Damned Damned Damned

One of the most sig­ni­fic­ant DVD releases of the year will be hid­ing in plain sight, as it were, on April 6, when Sony puts out its three-disc, six-film “Hammer Icons of Suspense” col­lec­tion. For one of the six films in the col­lec­tion is Joseph Losey’s “These Are The Damned”, a land­mark of eschat­o­lo­gic­al film­mak­ing and an essen­tial, if not quint­es­sen­tial, Losey work. The pic­ture is still as stag­ger­ing, and as odd, as it must have been when it was first released in a much-truncated form almost fifty years ago. 

It’s often termed a science-fiction film—indeed, the entry on it in Carlos Clarens’ great An Illustrated History of Horror and Science Fiction Films is one of the most cru­cial pas­sages in that essen­tial book—but one of the most dis­arm­ing things about it is how cas­u­ally the science-fiction ele­ment is intro­duced into it. The pic­ture begins with a shot of a sea­side town taken from the water (it ends with the same shot) and cuts imme­di­ately to civil­iz­a­tion out of joint—a tableau of itchy “teddy boys” dis­play­ing their tics to the hor­rid strains of a ditty called “Black Leather Rock.”

Their ringlead­er is King, played by the always-suitably-intense Oliver Reed, who soon dis­patches the comely Joan (Shirley Ann Field) to ensnare aging Yank tour­ist Simon (MacDonald Carey) into a mug­ging. After a bru­tal beat­ing, Simon is looked after a bit by a civil ser­vant Bernard (Alexander Knox) and sculptor Freya, who’s rent­ing an isol­ated house from Bernard, where she claims to be doing her best work. Once these char­ac­ters are intro­duced, their lives con­tin­ue to knit togeth­er in ways we might expect of a real­ist­ic but unusu­ally intense drama; the sub­sequent intro­duc­tion of the isol­ated chil­dren who trans­form all their lives forever is handled as merely anoth­er thread. The hor­ror these chil­dren rep­res­ent, Losey insists, is merely part of the world as it is today.

When he next encoun­ters Joan, Simon, rather than run­ning from her like the plague, prac­tic­ally forces him­self upon her and throws her on his boat, all but kid­nap­ping her. This lust-fueled impuls­ive­ness, a cor­rel­at­ive to wan­ton self-destructiveness, of course brings to mind Stanley Baker’s Tyvian Jones in Losey’s sub­sequent Eve (which was scrip­ted in part by Evan Jones, who also wrote the screen­play here, adapt­ing H.L. Lawrence’s nov­el The Children Of Light), who’s in a sense the archetyp­al Losey male. King’s boys fol­low in hot pur­suit, trail­ing Simon’s boat from over the high cliffs that make up much of the coast­line. We dis­cov­er that Joan, who King is so insanely pos­sess­ive of, is in fact King’s sis­ter. Simon, Joan, and King even­tu­ally infect, as it were, the space where Freya once felt so free to cre­ate. Looking over her art­works, King believes he’s got Freya pegged: “I know your kind. Smart talk­ing. Bad liv­ing. People with no mor­als.” (Wow, he sounds like Armond White!) Morals, eth­ics, all that sort of thing, are put through some fairly grue­some muta­tions as the pic­ture con­tin­ues, and as, soon, one by one, the prin­cipals all fall into the cave, the cave where the cold chil­dren have made their “hide­away.”

I won’t give away too much of the plot, for the sake of those who have yet to see this utterly bril­liant pic­ture. I will instead say that, among oth­er things, the pic­ture con­firms to some extent Andrew Sarris’ asser­tion that Losey’s often at his best in a genre set­ting: “Genre movies give him the dis­tan­cing he needs to writhe express­ively on screen.” (As it hap­pens, Losey held the science-fiction/horror genres in particular…not quite con­tempt, but mis­trust, and he described Hammer as an out­fit “dis­tin­guished for mak­ing pretty hor­rid hor­ror films.”) This movie writhes through­out, with a thor­oughly uncom­fort­able vibe estab­lished at the very out­set; there’s one cut, in a trans­ition from exter­i­or to interi­or fol­low­ing the thugs, that’s a mar­vel of neck-snapping dis­or­i­ent­a­tion. “The film is slightly dis­join­ted,” Losey explained to Tom Milne in the inter­view book Losey on Losey. But its dis­join­ted­ness con­trib­utes to its power, makes the pic­ture’s ulti­mate, unfor­giv­ing des­ol­a­tion all the more forceful. 

I haven’t even begun to think about look­ing at the oth­er five films in the new Hammer set. They are: Stop Me Before I Kill, Cash on Demand, The Snorkel, Maniac, and Never Take Candy From A Stranger. All are rel­at­ively obscure (Stop and Stranger aren’t even lis­ted in the Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film) and of them I’ve only seen Maniac; I’m sure I’ll get to them all even­tu­ally. But I can assure you without even look­ing at the oth­er films that “These Are The Damned” , which appears here in Losey’s 97-minute cut (Tim Lucas wrote a won­der­ful piece on the dif­fer­ent mani­fest­a­tions of the film in Video Watchdog issue #133) and a beau­ti­ful trans­fer, is worth the price of the whole set.