The Damned

Abstract

A co-production between Columbia Pictures and Hammer, made by the acclaimed American director Joseph Losey and adapted from the now obscure science-fiction novel The Children of Light by H.L. Lawrence, it's immensely ironic that this, one of the most subtle and intelligent films Hammer ever produced, suffered a fate far worse than many of its more unpleasant and worthless offerings. [...]The Damned even dares to suggest that violence may be the motive power behind history, the necessary evil that is the ultimate cause of all change.

The Damned

(Dir. Joseph Losey) UK 1963

Columbia/Hammer

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment (2010)

One of the most unusual horror films ever to emerge from the Hammer Studios, The Damned is set, not in a distant comer of Europe at some indeterminate point in history, but in a British sea-side resort in what was then the present day of 1960. It doesn't feature Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, or any of the other Hammer stalwarts and there is not a cobweb-strewn crypt or a blood-splattered laboratory in sight. Neither is there any sign of a vampire, one of Baron Frankenstein's creations or any other species of monster, except perhaps those who wear a human guise. Instead, The Damned deals with a very real fear, one that came to consume the whole world in the years between this film's production and its release. This was the fear of impending nuclear war and the belief that the human race was running rapidly out of time.

A co-production between Columbia Pictures and Hammer, made by the acclaimed American director Joseph Losey and adapted from the now obscure science-fiction novel The Children of Light by H.L. Lawrence, it's immensely ironic that this, one of the most subtle and intelligent films Hammer ever produced, suffered a fate far worse than many of its more unpleasant and worthless offerings. Butchered in the editing room, kept waiting almost two years for its release and then withdrawn from cinemas before it had a chance to make any impact, The Damned was treated with total disdain, even by the studios that financed it. In many ways The Damned's DVD release now represents the first opportunity an audience has had really to appreciate this accomplished, conscientious and alarmingly ahead-of-its-time horror movie.

Based in and around the Dorset town of Weymouth, The Damned's central character is American former insurance executive Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) who has decided to go "on holiday from everything." Entranced by a young girl called Joan (Shirley Anne Field), Wells is lured into a trap set by Joan's psychotic brother, King (Oliver Reed), and his gang of vicious thugs. Robbed and badly beaten, Wells is helped to a hotel by two military men. There he meets their boss, Bernard (Alexander Knox), and his mistress, the sculptress Freya (Viveca Lindfors). Bernard warns Simon that "The age of senseless violence has caught up with us too" and the American returns to the dock and prepares to depart in his boat. Suddenly Joan appears and, after another encounter with King, Wells encourages her to leap aboard his ship and the two head out to sea. Enraged that Joan has escaped his obsessive, incestuous hold, King and his hoodlums set off in pursuit.

Hunted along the coast by the relentless King, Simon and Joan are forced to break into a mysterious military base. Chased by security guards they fall into the sea and are swept inside a cave. Within they find themselves surrounded by a group of children who claim never to have seen the outside world and who live in a specially constructed bunker beneath the base. Simon and Joan are horrified by the children's plight and vow to help them. Then they discover something. All of the children have skin which is ice-cold to the touch.

It transpires that the children were bom in the aftermath of a nuclear accident and that they are able to withstand extremely high levels of radiation. Bernard is implanting in them all of human history, science and culture so that "When the time comes," the children shall be the inheritors of the Earth. The danger is that the children are highly radioactive and prolonged exposure to them is fatal, hence the fact that they must be educated by remote control. Failing to understand why the children are being held prisoner in their shadowy underworld, Wells and Joan plot their release. Unfortunately, King has followed them and, in the desperate struggle for survival that follows, the future of the human race is put in jeopardy.

What distinguishes The Damned as a horror fdm is the elegance with which it intertwines so many themes, including questions of progression and regression, the role of science and the value of art. At its heart is the concept of violence as both a creative and destructive force. King and his thugs commit crimes because they are an outlet for their talent and natural energy, and they execute them with the skill and precision of artists. The deadly children, themselves the unforeseen result of a form of violence, could now prove to be the key to the continuation of life on Earth. The accelerated destruction of civilization might allow an entirely new world, and a new evolutionary age, to begin. In fact, The Damned even dares to suggest that violence may be the motive power behind history, the necessary evil that is the ultimate cause of all change.

There is little doubt that the world presented in The Damned is crying out for change. The viewer is left under no illusion that Britain's great imperial project is anything other than dead and buried. One of the film's earliest images is of a monument commemorating Queen Victoria's Jubilee gaudily decked out in amusement arcade lights and when we first see King and his gang they are sprawled on the base of statue to George III. This is a stagnant, decaying world in which the talent of the young is no longer being harnessed. "What else is there to do?" replies one of the gang when asked why he behaves as he does. The military too seem to be at a loss. With no real enemies left to fight they have had to content themselves with the mindless posturing which has now brought civilization to the brink of destruction. Cooped up in the base, Bernard's team of scientists bicker and, indifferent to the suffering of the children, they merely complain that their abilities are being wasted. In this way, Losey argues that there is no fundamental difference between the cowardly and imbecile activities of King and his gang and the faceless institutional violence of the military and those who serve them.

The conflict at the centre of The Damned is not one between good and evil but between old and new values. Simon is a man who knows that his traditional values have ceased to be relevant but he doesn't know what else to do other than uphold them. Bernard explains that he became a public servant because the imminent catastrophe meant that "it was too late to do anything in private life. "Self-reliance, character, gentility. Do you think these values will mean anything?" ponders one of Bernard's educational experts, thinking aloud about the wasteland the children shall inherit. Freya alone refuses to lose faith in mankind's capacity to grow but she can only really express herself by creating artworks which no-one understands and fatally underestimates man's savagery. Even King has an ethical system, thoroughly twisted though it is, and accuses the modem world of having no morals.

Since they both connect the cruelty of the individual with the barbarism of the state and asses the relationship between art and violence many critics have drawn comparisons between Losey's film and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) and it's true that at times The Damned feels like a dry run for Kubrick's movie. Neither is their similarity simply a thematic one. King and Kubrick's Alex share many stylistic traits, such as the peculiar patchwork language they speak, their adoption of dapper attire for their crime-sprees and their use of a sword-stick, or in King's case a sword-umbrella. It's also a peculiar coincidence that it was on the beach of a sea-side resort much like Weymouth that the author of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess, saw the gang warfare of the Mods and Rockers and conceived the notion of a novel on that subject. However, The Damned is a far more sensitive and profound study of the omnipresence of violence in modem society than Kubrick's film.

That The Damned is such a harmonious piece of cinema is no small achievement on Losey's part when you consider the battle for control that raged behind the scenes. Drawn to the movie by its anti-nuclear message, Losey secretly commissioned a new version of the script and began shooting this without the studio's knowledge. When the producers at Hammer learned what was happening they were stunned, but too much of the script had already been shot. Losey's revised script ended with an elaborate chase between a sports car and two helicopters and necessitated much aerial photography and stunt work. This led the film's budget to spiral to £170,000. Although filming was completed in September 1961, The Damned was held back by Hammer's executives, who believed that its inflammatory political message might do the company harm. It was only in May 1963 that the film was finally released as the lower half of a double bill, and even then with a full seven minutes cut. Some film historians now believe that it was due to The Damned that Hammer rarely ventured outside of Gothic territory again.

That The Damned was treated so deplorably is tragic because there is much in it that impresses today. Losey's direction has the same vitality and earnestness here that it does in the films he would later make with Harold Pinter. Evan Jones's screenplay is witty and sophisticated. Arthur Grant's beautiful black-and-white photography makes the most of the Weymouth and the Portland Bill locations and Hammer regular James Bernard's music is mournful and subdued and even his theme for King's gang is catchy. The production design by Bernard Robinson, particularly the children's subterranean lair, is striking and as good as anything Ken Adam would later visualise.

As for the cast, Macdonald Carey does his best to make his patronising hero likeable. The 23 year-old Oliver Reed uses both his voice and physicality to great menacing effect, and it's fascinating to see how his character reverts to a snivelling child by the end. Alexander Knox is credible as the frosty, fanatical Bernard but it's Viveca Lindfors as the enigmatic Feya who makes the strongest impression. Constantly putting an interesting spin on even the most routine dialogue (the movie's best moment is her reaction to Bernard's news that it's too late to prevent the world's destruction), she gives a stunning performance and invests the film with a real emotional centre. Completing the cast are the familiar British movie actors Walter Gotell, James Villiers and Kenneth Cope of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) fame.

Losey also manages to come up with some legitimately scary scenes, most notably the radiation-suited security guard prowling silently through the darkened classroom towards the sleeping children, King chasing Simon and Joan across a derelict and moonlit churchyard and the children leading them into the strange netherworld they have put together from the flotsam and jetsam which has drifted into their cave. Overall, though, this is a film which uses implication to convey the horror it deals with. Nothing helps to achieve this more than the use of the work of the brilliant British sculptress Elisabeth Frink. Frink was famous for her terrifying, jagged sculptures of sinister, elongated and winged figures, mutilated soldiers with truncated limbs and especially predatory birds. Frink's "graveyard bird" and the rest of her sculptures are used in the film as both a fearful reminder of the violence inherent in nature and as harbingers of the nightmarish life-forms the world may spawn in the wake of a nuclear winter.

A horror film with both a head and a heart, The Damned is a disturbing and haunting work which anticipates more recent movies like Eden Lake (Dir. James Watkins, 2008) and this year's Never Let Me Go (Dir. Mark Romanek). More than any other film it convincingly depicts a world in which most of the characters see Armageddon as inescapable and gives us an unforgettable image of a cycle of destructiveness that has gone totally out of control. A flawless, crisp print with a gallery and extensive notes by Marcus Heam, The Damned is a release to be welcomed.

Edward O'Hare