The Damned (1965)

Beautiful, moving film.

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

The middle-aged American Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey) sails in his boat to Weymouth and stumbles with the twenty year-old Joan (Shirley Anne Field) on the street. He believes that she is a prostitute but she is actually part of a scheme of a motorcycle gang to rob tourists. Simon is brutally beaten up by her brother King (Oliver Reed) and his gang. The policemen find the wounded Simon and take him to a bar to recover, where he meets the military Bernard (Alexander Knox) and his mistress Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors). On the next morning, Joan challenges King and meets Simon in his boat, and King and his gang hunts Simon down. Joan and Simon spend the night together in an isolated house and on the morning, they are located by the gang. They try to flee and stumble in a top-secret military facility managed by Bernard. They are helped by children and brought to their hideout in a cave. King falls in the sea while chasing the couple and is also helped by a boy and brought to the same place. Soon Joan finds that the children are cold as if they were dead. What is the secret of the children and the military staff?"The Damned" is a creepy sci-fi with a very dark and hopeless conclusion in the summit of the Cold War. In this period, people were paranoid with nuclear attack and the British research in understood by those that lived in that period. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "Malditos" ("Damned")

Losey or no Losey, I immediately thought I was in trouble when the credits rolled and the hypnotic and ominous theme song lit up the room: "Black leather, black leather, crash, crash crash.,.." I was almost sure of it when evil, violent, Oliver Reed showed up with his glowering and sneering and his ominous hissing whisper of a voice. I could hear the book slamming closed when he coshed poor old MacDonald Carey over the head and then stomped him for daring to flirt with Shirley Anne Field, his virginal sister. It looked like a Black Leather story of Teddy Boys run amok, full of social relevance, a chronicle of the times.But no. Carey manages to whisk Field off on his boat and Reed swears to kill Carey as the boat disappears into the distance. The relevance issue remains but its entire character changes. We're soon rid of the Teddy Boys and it's just Reed tracking down Carey and Field to a hidden government laboratory nestled among some hills overlooking the cliffs near Weymouth. The laboratory, run by Alexander Knox with a fake Scots accent, remains background while Carey and Field have some elliptical conversations of the sort Losey was so fond of. Nobody looks anybody in the eye. They answer a question with a question or a non sequitur. Once the now loving couple are ashore and have mussed up the bed of a nearby cottage belonging to a sculptor, Viveca Lindfors, the banter disappears too and a new and disturbing track appears in the narrative. I don't think I'll reveal more of the plot except to say that the government turns out to be involved in some dicey stuff of questionable value. It's probably no more than a curious coincidence that Losey himself was kicked out of Hollywood and settled in England in 1953, after being investigated by the FBI, the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and Howard Hughes, for being a communist sympathizer and wearing white after Labor Day. If you've seen "Children of the Damned" or "Village of the Damned", you'll know the source of this semi-science-fiction plot. A dozen kids are raised from birth in complete isolation from the rest of the world. They are, in a sense, "home schooled" by the government. We never find out what they're being taught about anthropogenic global warming, evolution, international terrorism, or the Beatles but, locked away in secret solitude as they are, they do get a very apt dose of Lord Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon.""My hair is grey, but not with years, Nor grew it white In a single night, As men's have grown from sudden fears: My limbs are bowed, though not with toil, But rusted with a vile repose, For they have been a dungeon's spoil, And mine has been the fate of those To whom the goodly earth and air Are banned, and barred -— forbidden fare."Oddly, the little kids aren't particularly cuddly. I didn't feel any rush of joy when they got a peek at the outside world. But I got a rush every time Viveca Lindfors as the sensitive and intelligent sculptress appeared on the screen. She's delightful. Shirley Anne Field, an ex model, is so beautiful that she gets a pass on her inability to utter a single believable line of dialog. But Lindfors more than makes up for it. She has strong and attractive features, even here in middle age, and is radiant with femininity. And her voice has exotic ups and downs that the American and Brit actors wouldn't dream of. Losey gives her a close up while she's considering something she's just been told and every one of her tiny facial muscles -- her narrowing eyes, her slightly pursed lips -- form a kind of visual chamber music whose power is irresistible. Her character is a kind of series of grace notes within the film itself. Alexander Knox, by contrast, seems unable to change his expression at all, like some stroke victims.

Joseph Losey directed this bizarre crime and sci-fi hybrid that stars Oliver Reed as a brutal gang leader who pursues his runaway sister, who has fled with a former victim of his, whose boat they attempted to rob. They eventually all land on an isolated scientific/military base, where they discover a group of children who were born radioactive, and are being studied to see how they got that way, since if there were a third world war with nuclear fallout, the children would be immune, and the inevitable future. Trouble is, the children also have a high mortality rate as well...Definite cult item failed to connect with me at all, lurching unconvincingly from crime to sci-fi with a most unappealing story and characters.

The seaside resort of Weymouth is the unlikely setting for this 1963 Joseph Losey film. It also happens to be the home of a biker gang who act tough by strutting around town in black leather jackets and… whistling. The leader of the gang (Oliver Reed) is unhealthily protective of his sister's chastity (Shirley Anne Field), though he's not above using her to lure men into honey traps. She, in turn, gets involved with an American yachtsman (McDonald Carey), much to her brother's rage. Meanwhile, there's a parallel scenario involving an eccentric sculptress (Viveca Lindfors) and a mysterious military base on the cliffs where a group of children are held captive in a secret bunker, a lair not too dissimilar to the one Kubrick used in Dr Strangelove a year later. The two narratives merge when the quarrelling trio from the first scenario invade the base via a secret entrance and discover that the abducted kids harbour a terrible secret; one that involves a dead rabbit, the black death and their permanently freezing temperatures.Losey's direction gives the film a lot of credibility while Hammer regular DOP Arthur Grant makes everything look shadowy and sinister. The big let-down is the script, especially the embarrassing incidental dialogue. The 'dammed' of the title and the presence of the children suggest the work of John Wyndham, however, the story is based on the novel Children of the Light by H L Lawrence. Rumour has it that Losey completely rewrote the script (unaccredited) in his determination to make a 'moral' statement following his Hollywood blacklisting. This is very strange if true, for the core narrative is so entertainingly mad that it's hard to see where any such statement would make an impact. A moral maze this film isn't. The recent anamorphic transfer features the uncut version of the film, In the original print the US distributors snipped out some of the social comment, unwittingly providing an example of the prevailing paranoia of the period.