NOTORIOUS Dorset film The Damned has been re-released uncut on DVD.
Oliver Reed and Shirley Anne Field in The Damned
Shot in Weymouth and Portland in 1961, The Damned features Oliver Reed as the leader of a gang of thuggish Teddy Boys who attack American tourist Macdonald Carey, after he’s lured by Shirley Anne Field into a side street. Field and Carey later fall in love. Fleeing the jealous Reed, they find themselves imprisoned by a sinister scientist who keeps children with special powers in caves on Portland, in preparation for a nuclear war.
Macdonald Carey and Shirley Anne Field in The Damned trespass into a secret installation on Portland
Even this briefest of summaries shows why The Damned is generally reckoned to be the strangest Hammer film ever made.
It was directed by Joseph Losey, who’d been blacklisted from working in America during the Cold War paranoia of the McCarthy era.
The Damned was not released in Britain until 1963, and only then in a cut-down version.
It was not released in America until 1965, as These Are The Damned, and it was trimmed even more, to 77 minutes. It was seen then as “an English shocker” and “a strong comment about the nuclear age”.
Now – this week, in the USA and Canada - The Damned has been re-issued in its original 96-minute form in a three-disk DVD set from Columbia (Icons of Suspense: Hammer Films).
It’s provoked some fascinating re-assessments.
Richard Brody in The New Yorker magazine: “Losey’s strongest critique of the times emerges in his wide-screen, black-and-white images, which convey the superficial charms of conventional society, the reproachful serenity of the sea and the sky, and the despairing humanism of modernistic sculpture—and do so with a unique stylistic flourish…
“The cutting-edge accessories—from chic attire and whiz-bang audiovisual equipment to a convertible sports car and balletic helicopters—are emblematic of the moment, and dazzle Losey even as he rues them.
“His complex relationship to modernity makes this film as quintessentially modern as those by Antonioni and Godard which were its contemporaries.”
To read more – and it is worth reading more – click here.
Bunkered children in The Damned
Dave Kehr in The New York Times also refers to Antonioni’s L’Avventura and continues: “A film of influences, These Are the Damned was also influential — at least on one other American director then working in England. The modernistic design of the bunker and the weirdly avid embrace of nuclear Armageddon reappear in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 “Dr. Strangelove”; the thematic contrast between the impulsive, interpersonal violence of Reed’s Teddy Boy character and the chilly, authoritarian violence of Knox’s government functionary is echoed in Kubrick’s 1971 film, “A Clockwork Orange.”
To read more – and again, it is well worth reading more – click here.
It’s also crisply reviewed on American film blog Fangoria.
To buy The Damned – or to think about doing so – click here. A multi-region DVD player would be required to see the uncut version, and Amazon warns of possible problems [though - Editor's Note - I've never had any].
And you can watch the start of the film on YouTube.
