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.
I've wanted to see this Losey film for a long time. This is great news.
"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."
That's what I found so interesting about Ishiguro's NEVER LET ME GO. It can only be termed an SF novel because the idea around which everything else in the book revolves is an SF concept, but it reads like a contemporary drama. There are no SF trappings outside of that one idea (without which the book wouldn't exist).
Also, and forgive me if this sounds pedestrian, and your answer won't effect my desire for this DVD set one way or the other, but are there any commentaries? Old genre films with good commentary tracks are my favorite thing.
Posted by: bill | March 18, 2010 at 10:59 AM
@ Bill: No commentary; this is about as bare as bare-bones gets. The picture quality is ace, though.
Posted by: Glenn Kenny | March 18, 2010 at 11:21 AM
Nertz. Well, I'll buy it anyway.
Posted by: bill | March 18, 2010 at 11:28 AM
@bill: Excellent way of describing the Ishiguro novel. He does the same kind of sleight-of-hand genre trick with detective fiction in "We Were Orphans," to equally powerful effect. And did you see there's a film of "Never Let Me Go" in the works? I suspect the film version will tilt over into a fully sci-fi genre approach--just as "Remains of the Day" tilted over into full-mahogany period piece.
Posted by: Ray | March 18, 2010 at 10:18 PM
Fricking about time. I've wanted to get my mitts on this one for ages....
Posted by: steve simels | March 19, 2010 at 10:06 AM
Ray - I think that movie's done, actually, and set for release in the not-too-distant future. For whatever reason, I'm cautiously optimistic about it. If they go the route you predict, then it'll probably be a disaster, but I'd frankly be surprised if they went to the trouble of adapting that novel, if they misunderstood it so badly. But I've been wrong about these things before.
I've read WHEN WE WERE ORPHANS. Strange book...
Posted by: bill | March 19, 2010 at 01:38 PM
Because I can't help myself I went to the NYP Web site. And the headline on the essay made me cry out "OH. Oh God, no."
Good thing it's Sunday and I'm alone in the office and don't have to explain what just punched me in the stomach.
Posted by: Shawn Stone | March 21, 2010 at 03:24 PM
I offered to provide a commentary for this one, but my offer either didn't reach the right ear or was rejected. : (
Posted by: Tim Lucas | March 22, 2010 at 05:34 PM