These Are the Damned (1963)

***^½
Country: UK
Director: Joseph Losey

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

So goes the song chanted by a group of leather-jacketed, motorcycle-riding British Teddy Boys at the beginning of Joseph Losey's astonishingly bizarre film These Are the Damned, released in April as part of the Icons of Suspense: Hammer Films collection. Part romance, part thriller, part teen alienation picture, part nuclear age angst movie, part government conspiracy paranoia, part science fiction—the film synthesizes elements from all these genres into a unique form that defies categorization. It does, however, plainly show what David Thomson identifies as Losey's defining trait as a director—his blending of the apparently contradictory qualities of "subtlety" and "hysteria."

The movie opens with an American tourist, Simon Wells (Macdonald Carey), guide book in hand, being brazenly picked up on the street in the southern English coastal town of Weymouth by a young woman, Joan (Shirley Anne Field). It turns out she is acting as bait to lure gullible male tourists into being robbed by a gang of motorcycle thugs led by her sadistic brother, King (Oliver Reed). When the bloodied Simon is taken to a hotel by a couple of friendly strangers (who are actually military officers in civilian clothing) to recover, he meets their colleague Bernard (Alexander Knox, like Losey a victim of the Hollywood blacklist who relocated to Britain), a scientist working with them on a top-secret government research project, and Freya Neilson (Viveca Lindfors), the Swedish sculptor who is possibly Bernard's former lover and who has rented his cottage, The Bird House, located next to the research center, for the summer season.

Later as Simon, recovered from the attack, leaves Weymouth in his boat, he reconnects with Joan, now fleeing from the possessive brother who seems to have an unhealthy obsession with her sex life. ("You think I'll let a man put his filthy hands on you?" King angrily asks after she admits her attraction to Simon.) Pursued by the brother and his gang, Joan takes off with Simon in his yacht and the two begin an affair. When they are followed by the gang and forced to hide out, Joan directs him to the secluded Bird House. Soon all these characters—Simon, Joan, King, Freya, and Bernard—meet up again and become involved in the top-secret government project, which involves psychological experiments on a group of decidedly spooky children. When the two lovers realize the children are being held against their will, they determine to help the children escape.

These Are the Damned was distributed by Columbia but was a Hammer production, and it shows, especially in the lurid and rather misleading publicity for the movie, clearly intended to capitalize on the success of Village of the Damned (1960). Like many Hammer horror films, especially those with a modern setting, it deals with outsiders who find themselves enmeshed in the peculiar goings-on in a strange place where they have just arrived. But just as Alfred Hitchcock did in Psycho, Losey subverts audience expectations by turning a predictable genre on its head, in this case by transforming what at first seems an odd but basically conventional Hammer thriller—two lovers on the run from a pack of predatory monsters—into a movie about repressed incestuous impulses, fear of nuclear destruction, distrust of government, the inhumanity of scientific research, existential angst, and the social disintegration of the modern world.

One thing that distinguishes These Are the Damned from typical Hammer fare is the attention paid to the visual element of the film. It is the haunting look Losey creates for the movie that gives the film its thematic gravity and visual urgency. That this is going to be no ordinary Hammer horror film is apparent from the opening shots. The first thing we see is a static, picture postcard view of the sun-drenched southern English coast in high summer, the gently curving cliffs receding to the horizon, crowned by lush meadows, with waves breaking languidly at their base. After a few moments the camera pans to the right, and when it stops we now are looking at the edge of the clifftop stretching horizontally across the vast CinemaScope screen, a group of grotesque post-modern sculptures silhouetted against the blank sea and sky. These are the sculptures of Freya arrayed outside The Bird House, and most seem to be either monstrous, gargoyle-like birds (she refers to one of her works in this style as "my graveyard bird") or misshapen human forms that resemble nothing so much as the anguished victims at Pompeii.

Such strong visual contrasts are found throughout These Are the Damned. The traditional streets of Weymouth typified by the clock tower where Simon first meets Joan, with its unicorn statue and large plaque of Queen Victoria, contrast vividly with the fortified, ultra-modern research facility where Bernard conducts his experiments on the children, with its array of high-tech gadgetry used to spy on the children and its walls decorated with semi-abstract paintings whose dominant mood is of dread and alienation. The open-air scenes of sea, sky, and meadows and The Bird House, built right into the cliff so that its whitewashed walls and grass-covered roof seem almost a natural extension of the landscape, form striking counterpoints to the futuristic underground dormitory excavated deep in the cliff face where the children live, deprived not only of natural light and air, but of any direct human contact except with one another.

This is a movie whose details of plot and production design cumulatively relay an atmosphere of hopelessness, a movie that shows the futility of any attempt to escape by the people trapped in the bleak world it depicts. Bernard, the representative of order (government) and knowledge (science), decries the "senseless violence" of youth culture yet has no qualms about subjecting the children in his experiments to psychological cruelty. He regretfully accepts the inevitability of nuclear war and the destruction of the human race while at the same time coldly sanctioning the deaths of those who oppose his scientific aims and even committing murder himself. The ultimate irony of the film is that those individuals with the most humanity are in the end destroyed by those with the least humanity, who justify their actions as a means of ensuring the survival of humankind after a nuclear holocaust. One of the most weirdly entertaining movies of the Cold War is also one of the darkest, most disturbing, and most cynically anti-authoritarian of that anxiety-ridden time.

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Katie Holmes’s Miu Miu ad campaign. The pictures are absolutely amazing! Katie looks so gorgeous and proves that she has what it takes to produce one amazing ad campaign.

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Love Me Tonight (1932)

****
Country: US
Director: Rouben Mamoulian

It's quiz time. Naming only one film and its director, answer all the following questions:

1. Name a director who used fast-motion, slow-motion, zooms, and split screens in a musical film. [Hint: The answer is not Richard Lester.]

2. Name a film in which all the following can be found: deep-focus photography, rooms with ceilings, extremely low and high camera placement, elaborately choreographed tracking and crane shots, and repeated shots in which the camera moves into and out of the windows of a palatial home. [Hint: The answer is not Citizen Kane.]

3. Name a film in which a well-known singing and dancing actor performs a musical number with his oversized shadow projected onto the wall behind him. [Hint: The answer is not Swing Time.]

4. Name the director of an early sound film set in France which integrated songs, sung dialogue, rhyming dialogue, natural and ambient sounds, ordinary speech, and overlapping sound. [Hint: The answer is not René Clair.]

5. Name a director who used a distinctively light, whimsical, and subtly erotic touch in a film starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. [Hint: The answer is not Ernst Lubitsch.]

As you've probably already guessed, the answer to all of the above questions is Love Me Tonight and its director, Rouben Mamoulian. The plot of the movie may be just a lighter-than-air bauble based on the mistaken identity/impersonation trope so common to the musical genre, but the cleverness with which that device is developed and the imaginative ways it is used for visual, verbal, and musical invention provide an hour and a half of non-stop enjoyment and awe. In the France that exists only in movies, a Parisian tailor named Maurice (Maurice Chevalier) follows an aristocratic client, the Viscount Gilbert (Charles Ruggles), who owes him a considerable amount of money, to the family château to collect on the debt. There he falls in love with Gilbert's cousin, an aloof widowed princess (it is strongly hinted that her marriage to a much older man was never consummated) named Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald) and for reasons too complicated to explain concisely, pretends to be an aristocrat himself as he redirects his pursuit of the money owed him to the pursuit of Jeanette.

Maurice Chevalier sizes up Jeanette MacDonald's bust

The film opens with two mind-boggling sequences which set the tone of startling originality that is maintained for the duration of the movie. The first thing we see are stock shots of early morning Paris with no sounds but the chiming of a lone church bell. Then we see a montage of Parisians beginning their day, with street sounds added one by one until the soundtrack becomes a percussive symphony of ambient sound, the rhythm of two cobblers hammering nails into the soles of boots emulating a heartbeat. Finally, on top of this intricate continuo of sound effects music is laid, and the camera moves through the open window of Maurice's room. As he dresses, he speaks the first line of dialogue in the film—"Lovely morning song of Paris, you are much too loud for me"—and immediately launches into the movie's first song, "That's the Song of Paree."

A bit later Mamoulian uses the song "Isn't It Romantic?" to unify a dazzling six and a half minute long sequence that gradually shifts the scene from Maurice's tailor shop in the morning to the country château in the evening. Chevalier begins singing the song to a customer, and the song then passes seamlessly from one person to another until it reaches Jeanette: from Maurice to the customer, to a taxi driver the customer encounters outside the shop, to a composer the driver picks up as a fare, to a group of soldiers on the train the composer transfers to, to a Gypsy boy the soldiers pass while marching through the countryside, who then carries it back to the Gypsy camp outside the château, and finally to Jeanette, who has come onto the terrace outside her room to take in the night air. To say that the sequence has to be seen to be fully appreciated is an understatement.

Bojangles of Montmartre?

In addition to its astounding cinematic creativity, Love Me Tonight has much else to recommend it. Chevalier has never been more charming, and it's easy to see why for a few years in the early 1930s he was such a big star in this kind of movie. Jeanette MacDonald is also at her peak—naïve but spirited, deadpan funny, and very sexy, a far cry from the image she later cultivated after moving from Paramount to MGM. As well as the ever-reliable Charlie Ruggles, the cast includes Myrna Loy as Jeanette's sex-mad young cousin and C. Aubrey Smith as the pompous family patriarch. Most unusual of all, the family includes three elderly aunts (one of whom is played by the delightful Elizabeth Patterson) who are presented at first like the three witches in Macbeth, mixing a potion and chanting a spell to summon up a Prince Charming for the sex-starved Jeanette (with the unexpected result of provoking Maurice's infatuation with her), and later like the three Fates, embroidering a needlework tapestry that directs the movie to a happy conclusion.

As a pre-Code production, Love Me Tonight is cheerfully risqué, and was apparently even more so in its original release version—about fifteen minutes longer and now lost—with things like see-through night gowns and repartee about visiting the "Virgin Springs." One of the film's biggest assets is its music score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Of all the great American songwriters of the twentieth century, I don't think anyone wrote lovelier melodies than Rodgers or wittier, better crafted lyrics than Hart. Love Me Tonight has two of their best, "Lover" (sung by MacDonald while driving a pony trap) and the lilting "Isn't It Romantic?" my own favorite Rodgers and Hart song. Paramount must have really liked "Isn't It Romantic?" because for years they used it in many other movies, often played in the background by the orchestra at a night club. Rudy Vallee sang it to Claudette Colbert in Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story (1942), and Billy Wilder used both it and "Lover" in Sabrina (1954).

The American musical film of the 1930s was dominated by the Astaire-Rogers movies, the Warner Bros. backstage musicals choreographed by Busby Berkeley, the Continental musical confections of Ernst Lubitsch, and in the last year of the decade by The Wizard of Oz. But to my mind the greatest American musical of this period is Love Me Tonight, and the significance of its innovations not just to musicals, but to cinema in general, cannot be overstated. As Arthur Knight put it in The Liveliest Art, compared to the musicals that preceded it, Love Me Tonight "is freer, lighter, more imaginative than ever before. Greater liberties are taken with reality, and . . . trick sound is combined with trick camera to create a world of gay illusion. . . . The experience of making such musicals provided directors with new insights into their craft which carried over into the more serious forms."

House of Strangers (1949)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Joseph L. Mankiewwicz won Oscars for writing and directing the sardonic comedy A Letter to Three Wives in 1949 (an accomplishment he would repeat a year later with All About Eve). That same year he also directed House of Strangers, a work quite different from his Oscar-winner. So overshadowed was this film by A Letter to Three Wives that I was barely aware of it until Dave Hicks included it in his film noir countdown at Goodfella's Movie Blog. With my fairly narrow view of that nebulous genre, I wouldn't really call it a film noir myself, although the lighting and cinematography by Milton Krasner have the noir-inflected look of many American films of the time, but its inclusion in the countdown and the comments made about it intrigued me enough to make me seek it out.

Based on a novel by Jerome Weidman, House of Strangers is about an Italian-American banking family, the Monettis—patriarch Gino (Edward G. Robinson) and his four sons, Max (Richard Conte, in a strong performance), a lawyer; Joe (Luther Adler), the eldest; Tony (Efram Zimbalist, Jr.), a dandy; and the none-too-bright Pietro (Paul Valentine), who dreams of being a professional boxer. Opera-loving Gino rules his family and runs his bank with a domineering attitude born of his willful personality. Max has his law office right inside the bank, but Gino keeps his other sons in menial positions of little responsibility and no status. Understandably, these three are resentful of both Gino's treatment of them and the obvious favoritism he shows towards Max. When Gino is arrested and charged with illegal banking practices, the dynamic is in place for a power struggle to see who will succeed him as head of the Monetti dynasty.

Modern viewers will detect in House of Strangers many resemblances to The Godfather, beginning with the very first scene, as Max walks down an open-air market street in New York's Little Italy and up to the door of the bank. Viewers of the time almost certainly would have seen similarities to the plays of Arthur Miller from the late 1940s—All My Sons and Death of a Salesman—with their emphasis on troubled relationships between fathers and sons. Those familiar with Shakespeare will immediately notice parallels to King Lear: the egotistical patriarch, the favored child, the patriarch's fall from power, and the struggle between the loyal child and the envious siblings to determine who will assume the king's position. House of Strangers also throws in a love interest for Max, Irene Bennett (Susan Hayward, who was just perfecting her persona of forceful femininity and is quite good), a WASP socialite who attempts to deflect the headstrong Max from the seemingly inevitable showdown with his brothers.

In the last year or two I've become aware that Edward G. Robinson—whom I had always thought of as an actor primarily of the 1930s, along with James Cagney the film epitome of the anarchic gangster figure of that era—was actually one of the best American screen actors of the 1940s, giving performances in that decade that are remarkable in both their intensity and their variety. Equally adept at playing villains or victims, men of great malevolence or great integrity, Robinson gave masterful performances in one film after another: as Wolf Larson in The Sea Wolf, in Double Indemnity, the two films he made for Fritz Lang, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, The Stranger, as the vicious gangster Johnny Rocco in Key Largo. In House of Strangers, his Gino Monetti is in a way a summation of the roles he had played during the entire decade, as he mines those performances to embody in one personality many of the qualities of character he had expressed in the previous ten years. It is quite possibly the most complex, most paradoxical, and grandest performance of his entire screen career.

Robinson's Gino Monetti is an observant judge of character, yet a man who seems blind to the contradictions in his own nature that drive his actions. He seems sincere in his desire to offer financial help to those whom other banks won't touch, yet as his trial reveals, he is not above exploiting them for exorbitant profits. He says the harsh treatment of his sons is intended to help them build character, which they clearly lack, yet he consistently undermines their self-confidence as he ruthlessly dominates them, openly bullying and humiliating them. He claims to be building a dynasty for his sons to inherit, yet he resists sharing power with them, instead clinging stubbornly to power himself, ruling from his palatial mansion with arbitrary tyranny and behaving in his office at the bank like a Renaissance prince granting audiences to subjects seeking his patronage. He is a shrewd, self-made businessman proud of his initiative and self-reliance, yet independent to the point of foolhardiness, as his disdain of banking laws and consequent legal problems indicate. He is in every way a classic tragic figure—a proud, inflexible man oblivious to his own flaws, his ego spinning so out of control that it causes him to self-destruct.

The movie's only glaring weakness is its almost complete lack of period detail. I wondered why at the beginning of the film Joe's office has a prominently displayed bust of Mussolini, but it was quite far into the movie before it became clear that the opening and closing scenes that frame the flashback structure of the film are set in the late 1930s, before the US entered World War II, and that the bulk of the movie takes place during the banking reforms of the early 1930s. The costumes, decor, and music don't adequately convey this fact, prolonging the confusion about when the events are taking place, when an on-screen title or two would have cleared up this point right away. Aside from this, I was quite impressed with House of Strangers. Joseph L. Mankiewicz had a nearly unbroken run of good films for several years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. House of Strangers is one of the best of this period and has been unjustly neglected.

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Trivia note: The young actress who plays Joe's wife is Diana Douglas, married at the time to Kirk Douglas and the mother of Michael and Joel Douglas.

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