Persuasive Nightmare

These Are The Damned is a small, harrowing science-fiction thriller in which expatriate U.S. Director Joseph Losey (The Servant, Eva) puts his best film footage forward, displaying some of the razzle-dazzle camera technique that has won him a major reputation among movie buffs. Filmed in England in 1962 with a second-string cast and a familiar atomic-age theme, The Damned exudes a mesmerizing air of intangible menace.

Losey gets his tale off to a snappy start at Weymouth, a seedy Victorian-style beach resort where rock 'n' roll mocks the glories of a bygone era. An affluent American tourist (MacDonald Carey) picks up a tart (Shirley Anne Field) who lures him away to be mugged by Teddy boys. At a local inn, a worldly sculptress (smashingly played by Viveca Lindfors) wryly suggests to her lover (Alexander Knox) that his real mistress is the "mysterious project" he heads at a heavily guarded clifftop installation near town. Step by step, Losey nudges his characters into a sci-fi fantasy, in which the cliches of the script are nearly always redeemed by stunning cinematic metaphor. His shrewdest touch is the band of motor cycling Teddies who swarm like gnats through the narrative, their blind, mindless violence set up as a stinging contrast to the crueler, chillingly cerebral evils yet to come.

During a second rendezvous, the tourist and the tart are pursued by the Teddies up to the forbidden military site and over the cliffside, where they are rescued by nine clear-eyed but strangely cold-blooded children. The youngsters' home is an antiseptically sealed experimental station within the rocky precipice; there Knox is nurturing a super-race enabled by mutation to survive what he sees as the inevitable nuclear holocaust. Although Losey's ban-the-bomb arguments by now sound stale and conventional, the film's climax fuses foolishness and fission in a poetically persuasive nightmare. Doomed lovers, terrorized children and a strutting Teddy boy all flee by land and sea, chased by Knox's avenging whirlybirds, which swoop overhead like precision-made angels of death.

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