Abstract
Blacklisted and exiled, American director Joseph Losey finished The Damned in England in 1961 but Hammer Films did not release it until 1963 (then with severe cuts) and it wasn’t seen until 1965 in the U.S., further changed and retitled These Are the Damned. Adapted by Evan Jones from The Children of Light, a novel by H.L. Lawrence, The Damned is a strange hybrid of science fiction, horror and social commentary that in some ways anticipates by a decade Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. Beautifully photographed in black-and-white on location in Weymouth, it brings a mysterious American stranger (Macdonald Carey)—perhaps a fugitive—into a violent confrontation with a gang of Teddy Boys and ultimately into a deadly, dystopic government experiment with radioactive children. Among the film’s considerable changes to Lawrence’s narrative was the addition of a major character: a sculptor, whose cliff-top studio is a vivid and key location and whose works function as visual omens of a social and technological apocalypse to come. Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors) was conceived expressly to employ the work of sculptor Elisabeth Frink (1930-1993), whose scarred, distressed figural works of the period included anthropomorphic birds, winged men, fallen men, horse heads and other morbid ciphers of existential dread. In the film these works of plaster and bronze embody the age of anxiety even as they represent art as a redemptive alternative to the cold-bloodedness of both lowbrow Teddy Boy (Oliver Reed) and highbrow Government scientist (Alexander Knox). Associated with the postwar structure of feeling that Herbert Read characterized as “the geometry of fear,” Frink’s work performs a major role in The Damned, giving form to psychosocial ills and fears of the postwar generation.
Highlights
Joseph Losey was on the verge of a third act in 1961, on the very brink of the collaboration with Harold Pinter and the art house films for which he may be best remembered, or at least most admired
The Damned tells the story of Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey), an American tourist who arrives in Weymouth, is lured into a trap by a young woman, Joan (Shirley Ann Field), mugged and beaten up by her brother King (Oliver Reed) and his gang
Asked about the bird imagery in the film, which Michel Ciment found “ambiguous because the bird is a symbol of freedom, but at the same time there is something threatening about the birds in the sculptures of Elisabeth Frink,” the contrarian Losey responded by connecting Frink’s imagery to other elements of the narrative and mise-en-scène: I don’t think it’s ambiguous at all—because the bird images of the helicopters, when we get the three of them, is very sinister
Summary
Asked about the bird imagery in the film, which Michel Ciment found “ambiguous because the bird is a symbol of freedom, but at the same time there is something threatening about the birds in the sculptures of Elisabeth Frink,” the contrarian Losey responded by connecting Frink’s imagery to other elements of the narrative and mise-en-scène: I don’t think it’s ambiguous at all—because the bird images of the helicopters, when we get the three of them, is very sinister.
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