), brought in to shoot linking material and hold together a film with nobody in charge, and it defeated him as it defeated everyone else. We were bored well before the halfway point and then irritated, because the noise is so expensive, and because David Niven's dry first half-hour and Burt Bacharach's score show what a steadier hand might have made of it. That a director whose whole method was belief should be hired to glue together a film with none is an irony nobody would have chosen. After it came spy films, sex comedies, *Toomorrow* (1970), for which almost nobody has a kind word, and *The Boys in Blue* (1982), a remake of a Will Hay film, which took him back to where he started and not in the way he would have wanted. If you are going to give him an evening, give it to the Hammer years and the films around them, when he had a Kneale script under one arm and a camera on his shoulder. He never made anything as good after 1961, and he kept working for another twenty years, which is true of a great many careers and does not make the first half of his any less worth your time. ## Biography Val Guest (born Valmond Maurice Grossman) was a British film director and screenwriter. He began his career in the 1930s as a stage actor and journalist before becoming a screenwriter at Gainsborough Studios. He turned to directing in the early 1940s and maintained an active career in film and television until the early 1980s. Guest directed several science-fiction films for Hammer Film Productions, including *The Quatermass Xperiment* (1955), *Quatermass 2* (1957) and *The Abominable Snowman* (1957). He also wrote and directed *The Day the Earth Caught Fire* (1961) and was one of five directors credited on *Casino Royale* (1967). Other credits include episodes of the television series *The Persuaders!* (1971) and *Space: 1999* (1975). He was married to actress Yolande Donlan from 1954 until his death. *Sources: imdb.com, en.wikipedia.org.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Casino Royale* (1967), Fi1m 50, Director, Additional Dialogue — [page](https://film.one/film/casino-royale-1967.md) ## Complete filmography (87) Every credit, newest first. Titles without a page can be requested for review on the HTML page. - *Prisoners in Space* (2025), Director - *Flesh and Blood: The Hammer Heritage of Horror* (1994), Thanks - *In Possession* (1984), Director - *Child's Play* (1984), Director - *Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense* (1984), series, Director - *Mark of the Devil* (1984), Director - *The Boys in Blue* (1982), Director, Screenplay - *Birds of Paradise* (1981), Screenplay - *Shillingbury Tales* (1981), series, Director - *Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective* (1981), Director, Screenplay - *The Shillingbury Blowers* (1980), Director - *The Switch* (1976), Director - *Killer Force* (1976), Director, Screenplay - *Space: 1999* (1975), series, Director - *Sporting Chance* (1975), Director - *Confessions of a Window Cleaner* (1974), Director, Screenplay - *Mission: Monte Carlo* (1974), Writer - *The Persuaders!* (1973), Director - *The Adventurer* (1972), series, Director - *Au Pair Girls* (1972), Director, Screenplay - *The Persuaders!* (1971), series, Director, Writer - *When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth* (1970), Director, Writer - *Toomorrow* (1970), Writer, Director - *Assignment K* (1968), Screenplay, Director - *Casino Royale* (1967), Additional Dialogue, Director — Fi1m 50, [page](https://film.one/film/casino-royale-1967.md) - *Where the Spies Are* (1966), Screenplay, Director, Producer - *The Beauty Jungle* (1964), Director, Screenplay, Producer - *80,000 Suspects* (1963), Director, Screenplay, Producer - *Jigsaw* (1962), Director, Screenplay, Producer - *The Day the Earth Caught Fire* (1961), Director, Writer, Producer - *The Full Treatment* (1960), Screenplay, Producer, Director - *Dentist in the Chair* (1960), Screenplay - *Hell Is a City* (1960), Director, Screenplay - *Life Is a Circus* (1960), Director, Writer - *Expresso Bongo* (1959), Director, Producer - *Yesterday's Enemy* (1959), Director - *Further Up the Creek* (1958), Director, Writer - *Up the Creek* (1958), Writer, Director - *The Camp on Blood Island* (1958), Director, Screenplay - *The Abominable Snowman* (1957), Director - *Quatermass 2* (1957), Director, Screenplay - *Carry On Admiral* (1957), Director, Screenplay - *The Weapon* (1956), Director - *It's a Wonderful World* (1956), Director, Writer - *Women Without Men* (1956), Writer - *Blonde Bait* (1956), Original Story - *They Can't Hang Me* (1955), Screenplay, Director - *The Quatermass Xperiment* (1955), Director, Screenplay - *The Lyons in Paris* (1955), Director, Writer - *Break in the Circle* (1955), Director, Writer - *The Men of Sherwood Forest* (1954), Director - *Dance Little Lady* (1954), Director, Writer - *Life with the Lyons* (1954), Director - *The Runaway Bus* (1953), Writer, Director, Producer - *Penny Princess* (1952), Writer, Director - *Another Man's Poison* (1951), Writer - *Mr. Drake's Duck* (1951), Director, Writer - *Happy Go Lovely* (1951), Screenplay - *The Body Said No!* (1950), Director, Writer - *Miss Pilgrim's Progress* (1949), Director, Writer - *Murder at the Windmill* (1949), Writer, Director - *Paper Orchid* (1949), Screenplay - *Once Upon a Dream* (1949), Story - *William Comes to Town* (1948), Writer, Director - *Just William's Luck* (1947), Director, Screenplay - *Walking on Air* (1946), Writer - *I'll Be Your Sweetheart* (1945), Director, Screenplay - *Give Us the Moon* (1944), Writer, Director - *Bees in Paradise* (1944), Director, Writer - *Miss London Ltd.* (1943), Director, Writer - *King Arthur Was a Gentleman* (1942), Writer - *Back-Room Boy* (1942), Screenplay, Original Story - *The Nose Has It!* (1942), Director, Writer - *I Thank You* (1941), Screenplay - *Inspector Hornleigh Goes to It* (1941), Writer - *The Ghost Train* (1941), Writer - *Gasbags* (1941), Writer - *Where's That Fire* (1939), Writer - *Ask a Policeman* (1939), Screenplay - *Convict 99* (1938), Writer - *Oh, Mr. Porter!* (1937), Screenplay - *Good Morning, Boys!* (1937), Writer - *All In!* (1936), Dialogue, Screenplay - *Public Nuisance No. 1* (1936), Writer - *Old Spanish Customers* (1932), as Newspaper reporter - *The Innocents of Chicago* (1932), as Gangster - *The Maid of the Mountains* (1932), as Party Guest --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/val-guest