These are the Damned, also known as simply The Damned, is a very special movie. it was made by hammer, but doesn't feel much like a hammer film. it was
directed by an American named joseph Losey, who moved to England in an attempt to find work after he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities
Committee. he returned to the US later, and made a few interesting films, like Secret Ceremony with Elizabeth Taylor and Robert mitchum, and The Accident.
This is, I think, his only science fiction movie.
And it's a bitter, angry, sad and highly frustrated-seeming Cold War story. It manages to throw together a bunch of disparate elements in a really interesting
and original way. It has a juvenile delinquent gang led by Oliver Reed in an early role, an American tourist, a group of scientists and military types
doing covert experiments on children and an intense Scandinavian artist lady who creates weird sculptures, all congregating in an English seaside town.
When the tourist gets mixed up with the gangleader's sister, he vows to protect her from her brother and his thugs. Big mistake. you really don't want
to get on Oliver Reed's bad side. Fists fly and tempers flair, and soon our hero and the somewhat drippy sister are on the run, and end up finding out
about the scientists and their highly dubious experiments, experiments which the lead professor type believes to be absolutely necessary. You see, he's
convinced that a nuclear holocaust is coming, and his work is the only way the human race will survive.
I don't want to spoil this movie by saying much more about it. let's just say and, ok, it's not even a 70s movie so there's
not a lot of blood and violence or anything, but to me, this is really intense, mostly in a psychological way. The ending is really sad and, if you have
young loved ones (children, relatives, whatever), will make you want to hold them close for a while. Of course, this is one of those movies, like the Space: 1999 series, that ascribes
some pretty strange properties to radiation, but it's a bit more realistic than that, and the science aspect isn't really that important anyway. It's more
of a drama with a science fiction underpinning.
As well as Oliver, there are some other standouts in the cast. Alexander Knox as the professor is the closest thing the movie has to a villain, but he's
not evil at all -- his motivation is that he wants the human race to survive, and he has a really nice relationship with Freya the artist, who is portrayed
with real class and poise by Viveca Lindfors. She's a melancholy character, but also kind of the heart of this film, in a way, showing in a real physical
sense what beauty humans can accomplish and why the race maybe should survive after all. In the end, oliver Reed's King character tries his best to be
a hero. Yes, he's quite an interesting guy, at first a dangerous psychopath, but when the chips are down, he turns out to be not a bad sort. his last scene
is just terribly grim and then it leads up to that heart-breaking ending.
So yeah, definitely not a feel-good film. it's personal and not everyone will agree, but to me, this is just as effective a Cold War story as Dr. Strangelove
in its own way, and it was even made the same year. I kind of love that this movie is so unknown. People will watch it, expecting maybe some kind of thriller that they can easily forget about the next day, and, maybe, some of them will end up haunted for life by this thing. I know I was; it's a film that is oddly difficult to stop thinking about, even so many years on, when the threat of nuclear annihilation has receded in most peoples' consciousness to a vague but foreboding twinge of menace somewhere on the horizon.
