The Damned

(THESE ARE) THE DAMNED is now being seen in the U.S. in a restored print that has been making the rounds (I caught up with it at the 27th Annual Boston Science Fiction Film Marathon & Festival (for info go to: www.sf.theboard.net) on February 17th.

After having seen it only in edited form on late night TV decades ago, it was fascinating to see the exquisite B&W photography on the big screen (with footage not in the TV prints). Although it was made under the Hammer Films banner, THE DAMNED is not a typical SF picture by any means. Expatriate director Joseph Losey set out to make a social parable more than an SF thriller. He succeeds in showing how society's increasing violence and callousness on the streets could lead to the horrible thought of "breeding" radioactive children in the government in order to survive an inevitable (?) nuclear war. The moral is both, of the time & time-less. Of course, modern audiences may feel that the end of the Cold War makes such a tale outdated and even silly - but are we only fooling ourselves?

"Black Leather, Black Leather....."

These are the Damned, also known as simply The Damned, is a very special movie. it was made by hammer, but doesn't feel much like a hammer film. it was directed by an American named joseph Losey, who moved to England in an attempt to find work after he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. he returned to the US later, and made a few interesting films, like Secret Ceremony with Elizabeth Taylor and Robert mitchum, and The Accident. This is, I think, his only science fiction movie.

And it's a bitter, angry, sad and highly frustrated-seeming Cold War story. It manages to throw together a bunch of disparate elements in a really interesting and original way. It has a juvenile delinquent gang led by Oliver Reed in an early role, an American tourist, a group of scientists and military types doing covert experiments on children and an intense Scandinavian artist lady who creates weird sculptures, all congregating in an English seaside town. When the tourist gets mixed up with the gangleader's sister, he vows to protect her from her brother and his thugs. Big mistake. you really don't want to get on Oliver Reed's bad side. Fists fly and tempers flair, and soon our hero and the somewhat drippy sister are on the run, and end up finding out about the scientists and their highly dubious experiments, experiments which the lead professor type believes to be absolutely necessary. You see, he's convinced that a nuclear holocaust is coming, and his work is the only way the human race will survive.

I don't want to spoil this movie by saying much more about it. let's just say and, ok, it's not even a 70s movie so there's not a lot of blood and violence or anything, but to me, this is really intense, mostly in a psychological way. The ending is really sad and, if you have young loved ones (children, relatives, whatever), will make you want to hold them close for a while. Of course, this is one of those movies, like the Space: 1999 series, that ascribes some pretty strange properties to radiation, but it's a bit more realistic than that, and the science aspect isn't really that important anyway. It's more of a drama with a science fiction underpinning.

As well as Oliver, there are some other standouts in the cast. Alexander Knox as the professor is the closest thing the movie has to a villain, but he's not evil at all -- his motivation is that he wants the human race to survive, and he has a really nice relationship with Freya the artist, who is portrayed with real class and poise by Viveca Lindfors. She's a melancholy character, but also kind of the heart of this film, in a way, showing in a real physical sense what beauty humans can accomplish and why the race maybe should survive after all. In the end, oliver Reed's King character tries his best to be a hero. Yes, he's quite an interesting guy, at first a dangerous psychopath, but when the chips are down, he turns out to be not a bad sort. his last scene is just terribly grim and then it leads up to that heart-breaking ending.

So yeah, definitely not a feel-good film. it's personal and not everyone will agree, but to me, this is just as effective a Cold War story as Dr. Strangelove in its own way, and it was even made the same year. I kind of love that this movie is so unknown. People will watch it, expecting maybe some kind of thriller that they can easily forget about the next day, and, maybe, some of them will end up haunted for life by this thing. I know I was; it's a film that is oddly difficult to stop thinking about, even so many years on, when the threat of nuclear annihilation has receded in most peoples' consciousness to a vague but foreboding twinge of menace somewhere on the horizon.

considering this movie was made in 1961 (uk), its message is still chilling, how far will mankind experiment? it took me two years just to find a copy, the movie will challenge your imagination, if you laugh and say it could never happen, you may be in denial, the early 15 minutes of the film is 60"s exploitation, after that it evolves into a more serious study of how far government and scientists will push the envelope, if 1% of this sci-fi drama could be true, may god help us.

The middle-aged American Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) sails in his boat to Weymouth and stumbles with the twenty year-old Joan (Shirley Anne Field) on the street. He believes that she is a prostitute but she is actually part of a scheme of a motorcycle gang to rob tourists. Simon is brutally beaten up by her brother King (Oliver Reed) and his gang. The policemen find the wounded Simon and take him to a bar to recover, where he meets the military Bernard (Alexander Knox) and his mistress Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors). On the next morning, Joan challenges King and meets Simon in his boat, and King and his gang hunts Simon down. Joan and Simon spend the night together in an isolated house and on the morning, they are located by the gang. They try to flee and stumble in a top-secret military facility managed by Bernard. They are helped by children and brought to their hideout in a cave. King falls in the sea while chasing the couple and is also helped by a boy and brought to the same place. Soon Joan finds that the children are cold as if they were dead. What is the secret of the children and the military staff?

"The Damned" is a creepy sci-fi with a very dark and hopeless conclusion in the summit of the Cold War. In this period, people were paranoid with nuclear attack and the British research in understood by those that lived in that period. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Malditos" ("Damned")

A lot of great horror films were produced by Hammer Studios, and The Damned certainly ranks up there both as one of the studios best, and as one of the weirdest. The film is a mix of drama, thriller, horror and sci-fi and is inventive and refreshing in the way it plays out and I guarantee that if you go into this film without first finding out what it's about, you'll never guess where it will take you! The plot structure basically has two main threads to it and neither one is related to the other, but the film pulls them together well. The first plot we are introduced to focuses on Joan, a young woman who gets involved with an American tourist. He gets beaten up by a gang of thugs and it soon transpires that Joan is the sister of the leader of them! The two run away with the angry brother and his gang hot on their tails. The second side of the plot concerns nine children who are being brought up in isolation inside a secret military base as they have somehow been born radioactive. The two plots combine when the American and his girl stumble into the base with the brother after them.

This film was always in danger of becoming messy considering how the story changes dramatically half way through, but it actually flows really well and the story manages to keep the first plot running even when the second one takes centre stage. The themes of the story do get lost somewhat under what we are directly seeing on screen, but 'The Damned' is a very fitting title as the movie deals with a situation born out of the need for a contingency plan in case of nuclear war. The fact that the plot focuses on both sanctioned and unsanctioned criminals makes it more interesting. The film is also very haunting; the children themselves echo those in the classic Village of the Damned and the gloomy plot line gives off its own formidable atmosphere, which is reinforced well by the way the children are treated in their prison/home. The central cast is excellent with Shirley Anne Field and Macdonald Carey getting good support from the always memorable Oliver Reed. The children give some of the best performances in the film and manage to capture what you would expect of children in their situation very well indeed. Overall, The Damned is one of Hammer's most strange and surreal films; but it marks a welcome change and it's not a film I will forget in a hurry. Don't miss out on this one!