The Day the Earth Caught Fire

Val Guest (11 December 1911 – 10 May 2006) was a British film director, best known for his science-fiction films for Hammer Film Productions in the 1950s, but who also enjoyed a long, varied and active career in the film industry from the early 1930s up until the early 1980s.

He was born Valmond Maurice Grossmann in London, England, and educated at Seaford College. Guest’s initial career was as an actor, appearing in various productions in London theatres. He also appeared in a few early sound film roles, before he gave up an acting career and moved into writing. For a time in the early 1930s he was the London correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter trade paper, before he began working on film screenplays for Gainsborough Pictures, his first being No Monkey Business in 1935.

He wrote screenplays for the rest of the decade, including working on scripts for Will Hay, as well as some film scores, before in the early 1940s becoming a director, with his debut feature in this role being Miss London Ltd. in 1943. He went on to direct, produce and script a huge number of films over the following forty years, with perhaps his best known work being on the first two Hammer Films Quatermass science-fiction adaptations in the 1950s: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957). He also directed the cult science-fiction films The Abominable Snowman (1957) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961) (which won him a BAFTA Award with Wolf Mankowitz for Best Screenplay). He also directed and wrote the screenplay for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970). Guest was one of several directors to work on the spoof James Bond film Casino Royale (1967). —wikipedia