The Damned.

Review #2608: The Damned.

Cast: 

Macdonald Carey (Simon Wells), Shirley Anne Field (Joan), Viveca Lindfors (Freya Neilson), Oliver Reed (King), Alexander Knox (Bernard), Walter Gotell (Major Holland), James Villiers (Captain Gregory), Tom Kempinski (Ted), Kenneth Cope (Sid), with Rachel Clay (Victoria), Caroline Sheldon (Elizabeth), Rebecca Dignam (Anne), Siobhan Taylor (Mary), Nicholas Clay (Richard), Kit Williams (Henry), Christopher Witty (William), David Palmer (George), and John Thompson (Charles)

Directed by Joseph Losey.

Review: 

Sure, let's see what's with the British and sci-fi/horror. Known as The Damned in its native Britain but These Are the Damned in its original American release (as distributed by Columbia Pictures), the film was based on the 1960 novel The Children of Light by H.L. Lawrence by Evan Jones. At director was expatriate Joseph Losey, who reluctantly accepted because of his desire to keep working as an American that was still reeling from the blacklist of the previous decade (it was he who brought in Jones to do the script rather than the one originally co-written by producer Anthony Hinds and Ben Barzman). Due to demands from Hinds (who once stated his loathing of both Losey and the film), there would be more than one version of the film lurking around to pair for a double feature. It actually was meant to be just a 95 minute movie (complete with already being rated with an X certificate), but Losey went with the suggested Hinds edits (heaven forbid a bleak movie be a bit bleak for audiences) for an 87 minute version on release for the UK (of course, the movie ended up being released first in Australia in 1962 before the UK release of "The Damned" for a title rather than "The Brink" in 1963). Columbia ended up quibbling even further and released it only in 1965 with a 77-minute version called "These Are the Damned" (because, hey, Village of the Damned [1960]). Losey would continue to direct all the way until his death in 1984 at the age of 75, leaving behind such films as The Boy with Green Hair (1948), Boom! (1968), and The Go-Between (1971).

Sure, it's a horror movie in the perils of potential Armageddon that goes with atmosphere over gore (as one does when focusing on what lies beneath kids that happen to be a bit cold) that does in fact make for a pretty curious movie that really does have no winners. The best of intentions can in fact lead to the potential for the most horrifying of possibilities in a time where people really did believe in the looming threat of a Cold War blooming into actual nuclear holocaust where only the fateful few may survive. Naturally, it is a potboiler type of movie that gets to that point by first starting out with a gang of tough-guys and the relative ease in which they engage in violence for a world that both loves and hates the ones who are angry to it all. You might remember that Hammer liked what they saw from Reed* in The Curse of the Werewolf [1961] to cast him with a few more interesting roles in movies such as this and Paranoiac [1963] before exploding later in the decade. His performance here weighs heavily in the time you see him for what lurks in the hearts of men within his instability and his odd dynamic with his onscreen sister in Field that suggests more than meets the eye in the cloying rot that pervades us more than we wish to admit. This doesn't take away from Carey and Field, don't get me wrong, because they still make for suitable presences to get caught in the structures of chaos with very few choices for themselves that might as well fit the title of the film more than anything. Knox and his cold logic in the ideas of reasoned intentions does fit for the key piece of seeing where all things lie when plans and human nature crash into a fiery hell. The interactions with the kid actors generally go pretty well in seeing the unsettling nature of what things really are like outside of a bubble, where cold choices really can be made by the most alleged warm-blooded people imaginable. The damned could inherit the Earth, but for what? As a whole, it is the horrors of the inevitable that really drive the movie for better or worse, one that makes a pretty damned cold time that is worth at least one curious watch.

Overall, I give it 8 out of 10 stars.

Song of the day!

*One year after the film came out, Reed got into a bar fight that saw him fear the worst because he ended up with plenty of stitches and a scar on his cheek. But he lived on.