Kenji Mizoguchi | Naniwa erejii (Osaka Elegy) / 1936

no satisfaction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoshikata Yoda and Kenji Mizoguchi (screenplay), Kenji Mizoguchi (director) Naniwa erejii (Osaka Elegy) / 1936

 

A young telephone operator in the Asai Pharmaceutical Company, Ayako Murai (Isuzu Yamada) is in love with a fellow colleague, Nishimura (Kensaku Hara), a love which he returns with several excuses and lies. At nights Mr. Nisimura has been accompanying the company director’s wife, Sonosuke (Benkei Shiganoya), to the theater. Ayako notices him being paid for his services, but the young man denies everything, not recognizing his own behavior as a kind of prostitution. Unhappy at home, the company head, Sumiko (Yoko Umemura)—presented from the beginning of the film as a petulant, selfish, and abusive man—attempts to involve the young Ayako in an affair, which she rejects.

     When it becomes apparent that her father, who has embezzled 300 Yen from the company for which worked, will soon be imprisoned if we cannot come up with the money, Ayako attempts to borrow the money from Nisimura, but he refuses. Although Ayako is a spirited young woman, arguing against her father for his transgressions, she finally agrees to become Asai’s mistress so that she might raise the money to save her father.   

    Leaving home, Ayako enters a new nightmare world, expressed by the director’s dark, nighttime images.  Once Ayako has left home, she hardly sees the light of day again. The elderly Asai, setting her up in an apartment, forces her to redo her hair in the manner of married woman so that he might appear with her in public. And much of the day she is forced to sit alone awaiting the return of her unfeeling lover.

     When Asai’s wife encounters the two of them at a puppet play, he forces another of his employees to insist that it was him who is seeing Ayako, not Asai, deceiving the incensed wife. But soon after, she perceives the real truth when Asai’s doctor mistakenly shows up at their house to care for Asai, when, in fact, he has fallen ill in Ayako’s apartment. The affair ends, abruptly, disgracing Ayako. 

     Running into Nisimura in the street, the two former lovers come together again, he asking Ayako to marry him; but embarrassed by her situation, she rushes off. Later, however, she becomes determined to seek out Nisimura, to accept his offer and admit her past. If his love is strong enough, she will marry him, freeing herself from her downward spiral.

     En route, however, Ayako discovers from her sister that her college brother has run out of tuition money, and she agrees to take up with another unpleasant businessman, Fujino (Eitarō Shindō) to secretly raise money for her brother’s education. She raises the money, and attempts to fool Fujino into giving extra money so that she can marry Nisimura. But when she walks out on him, Fujino calls the police, accusing her of soliciting.

      Ayako, meanwhile, attempts to explain her past to a horrified Nisimura, but is interrupted by the police who arrest her. At police headquarters Nisimura denies involvement with Ayako, denying any desire to marry her, and the young girl is forced to admit to a crime she had committed only in search a way to further help her family and give herself a better life.

 

    Released by the police, she returns home, hoping for at least some appreciation for her acts, almost speaking a version of the cliché “There’s no place like home”; Mizoguchi’s irony in that statement almost breaks our hearts, as reality in Osaka is shown to be the reverse of that same The Wizard of Oz platitude of three years later. Over a family meal, of which she never offered a bite, Ayako is shunned by her brother, berated by her father, and even derided by her younger sister. Spurned by all, she is cast out from her home. 

      The film’s last scene shows her walking along the side of the railroad tracks, pondering what might be the “disease of delinquency” for which her family and society have condemned her. Clearly, in answer to that, she must attempt a voyage into a strange new world once more. As in so many Mizoguchu works, women—particularly strong and nonsubservient women—are abused by Japanese society, ultimately having little choice but to use their bodies in order to survive. The delinquency of which Ayako, in the end, is accused, is actually a product of the delinquency of nearly all the film’s male figures, who together scheme, lie, cheat, and abuse the young girls they encounter. And, accordingly, the independent women end up as mere figures of service as if they had never left home in the first place. The only successful woman in this world (head of the Woman’s Association) is the unloving and tart tongued Mrs. Asai, and it is she, as we observe in an early scene, who sleeps with a version of Dorothy’s beloved dog; without a totemic scarecrow, woodsman, or lion to accompany her, Ayako is completely on her own, with only her own brain, heart, and courage to help her move forward.

 

Los Angeles, July 29, 2013

Reprinted from International Cinema Review (July 2013).

Alfred E. Green | Baby Face / 1933

a woman of powerful means

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gene Markey and Kathryn Scola (screenplay, based on a story by Daryl Zanuck), Alfred E. Green (director) Baby Face / 1933

 

If there was ever an example of a healthy shift away from the Naturalism of Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser at the turn of the century, it was the almost Grade B movie of 1933, Baby Face— fortunately made with Grade A actors such as Barbara Stanwyck and George Brent.      

     While the Depression may have set everyone spinning back to believing that their personal fates lay outside of their control, Stanwyck’s character, Lily Powers, is a girl of flowering powers, revealed to her by the local cobbler—who a bit like Joseph Stalin, whose father was a cobbler, and carried with him the tools of shoe-making for the rest of life—who has matters more political and philosophical on his mind. A devotee of Nietzsche—at least of Nietzsche’s sayings collected by his sister after the philosopher had gone mad—Adolph Cragg (Alphonse Ethier) consuls his young admirer, Lily, to take advantage of the power of her sexuality, arguing that she should use her sexual appeal, like the men use physical bulk, to achieve the goals she desires. 

     The only problem is that Lily has yet to discover what she truly desires. At one point, as she works in her father’s apartment-based speakeasy, we glimpse that her wishes may be simple; opening the windows and breathing upon her few window-boxed plants, the lights of the oil refineries glistening below; it appears that all she truly wants to is a bit a fresh air, the pleasure of her lungs not filled with the fumes of oil and her attendant life with the crude workers from the refineries.

 

     She seems doomed, however, by the world in which she has been raised, where her father has used his daughter as a prostitute in order to gain friends and obtain the permissions to continue running his illegal still. When a local politician attempts to make good on her father’s promises, however, Lily rebels, clobbering the local politician over the head with a beer bottle, and, in so doing, threatening her father’s livelihood. The interchange between father and daughter reveals what the young girl has had to endure throughout most of her childhood, and sets the tone, in fact, for her actions throughout the rest of the movie:

 

                   Lily Powers: Yeah, I'm a tramp, and who's to blame? My Father.

                   A swell start you gave me. Ever since I was fourteen, what's it been?

                   Nothing but men! Dirty rotten men! And you're lower than any

                   of them. I'll hate you as long as I live!

 

     If the fact that her man-hating manifesto along with even the mention of Nietzsche in this Daryl Zanuck concocted comedy-drama, all seems a bit strange, this film, I warn you, is an unabashedly odd duckling, among the top films that are often cited for assuring the existence of Will Hays’ Production Code, the moral mantle tossed over Hollywood Productions to douse the embers of any pre-code enlightenment. Only in a recent version was it discovered that Lily was only 14 at the time of her first sexual exploits, which can only explain her obvious hatred of men which permeates this film.

     Within moments after Lily’s attack on the male species, her father dies in an explosion of his still, and she, along with her apparently life-long black friend, Chico (the wonderful Theresa Harris) is freed to discover herself.

     Once again, Lily does not really know what to make of that freedom, debating, on another visit to her cobbler friend, whether it might not be best to take the strip club offer she’s just received, where she might be paid for showing off her body. But in the original uncensored version I saw yesterday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art showing, part of their series in “Masters of Hollywood Costumes,” the cobbler proclaims that she must use men like they have previously used her, that she should show no compromises in obtaining what she wants.

     And with that Lily and Chico are off to New York, hinting at what might have been, but of course couldn’t have been realized, the first black and white lesbian liaison ever presented on screen.

      A scene in the empty freight car, as the two women attempt to tramp along as hobos, demonstrates that Lily has suddenly caught on to what the old cobbler has tried to teach her. Discovered by a train official, the two are ordered off and threatened with imprisonment. Looking carefully into her assailant’s face, Lily suggests they “talk it over,” the idea of which, after a quick smirk, the railway man takes up, joining the two women as Chico moves away in a joyously sexually-laced song. In the dark railway car we catch only the glimpse of the line-man’s gloves tossed beside Lily, she carefully moving them aside—obviously to make room for him next to her in the straw. The women here are where the power lies, and the two of them join in on that new aspect of their lives, a sisterhood as old as the most ancient of texts.

     Without the further ado, the two women, having arrived in Eden, walk down the avenue, staring into the windows of wealthy eateries before Lily spots the Gotham Trust tower, which the camera follows from its base to the top of its towers—a motif that will be repeated throughout the film as Lily makes her way, quite literally, up from the employment office to the very top. Flirting with the security guard, she discovers the whereabouts of the employment office, quickly conquering a chubby assistant to the head of personnel before we, breathtakingly, discover her—much like J. Pierpont Finch in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying—in the filing department.

     Using the men she encounters like so-many sitting ducks, just as they behave, Lily sleeps her way up the corporate ladder. An affair with a youthful John Wayne (as Jimmy McCoy) quickly leads her to his boss, Brody (Douglass Dumbrille). And before we even blink, accompanied by the glorious tones of W. C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues, she applies herself to the Mortgage Department, where she is caught in the ladies’ room with by a rising young executive Ned Stevens (Donald Cook). Brody loses his job, but Lily successfully convinces that she was forced into the situation, her job temporarily “saved.”

     What is interesting and of great importance in her dizzying successes is that the script goes out of its way to demonstrate that Lily is not only a competent worker, but is exceptional, that she deserves the promotions that she has sexually obtained. Indeed, without her behind-the-scenes manipulation of the men around her, she would likely never have been awarded what she truly deserves.

     Similarly, despite several times when the men in her life would have her dismiss her maid / friend Chico, Lily remains absolutely adamant that the black woman not only remain in her close relationship with her, but that she equally benefit in the financial gains Lily has used to improve her own appearance through a near-staggering number of hair-styles and Orry-Kelly gowns. Although I wouldn’t argue too stridently for this, I suggest that, given Lily’s detestation of the men of whom she takes advantage, that her relationship with Chico might represent something closer than mere friendship, hinted at, perhaps by the increasing number of dolls which appear upon her bed—which, a few years later Djuna Barnes would speak of in her novel of lesbian love, Nightwood, as surrogate children.

 

    What matters more in this film, however, is Lily’s continued rise in the company echelons. Despite the fact that Stevens is rumored to be morally inculpable and that he is engaged to First Vice President J. R. Carter’s daughter, Lily quickly forces him into an untenable corner, by allowing his finance to discover them sharing a kiss. When Stevens cannot bring himself to fire Lily, he is temporarily sent away by Carter, who himself takes on Lily as his lover, setting her up in a lavish, new apartment attached to her own special bank account! The old codger is delighted with Baby Face’s foolish baby talk, but it is also clear just from the number of conquests she has made, and the fact that those she has destroyed all attempt to return to her, that Lily is just as good at her sexual duties as she was in her official ones.

      When Stevens, however, attempts to return to her arms, despite her cold dismissal of him, he stumbles into her current situation only to kill his would-be father-in-law before turning the gun upon himself. If she has previously been quite able to talk herself out of situations, Lily cannot even hope to wrangle out of this new situation. Immediately reporting the murder to the police (with the understatement of the movie, “There’s been an accident”), she discovers herself on the front pages of the city papers, the subject of a major scandal. Once more, she cleverly attempts to make the most of the situation, negotiating with the Gotham Trust board for a payment to not publish her private journals. But this time, she entraps herself by her pretenses, arguing that what she would really like is to simply have the opportunity to support herself. The new bank president, the former playboy Courtland Trenholm (George Brent) cleverly takes her up on her it, offering her a job in their Paris office. The fact that she linguistically slips back, for a few moments, to her    previous tough-girl dialogue, reveals her disorientation with the sudden shift of situation, and hints, perhaps, at her later fascination of the man who has just out-witted her.

 

    Surprising even herself, Lily takes on her new job as a travel agent within the company with great aplomb, demonstrating herself, once more, as one of the most capable of employees. This may seem like a minor issue, but it proves that Lily Powers, had she been only given an ordinary opportunity, would have succeeded equally, without her sexual offerings. In the depression, however, she most definitely would not have been given that opportunity, would most likely not ever hired and would practically reached no position higher than a secretary, just as Chico, no matter what her relationship to Lily, must continue to counterfeit herself as a maid.*

     But we also sense that Lily is now holding out for something far more desirable, that through her meteoric rise and fall she has discerned that she has still selling herself short. A clue might be in Cortland’s strange last name, Trenholm, which derives from a Nordic words meaning “crane island.” The tall stately birds, clearly representative of social heights and grace of Cortland’s ancestry, suggest a world apart from the others she has previously encountered, a cultural enclave to which she now suddenly wants entry. The film portrays her unexpected patience as she waits, without an umbrella, in the rain, for Trenholm to appear from the building wherein she has just reencountered him, to enter his awaiting car. Naturally, he must offer her a ride and the temporary cover of his umbrella.

     It is also clear that in the time she has spent away from New York, she has plotted a new strategy. Instead of making herself available, she sheaths herself in silence, as if she were judging him, evaluating his behavior, the fact of which he quickly discerns. Using honesty instead of placation, she even tells him that he has somewhat disappointed her in his very ordinariness, in the fact that he, too, has been taken in so easily by her charms. And this time around, Lily is not willing to enter in a sexual liaison without the promise of marriage.

 

    Amazingly, she quickly attains her entry to “crane island,” as he marries her, awarding her jewels and bonds which she dazzlingly displays to Chico as if they were trophies, arguing that they only represent half of what she will one day control.

     We are, however, still in a world where other powers can hold sway over our lives. This film, after all, remains a work of the Great Depression. If Trenholm, called back to New York for having created yet a new scandal through his marriage, the bank which he heads is as subject as all others to failure, even if Baby Face unconvincingly attempts to suggest the cause was its customer’s lack of confidence because of his alliance. Indicted, Trenholm must suddenly raise a million dollars for his defense, half of which he has entrusted to his newly wed wife.

     Deluded, like all the others, Trenholm is suddenly faced with his stupidity when the now heartless Lily outrightly refuses to help him:

 

                      Lily Powers: I can't do it. I have to think of myself. I've

                      gone through a lot to get those things. My life has been

                      bitter and hard. I'm not like other women.

 

     Here, we suddenly discover that her machinations have turned her into a kind of monster, as she perceives even her former achievements as elements in a life of suffering. And, once again, there is a hint in her final disclaimer that she, different from other women, is unable to love men.

    Grabbing her jewels and money, she orders Chico to pack her bags and meet her back at the ship, with the intention, obviously, of leaving her husband in the lurch. It is unpleasant scene, but it fits the pattern of her behavior throughout the film, forcing us to realize that she has never truly come to understand what precisely she has been seeking, to discover the goal of all her so capable acts.

    Just as she as realized that she must use a different tactic to win over Trenholm, however, she must accordingly comprehend that he is not just another man. Trenholm is a taller more gracious being who stands apart from all the others, and in that recognition she rushes back to him at the very moment he attempts suicide. **

    At film’s end, as the couple speed away in an ambulance, we perceive that Trenholm will survive. When one of her attaché cases falls open, revealing its contents, an attendant suggests she might want to protect it, but Lily, focusing upon her husband’s fate, proclaims that they no longer need it. Finally, we perceive, this woman-on-the-prowl has discovered what she has been looking for: a human being who might love her, not a container of baubles and promised payments. Yet, as one critic wittily noted, we can only imagine that, a few minutes later, she will take care of the open case; for they will surely need the money to pay for the doctor’s bill and the lawyers to save Trenholm from imprisonment. She has finally found something worthy of purchasing with her new-found wealth.

 

*Sadly, except for this and a few other films, the obviously talented Harris had to play a maid or chorus singer in most of the dozens of films in which she had small parts. She worked throughout her life to change Hollywood’s attitudes toward black actors, unsuccessfully during her lifetime. Lynn Nottage’s 2011 play, By the Way, Meet Vera Stark is based, in part, on Harris’ life.

**Strangely, the later censored version insisted that he was just another lug, returning the couple to Erie, New York where he would work in the refineries like all the other men she had previously rejected.

        

Los Angeles, November 5, 2014

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2014).

Joseph Losey | The Servant / 1963

the house

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harold Pinter (screenplay), Joseph Losey (director) The Servant / 1963

 

For several months now, I have waited for Netflix to add Joseph Losey’s 1963 film, The Servant, to their library. As sometimes happens in a city so devoted to filmmaking, fortunately, one of Los Angeles’ major independent theaters, Laemmle’s Royal, coincidentally announced a showing of a restored 50th anniversary version of the film, which Howard and I attended this Labor Day.

    A few days ago, Los Angeles Times critic Kenneth Turan wrote an appreciative review of what he described as Losey’s “icy” masterpiece. Yet looking back on some of earlier reviews, it appears that most critics originally dismissed the film as inconsistent and, more importantly, unbelievable. As Tony Rayns wrote in the Time Out Film Guide: “Neither [Harold] Pinter’s pregnant dialogue nor the generally svelte performances can disguise the fact that there’s less here that meets the eye and ear.”

     Certainly, few viewers might describe this film—which begins in quiet realism, with a slightly dim-witted young man hiring a manservant in order to help him with a new house he has just purchased—as being, by its decadently, almost hysterical ending, anything that anyone might actually believe to have occurred, even in the period of free-wheeling sexuality of 1960s London. But then, who might describe any of Losey’s sexual fables as even attempting to represent realism? One might even argue that throughout his career the American-born Losey has shared more with Ken Russell than anyone else in British cinema—but fortunately without Russell’s extravagance and kitsch. While there is a kind of “iciness” to Losey’s rich black and whites, there is also a great deal of “white heat” radiating from the slow-boiling emotional dependencies of its central characters, particularly between the needy and indolent Tony (James Fox), who imagines himself traveling to Brazil to create three new cities for “the natives,” and the dangerously deferential Barrett (Dirk Bogarde), who portrays the servant of the film’s title.

       Although both have, we discover, fiancées, women in this somewhat misogynistic work, who are basically playthings, what really matters is the intense relationship between man and manservant, which both, revealing that their social status is only an accident of birth, play out in a series of alcoholic and sadomasochist interactions, as the child-man Tony humiliatingly romps in games of hit-ball and hide-and-seek with—as Pinter  puts it— his “old pal,” each of them admitting he has also had such a relationship earlier in the army. If outwardly there is nothing truly sexual about their relationship (gay sexuality, one must remember, was not easily portrayed on film in 1963) it is certainly apparent that there is a powerful pyscho-sexual need between them. Their desire for women is simply a “release.”

      One of the most absurd scenes of this film is Losey’s Fellini-like representation of their heterosexual orgy, which occurs, evidently, with the participants fully dressed, curling up, in turn, round one another like cold puppies. Only Tony’s former fiancée, Susan, showing up to the house unexpectedly, seems to have any sexual intentions, as she represents her shock at seeing her now fully degraded former lover, by briefly embracing and kissing the servant whom she has previously abused. In that last grab for power, she also recognizes that she has lost everything that the house once represented: love, pleasure, security, and wealth. And Barrett’s slam of the front door as she exits, soon after, makes it apparent that it is he who is now in charge.

      Earlier in the film, Susan has asked Barrett “What do you want from this house?” sensing that, like her, it is not the house’s owner he is truly after, but the house itself, and what comes with it. Of course, in order to control the house, he must first control Tony, and it is that manipulation upon which Pinter’s and Losey’s work pretends to focus.

      I would argue, however, that, instead of trying to comprehend this film as a study of psychological revelations—although, of course, all of Pinter’s works are filled with just that—that one might perceive The Servant as a strange kind of horror film, a version of the haunted house tale where things are never quite what they seem to be.

     Throughout his work, Losey spends a great deal of his film footage facing into mirrors, peeping around corners while its characters shift rooms, appearing and disappearing through doorways which, at first, may seem to be a row of bookshelves, etc. But unlike a work like, say, Cocteau’s Orphée—where the mirrors reveal a narcissistic self—or in Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom—where mirrors and windows betray the evil intentions and acts of the film’s central figure—in Losey’s work the mirrors generally reveal little of the humans’ existence, only occasionally showing the film’s characters, as one might expect, in reverse, which, of course, is what occurs in their lives. The mirrors are not used as referents of the humans in the house as much as they are of the house itself, its curved staircase, its shining objects to which Losey’s camera almost makes love. In short, while the characters may inhabit the house, the house—so thoughtfully decorated by Barrett in the first place—seemingly controls their behaviors, at one point even drawing Tony and Susan back to London from a wealthy country estate, so that they might have sex—where Tony discovers Barrett’s betrayal, temporarily firing him and the servant’s pretend sister, lover Vera (Sylvia Miles).

     Much of the movie, indeed, is centered on the house’s upkeep, kept brilliantly gleaming by Barrett in the first half of the film, and left to filth and decay in the second half. If nothing else, the house more fully reveals the characters’ conditions than do their own words and actions. And at film’s end the house, more than the psychological games of its servant, has seemingly declared for all the time the proper social position of its occupants, as the former gentleman, Tony, lays sprawled drunkenly across its floor—fallen and near-dead—and Barrett sneaks into Vera’s bedroom for a night of sex.

     I doubt that Losey actually thought of his film as fitting into the horror genre, but to my way of thinking it helps us more fully to accept the melodramatic, almost campy ending, and to recognize in whole The Servant as a great work of art, a fable that, in fact, has a great deal to say about colonization and class, and a society that is more dependent upon the symbols of “living conditions” than on the condition of the living.

 

Los Angeles, Labor Day, 2013

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2013).

 

 

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).