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These Are the Damned [1963] Joseph Losey
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These Are the Damned (1963) 
The Damned (original title) 
 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056576/

The Damned is a 1963 British science fiction film drama starring Macdonald Carey, Shirley Anne Field and Oliver Reed. It was a Hammer Film production directed by Joseph Losey and based on H.L. Lawrence's story The Children of Light.

  Macdonald Carey  ...  Simon Wells  
  Shirley Anne Field  ...  Joan  
  Viveca Lindfors  ...  Freya Neilson  
  Alexander Knox  ...  Bernard  
  Oliver Reed  ...  King  
  Walter Gotell  ...  Major Holland  
  James Villiers  ...  Captain Gregory  
  Tom Kempinski  ...  Ted (as Thomas Kempinski)  
  Kenneth Cope  ...  Sid  
  Brian Oulton  ...  Mr. Dingle  
  Barbara Everest  ...  Miss Lamont  
  Allan McClelland  ...  Mr. Stuart (as Alan McClelland)  
  James Maxwell  ...  Mr. Talbot  
  Rachel Clay  ...  Victoria  
  Caroline Sheldon  ...  Elizabeth  


In 1950s Sci-Fi runaway radiation created monsters, raised the dead and turned people into midgets and giants, effects that only alluded to real-life nuclear dangers. In 1961, blacklisted American director Joseph Losey struck much closer to the truth with this chilling fantasy from Hammer films. Its release in England was unaccountably delayed for over two years, and when it finally reached American screens in 1965, even Variety openly suspected that it had been suppressed. These Are the Damned (original English title, The Damned) is a radical thriller about artists and bureaucrats, juvenile delinquency and sinister top secret government projects. Its source is a book by H.L Lawrence, The Children of Light.

The movie is a catalogue of ideas that would inflame guardians of England's public image. A seaside town is depicted as overrun by a pack of unruly Teddy Boys, biker hoodlums led by King (Oliver Reed), a sullen thug with incestuous designs on his sister Joan (Shirley Anne Field). The gang uses Joan as bait to mug Simon, an American tourist disenchanted with modern life (MacDonald Carey). Simon meets the bohemian artist Freya (Viveca Lindfors, in her best role), a free-spirit sculptress of subversive statues resembling the charred remains of Hiroshima victims. Freya is in turn the mistress of Bernard (Alexander Knox), a stuffy executive in charge of an ultra top-secret military experiment. It is so secret, Bernard says, that should he tell Freya about it he "might be condemning her to death."

Simon defies King's gang and escapes on his boat with Joan, who seeks to break free of her brother's control. King pursues them near Bernard's secret project, a heavily-guarded compound reminiscent of Hammer's earlier Quatermass films. Simon, King and Joan soon find themselves in a futuristic bunker hidden below the sea cliffs, with a group of imprisoned children. The focus of Bernard's experiment, the sheltered and polite children wear tidy school uniforms and are being raised by remote control. The only contact with their 'keepers' is through a television screen, from which Bernard condescendingly promises that their many questions about life and the world will be answered, "When the time comes." The children are a mystery to Simon until Joan discovers that their body temperature is "ice cold." Bernard is rearing a breed of radioactive people to continue the human race in a post-nuclear radioactive world.

These Are the Damned takes a shockingly anti-establishment view of the nuclear arms race. Bernard justifies his atrocious experiment with the conviction that nuclear annihilation is inevitable. Freya goads him with loaded libertarian questions: Why is a public servant permitted to have secrets from his master, the public? She knows that Bernard is up to no good in his secret lab but worships oblivion in her own way, through her morbid statues. Screenwriter Evan Jones is quick to choose sides; as in Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange the hooligan motorcycle gang is simply a mirror image of the institutionalized brutality of society at large. The Teddy Boys' outlaw disenchantment is a direct reaction to the warped values of the adult generation. As Bernard puts it, "The age of senseless violence has caught up with us too." James Bernard's Teddy Boy theme Black Leather Rock is an anthem for a new era of anarchy.

Joseph Losey's prowling HammerScope camera uses landscape to heighten his dramatic contrasts. The sleepy holiday town gives way to the barren cliffs of Weymouth. The concrete and steel warrens of Bernard's inhuman project lie just below Freya's cliff-side studio, implying a direct relationship between political art and society's hidden agendas. The violent climax sees huge helicopters pursuing King's sports car down the seaside highway like ominous Orwellian watchdogs. 

Viewers are apt to find an even stronger image burned into their memory when the bunker doors open and the children stumble out into the light. As a rubber-suited goon threatens, Joan introduces one of the liberated children to the joys of a tiny flower. It's a perfect visual expression of the later pacifist motto, "War is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things." Freya and Simon should be running for their lives instead of confronting Bernard with the obscene truth of his atrocious project -- the 'graveyard bird' helicopters are already closing in for the kill.

These Are the Damned was cut by nineteen minutes for one version, removing many of its sharp philosophical speeches and a handful of interesting character confrontations. An encounter between Freya and King was cut in half, inadvertently making it look as if a rape occurs. Losey reportedly objected when the studio insisted that the Bernard character personally commit one of the final murders, as his plan was to assign that role to the faceless helicopters. If released in a timely fashion These Are the Damned might have been a key film of the Ban the Bomb years. It was instead shelved, cut up and discarded for reasons that were never made clear.

Sony/Columbia restored the film to its original 96-minute length in the early 1990s, and it has been greeted with enthusiasm at film festivals ever since. What was once considered one of Joseph Losey's weakest efforts is quickly becoming recognized as the very best of English Science Fiction filmmaking.

Joseph Losey was born in Wisconsin in 1909. He made his directing debut with a short film for the 1939 World's Fair, titled Pete-Roleum and His Cousins. The short didn't lead to feature assignments, and he spent the better part of the '40s knocking about the studios, directing the occasional short, before being handed his first feature assignment, an unusual parable titled The Boy With Green Hair (1948). He would go on to direct a handful of B thrillers, establishing himself as a promising talent, but his career was derailed by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his HUAC witchhunts. Branded as a communist sympathizer, Losey found himself blacklisted in the U.S.; desperate for work, he left for England... It may sound callous to say it, but in a way this was the best thing that could have happened to him. In the U.S., Losey was just another B filmmaker — he displayed style and panache, but he was already into his forties and his career wasn't exactly on fire. His early years in England were a struggle; he was forced to work under a pseudonym, frustrated as various projects slipped through his fingers, but his anger found a voice in his work. These Are the Damned was something of a gun-for-hire assignment for Losey, but it emerged as his angriest film to date — and inevitably ran into distribution troubles as a result. 
    
The script was adapted from a novel called The Children of Light, by H.L. Lawrence. It passed through a number of different hands before Losey came on board, but he saw in it the chance to make a personal statement. The director insisted on a complete overhaul and contributed a great deal to writing the final draft (without credit), but his commitment is a testimony to what can happen when a talented artist immerses himself in a project that originated long before they were involved in it. The film is by turns angry, self-righteous, moralistic and tragic. It digs deep into the psyches of its central characters, establishing the tone that would come to fruition in the director's more celebrated later work with screenwriter Harold Pinter: The Servant (1963), Accident (1967) and The Go-Between (1971). On the surface, it may be a B sci-fi film — certainly Losey himself was prone to representing it as such in later interviews — but like so many of the director's films, there is much more to it than might initially be apparent. 

The cast mixes actors familiar from Losey's previous work with faces familiar to British genre buffs of the period. Macdonald Carey was long past his prime as a leading man in Hollywood, and he's been criticized for being miscast as Simon. On the contrary, he's perfect for the role, and he brings a passionate intensity to it that is surprising, given the generally passive presence he had conveyed in other films. Carey had worked with Losey on the director's second feature, The Lawless (1950), and he would never appear in another Hammer film — it makes sense, therefore, to theorize that he was hand picked by the director. Simon is something of a loner, and a wanderer. His disposition is affected by a growing cynicism, but he is still capable of true emotion. When he becomes infatuated with Joan it would be easy to dismiss him as a dirty old man, but seen as a final act of desperation it makes perfect sense. Joan represents his final attempt at establishing a normal romantic relationship, and he ignores common sense in favor of trying to establish a connection with her. Shirley Ann Field (Peeping Tom) has often been criticized for her work in the film, and there's little question that she's the film's weakest link — but she improves as the film unfolds and does a better job of playing a surrogate mother figure than she does as an addle-brained flirt. That there is no discernible chemistry between her and Carey is as it should be — this is a relationship that is doomed from the start. Oliver Reed gives one of his finest early performances as the psychotic King, whose incestuous yearnings for Joan drive him to fits of apoplectic rage. Reed was at the start of a promising career when he made this film, and it came on the heels of numerous appearances in Hammer pictures; together with Curse of the Werewolf (1960), it was the only film that really tapped into his potential, and it compares favorably with his later, celebrated work in the films of Ken Russell. The second strand of the plot is carried by Canadian Alexander Knox (You Only Live Twice) and Swedish Viveca Lindfors (Creepshow); the former had already worked with Losey and would reunite with him again, while the latter claimed to have been involved in a relationship with the director. Both do superb work. Knox is ideal as the chilly, distant Bernard, who heads up the secret military project. Lindfors brings a touching mixture of romanticism and cynicism to her portrayal of the avant-garde artist Freya, who was formely involved in a relationship with Bernard. Indeed, it's tempting to view their dynamic as being modeled on that of Losey and Lindfors in real life. It's doubtful the director intended for this, but given his reputation as a humorless and aloof authoritarian, it's entirely possible that the actors picked up on this and decided to layer it into the picture. Supporting roles are filled by such excellent character actors as James Villiers (Repulsion) and Walter Gotell (The Spy Who Loved Me); the children who figure so unforgettably into the final act are also first rate, notably a very young Nicolas Clay (Excalibur, 1981). Anthony Valentine (To the Devil... A Daughter) can be glimpsed as a member of Reed's gang of thugs.  

These Are the Damned is a difficult film — it takes a few viewings for its passion and intensity to really come to the surface. Like so many Losey films, it is ultimately 'about' much more than is specified in its plot, but elements of speech-making do emerge in the dialogues between Bernard and Freya. It has been suggested that the film made an impression Stanley Kubrick, whose later A Clockwork Orange (1971) evoked elements of this film; whether or not this is the case, it remains one of its director's most powerful anti-authority diatribes. The film is damning in its commentary but is distinguished by a vein of humanism — even Bernard is to be pitied to some degree, making the film less about 'the good guys versus the bad guys' than it is about a society that is doomed precisely because people's principles will lead them astray. It is arguably the finest film Hammer ever made, and it ranks alongside Accident as Losey's most consistently engaging film.