The Damned (1963) - film review

A retired American, Simon Wells, is enjoying a yachting holiday in a small English seaside town when he is set upon by a group of teddy boys, led by an aggressive young man named King.  The latter is not amused when his sister, Joan, takes a liking to Simon.  As Joan and Simon sail off in the latter’s yacht, King vows to kill the American.  That night, Joan and Simon arrive at a remote part of the coast where they find a deserted house in which they eat and make love.  When King appears with his gang, the couple beat a hasty retreat, but fall over the edge of a cliff.  They are rescued by a group of children and taken to their subterranean shelter, in which they have lived all their lives.  When Joan and Simon learn that the children are the subjects of some top secret military project, they are appalled and resolve to help them escape.  What they do not know is that the children are radioactive mutants, the product of an experiment to breed a race of humans that can survive the inevitable nuclear holocaust...

The Damned is one of a series of so-so genre films that Joseph Losey directed during his exile in England, following his blacklisting in Hollywood for alleged ties with the Communist Party.  This film was produced by Hammer Film Productions, the British company that would become renowned in the 1960s and ’70s for its flamboyant Gothic horror films.  Losey was reluctant to direct the film, mainly because he had next to no interest in science-fiction and had difficulty making sense of the novel on which the film was to be based.  His fortunes would improve dramatically with his next two films – Eva (1962) and The Servant (1963) – which would earn him his credentials as a serious film director.

Losey’s evident disinterest in the sci-fi  elements of The Damned is, ironically, the thing that prevents it from being just another nondescript British B movie.  The film embraces a wide range of social, political and moral issues – the increasing level of violence in society, mounting fears over nuclear war, the risks of unconstrained scientific research, etc.  The Damned is more than a bog standard piece of science-fiction drama; it is an insightful reflection of the mores and concerns of 1960s Britain, made at a time when the world was never closer to nuclear obliteration.   King’s anthem (an ode to anarchy), "Black Leather, Black Leather, Kill Kill Kill!", succinctly captures the pent-up anti-establishment youth anger that would partly define this and the following decade.

There are some similarities with an earlier British sci-fi film, Village of the Damned (1960), although here the children are the innocent victims of human fear rather than a malign threat from outer space.  The plot, style and chilling mood of the film also bring to mind the Quatermass films that Hammer had recently made, adaptations of a popular groundbreaking BBC television series: The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and Quatermass 2 (1957).

In common with many of the films that Hammer made in the 1960s, The Damned combines excellent production values with a painfully mediocre screenplay.  Visually, the film is very strong, with its lush black and white photography and atmospheric sets conveying a sense of growing anxiety and oppression.  Losey’s use of wide-angle shots, which make the best of the wide-screen aspect, capture the bleakness of the coastal location, bringing a dark lyrical quality.  The film is particularly strong in its first half, and evokes the kind of subtle doom-laden mood that we find in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).  Unfortunately, much of this dissipates in the second half, as the plot takes over and realism gives way to sci-fi cliché.  Perhaps if Losey had had greater creative control over the film, and certainly the services of a better scriptwriter, The Damned could well have been one of his best works, rather than a curious footnote in an impressive career.

© James Travers 2009

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