Joseph Losey | The Damned (These Are the Damned) / 1963, USA 1965

a spin out of normality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Evan Jones (screenplay, based on a story by H. L. Lawrence), Joseph Losey (director) The Damned (These Are the Damned) / 1963, USA 1965

 

Having visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s to study the Russian stage, and working as a director for the WPS’s Federal Theatre Project, Joseph Losey seemed destined, it appears, to come under investigation in the 1940s by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Not only had Losey worked for the perceived “Commie”-aligned Federal Theatre Project, but he had been close friends with German composer Hans Eisler, who worked closely with German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Described by some as “the Karl Marx of music” and “the chief soviet agent in Hollywood,” Eisler came under investigation, and was placed on the Hollywood blacklist, despite early support by Charlie Chaplin, Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, and Woody Guthrie. Eisler was deported from the US in 1948.

     Losey’s first wife, Elizabeth Hawes, moreover, had worked with numerous Communist (and anti-Communist) liberals at the leftist-leaning newspaper PM. After it closed in 1944, she wrote about her work as a union organizer after World War II, arguing “one preferred the Communists to the Red-Baiters.” Losey, himself, had joined the Communist Party in 1946, explaining later:

 

              I had a feeling that I was being useless in Hollywood, that I'd been

              cut off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was

              unjustified. It was a kind of Hollywood guilt that led me into that

              kind of commitment. And I think that the work that I did on a much

              freer, more personal and independent basis for the political left in

              New York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable

              socially.

 

     Losey’s long-term contract with Dore Schary at RKO was extended by the company’s new purchaser, Howard Hughes, in 1948. But Hughes purged anyone he suspected of Communist sympathies, as Losey described it, by offering him a film to direct: I Married a Communist. When Losey immediately turned the project down, it has clear to Hughes that the director was a “red.” Accordingly, Hughes held Losey to his contract, but refused to assign him any new work. Schary intervened, persuading Hughes to release Losey, and the director began working as an independent for Paramount Pictures. When Losey, however, was called by two witnesses for testimony before HUAC, he abandoned his editing of The Big Night, and left for Europe a few days later, while HUAC tried unsuccessfully to issue him a subpoena. After working on Stranger on the Prowl in Italy, the director returned to the US in 1952, but found that he was unemployable.

     For a “brief moment” Losey was considered as a possible director of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, but was rejected because he had been “named” by the Committee. Once again, he left the country, this time for twelve years, settling first in Rome and then in London in 1953.

     As Losey describes it, “I didn’t stay away for reasons of fear, it was just that I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have any work.”  Accordingly, the US lost another significant artist, despite the assertion of some that the blacklisted directors and writers represented artists of insignificant talent.

     Under a pseudonym Losey worked on a couple of films in English, but when he was scheduled to direct the Hammer Production of X The Unknown, actor Dean Jagger refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathizer, and Losey was removed, to be later reassigned to another Hammer project, The Damned.

    Although the film was made in 1961, it was shelved due to political considerations, including Losey’s sympathies, but also because of its comments on contemporary British culture, finally released in 1963 with several minutes cut from the original. When eventually it was released in the United States as These Are the Damned in 1965, the film was further cut from its original 96 minutes to 77 minutes, creating a confusion of character actions and motivations along with the removal of some of its philosophical considerations.

     On one level, The Damned is a kind of precursor to Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel The Clockwork Orange, transformed into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. But it also has elements similar to Colin MacInnes’ fictions, City of Spades and Absolute Beginners of a few years earlier. What all these works have in common is the presentation of British gang culture, in both MacInnes’ fiction and in Losey’s film described as Teddy Boys. The leather-jacketed, bowler-hatted-gang of Losey’s work prowl the streets of the seaside village of Weymouth, waiting to rob and molest unsuspecting tourists.

     The film begins with just such a mugging, during the musical accompaniment of an almost comical gang sing-along:

 

                        Black leather, black leather

                        Smash smash smash

                        Black leather, black leather

                        Crash crash crash

                        Black leather, black leather

                        Kill kill kill

                        I got that feeling

                        Black leather rock

 

     Attracted to a young woman lurking about the streets, Joan (Shirley Anne Field), the wealthy American Simon (MacDonald Carey) attempts to pick her up, only to be waylaid by the gang, headed by Joan’s brother, King (Oliver Reed). Beaten and robbed, Simon is rescued by two local military men who return him to the town’s hotel, overseen, it appears, by Bernard (Alexander Knox), a local celebrity who is also in charge of a top-secret military experiment. Bernard’s mistress, the bohemian artist Freya (a wonderful Viveca Lindfors) has just returned to Weymouth from London, and, after meeting Simon, poutingly scolds Bernard for his secrecy. He warns her that he dare not involve her in his secret life for it may me “condemning her to death.”      

     Accordingly, we immediately sense that this seeming charming community is loaded with dangerous figures who clearly are not fond of any kind of intrusion. King and his gang continue to goad the recovered Simon at the very moment that Joan has joined him as he prepares to take out his boat.

      King, pathologically protective of his sister, demands that she leave the boat or he will hurt Simon. She unwillingly does so, but, as the boat begins to move out into the bay, she suddenly jumps aboard to rejoin Simon, infuriating King and his delinquent friends who are now determined to kill the American.

      Thus far, Losey’s film seems to be pointing to the kind of intimidation of innocents by bullies that we can observe in other films of the day such as Marlon Brando and his gang in The Wild One (1953) or the school gangs’ attacks on James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The situation is tense, but hardly earth-shattering in its moral consequences. The question that arises is simply how will Simon and the strange half-wild girl to whom he is now attracted survive. They may be threatened and even face death, but we can hardly define them or the   evil-minded Teddy Boys as “damned.”

      Quite quickly, however, the film entirely shifts its focus, as Joan suggests a spot where the two may secretly spend the night on land, an empty apartment embedded in a nearby fortress usually inhabited by the sculptor, Freya, we have already met.

      The odd couple break-in to the apartment, watched without their knowledge by King and his gang, and share, for a short while, the joys of sexual intercourse—evidently for the first time for Joan, since has been able to escape the watchful eye of her brother, who has trapped her, so it seems, in a nearly incestuous relationship.

      Freya’s return, however, quickly requires the couple’s exit, while the sculptor, discovering that someone has broken into her lair is equally intruded upon by the violent King, who in anger for her inability to tell him where the couple has gone, destroys one of her favorite works, a bird that is both beautiful and horrific, a subject that is repeated throughout this film, the horrific to normative society also always containing an element of danger or horror.

      As the couple retreat further into the cliffs, they fall into a small stream, as does King as he attempts to follow them. Simon and Joan are “saved” suddenly by a group of children, who take them inside the mountain through a kind of magical (futuristic) door, where they discover that their saviors are incredibly cold to the touch.

      King is later saved by one of the young boys of the group.

      We have already been shown, just previous to this event, these children, locked away in the military fortress, are being schooled by the evil Bernard. And we soon discover after the three intruders’ entry, that the children were all born on the same day to radioactive mothers who died soon after. The children miraculously survived, and are now being kept by the military for the day when a nuclear explosion will likely destroy all of mankind. These educated, trained beings, which Bernard refers to as “buried seed,” will, thereafter, be freed to begin a new race of humans able to survive the “brave new world” they will be forced to face.   

     Meanwhile, the children have been proffered only bits and pieces of information, which they have gradually expanded to comprehend that there may exist a world outside of theirs or that they inhabit a spacecraft on a long trip to another planet. The appearance of three new humans in their midst at first give them the hope that they may be their parents come to claim them, or, later, that the strangers may help them to escape.

    Losey, in short, has created in this film a bi-level world of violence consisting of destructive teenagers who serve, perhaps, merely as a reflection of a far more pernicious and terrifying world of adults and the governmental authorities they represent. It is a cynical world on both levels, but particularly in Bernard and the military’s case, who are convinced that there is no alternative to world destruction but a new breed of mankind.

      Simon, Joan, and even King determine to help the children escape, but in the time that they have spent with them they have already become infected with radioactivity—and, metaphorically speaking, with the very reality of such a perverted perception of life through which Bernard and his cronies justify their behavior. Bringing the children temporarily to the daylight merely helps speed everyone’s destruction. The children are quickly rounded up by the military helicopters and returned to their darkness. The one boy who escapes with King is sent away as “poisoned” by the already dying gang-leader. King crashes his car over a bridge.

      Simon and Joan, returning to their boat, are seen spinning on the boat in the ocean with helicopters circling overhead. Freya, who refuses the brutal vision of the future espoused by her lover, is shot to death.

    Losey’s split terrorist-tale and science-fiction flick combine two genres to reveal the multiple interconnections between the mindlessness of certain kinds of juvenile violence and its consequences in the authoritarian imprisonment of innocents. The blinded righteousness of both generations close off any normal possibilities of love, family, community, or open-minded culture. It is not a great leap to perceive that the children’s “differentness” has led directly to their imprisonment and isolation, just as the wild hysteria of McCarthy’s and the red-baiters’ political fears fed into a system of disenfranchisement and open hate of those who stood against the standard American values. In both cases, the future is damned!

     And finally, of course, both the male-bonded gang members, and the isolated children are perceived as sexually different as well. Neither might possibly create a new race in their closed off worlds of sexual non-heteronormativity. They are different both in their attitudinal values and, unspoken, in their sexual existence and behavior. A queer is a queer is a queer, spinning all of normative society into a vortex of destruction—a subject which Losey would continue to explore throughout the rest of his career in The Servant released the same year, Modesty Blaise, Accident, Boom!, and his uncompleted project with Harold Pinter, The Proust Screenplay, and which we might mention goes back even to his early 1948 film The Boy with Green Hair.

 

Los Angeles, August 22, 2004

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2004).