These are the Damned 1962 aka The Damned.
IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 27 minutes, rated 6.6 by 3,744 cinematizens.
Genre: Sci fi; species Nuke paranoia.
Verdict: Lugubrious.
Dr Tom is on vacation from General Hospital when he encounters caveman Ollie on the one day of summer in England. Adventures for both follow. Dr Tom engages in some safe activity with Ollie’s squeeze who has trouble remembering her name, and Ollie loses face and much more.
Spoilers ahead.
As this well-worn trope unfolds, in a parallel line we meet C with his artistic mistress who carves driftwood into members…of her collection. These two are so posh, few dare approach them. But wherever C goes men with military ranks dog his steps with reports. He may be in donnish mufti but he is one big kahuna for sure.
These two story lines collide when, with Ollie lumbering after them in slo-mo pursuit, Tom and Squeeze accidentally take refuge in C’s cliffside lair on the fatal shore. Ollie makes three.
Ever wondered what happened to the Village (of the Damned) children? It seems, C adopted them for his science experiment and has them locked away in a stone chamber (aka lair) where nary a geiger counter is heard. In the cave the children are monitored by Big Brother’s television cameras, and occasional nocturnal visits by some of those army officers in heavy duty radiation suits to give them nightmares. Ambiguity intended.
Yes, these sweet innocents are radioactive, and bred to be that way so that they will survive tomorrow’s nuclear war. C is not only a mad scientist, he is also a stable genius whose progeny will inherit the dust.
Tom, Squeeze, and even Ollie get all paternal with the cute kiddies, but recoil when they discover that the kids are icicles. In some Geordie-speak earlier we know they have been infused with radiation so that they will survive in a post-apocalyptic world, and that makes them radioactive to a fatal degree in a normal person. Their blood is uranium enriched! This fact gradually sinks into the would-be rescuers who have exposed themselves. Gulp! Ollie is quicker on the uptake than Dr Tom with all his degree-mill papers. One side effect of the radiation is that the children are colder than ice, but after a while everyone forgets that. The other side effect is that one hug, and you are dead.
The three (alleged) adults act spontaneously to escape with the tots without a plan or a clue and it ends accordingly.
There are nice touches. The children are very well integrated into the story, and penultimate scene when in a downbeat ending they are forcibly rounded up and reincarcerated is disturbing. It is not quite the SS in the ghetto but evocative of it. In a way the children drive the action because they are not all the docile sweetness and light that they have convinced C they are when he spies on them. Knowing that he is watching, they have worked out how to avoid that. If C has secrets, they have more.
The inevitability of Nuclear War shadows everything, as it did for us all at the time, and that became the justification for many unsavoury things without a doubt.
C is even colder than the children when he casually murdered his mistress because she learned too much about his work, criticised it, and beat him at scrabble. Three strikes and she was out!
British censors accepted the word ‘Damned’ in titles like the ‘Village’ (1960) of that name, and film producers rushed to get it into titles to titillate audiences. It was even easier to get that word than to get a coveted X-rating to lure in the gullible cinematizens. This film evokes the Village and its sequel, but stands on its own for a viewer who has not seen the others. The children are all posh white bread from the same casting agency. No cockney, no Pakistani. no Geordie, no West Indian, no Irish, no Nigerian…. All home counties.
Dr Tom is as unlikely an action hero as George Sanders was in 1960. He also knows precious little about radiation, it seems, despite his decades at General Hospital where he mostly looked wise.
Ollie tries to look smouldering but mostly looks hungry – bulimia warning. The portrayal of the biker gang members is, well, silly. They are all martial when Teddy Boys were rebels (without a cause) against authority. Ollie wears a tweed sports coat and the gang biker members leather, that is how we know he is the boss. For those who must know ‘Ted’ comes from Edward, as in Edwardian. Suffice it to say that tweed is not Edwardian. Look it up! I did.
The direction by expatriate blacklisted American Joseph Losey is excellent even if the story is disjointed. Kenneth Cope as one of the bikers conveys his love for Squeeze without a word or deed in a few superb moments. You might remember him as Hopkirk, deceased, a few years later.
There is no resolution at the end, which I took to be a reference to the end of Dr No.