buried seed
by Douglas Messerli
by Douglas Messerli
Evan Jones
(screenply, based on a story by H. L. Lawrence), Joseph Losey (director) The Damned (These Are the Damned) / 1963, USA 1965
Having
visited the Soviet Union in the 1930s to study the Russian stage, and working
as a director for the WPS’s Federal Theatre Project, Joseph Losey seemed
destined, it appears in hindsight, to come under investigation in the 1940s by
the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Not only had Losey worked
for the perceived “Commie”-aligned Federal Theatre Project, but he had been
close friends with German composer Hans Eisler, who worked closely with German
playwright Bertolt Brecht. Described by some as “the Karl Marx of music” and “the
chief Soviet agent in Hollywood,” Eisler came under investigation, and was
placed on the Hollywood blacklist, despite early support by Charles Chaplin,
Igor Stravinsky, Aaron Copeland, Leonard Bernstein, and Wood Guthrie. Eisler
was deported from the US in 1948.
Losey’s first wife, Elizabeth Hawes, moreover,
had worked with numerous Communist (an anti-Communist) liberals at the
leftist-leaning newspaper PM. After
it closed in 1944, she wrote about her work as a union organizer after World
War II, arguing “one preferred the Communists to the Red-Baiters.” Losey,
himself, had joined the Communist Party in 1946, explaining later:
I had
a feeling that I was being useless in Hollywood, that I'd been
cut
off from New York activity and I felt that my existence was
unjustified. It was a kind of Hollywood guilt that led me into that
kind
of commitment. And I think that the work that I did on a much
freer,
more personal and independent basis for the political left in
New
York, before going to Hollywood, was much more valuable
socially.
Losey’s long-term contract with Dore
Schary at RKO was extended by the company’s new purchaser, Howard Hughes, in
1948. But Hughes purged anyone he suspected of Communist sympathies, as Losey
described it, by offering him a film to direct: I Married a Communist. When Losey immediately turned the project
down, it has clear to Hughes that the director was a “red.” Accordingly, Hughes
held Losey to his contract, but refused to assign him any new work. Schary
intervened, persuading Hughes to release Losey, and the director began working
as an independent for Paramount Pictures. When Losey, however, was called by
two witnesses for testimony before HUAC, he abandoned his editing of The Big Night, and left for Europe a few
days later, while HUAC tried unsuccessfully to issue him a subpoena. After
working on Stranger on the Prowl in
Italy, the director returned to the U.S. in 1952, but found that he was
unemployable.
For a “brief moment” Losey was considered
as a possible director of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, but he was because he had been “named” by the
Committee. Once again, he left the country, this time for twelve years,
settling first in Rome and then in London in 1953.
As Losey describes it, “I didn’t stay away
for reasons of fear, it was just that I didn’t have any money. I didn’t have
any work.” And so the U.S. lost another
significant artist, despite the assertion of some that the blacklisted
directors and writers represented artists of insignificant talent.
Under a pseudonym Losey worked on a couple
of films in English, but when he was scheduled to direct the Hammer Production
of X The Unknown, actor Dean Jagger
refused to work with a supposed Communist sympathizer, and Losey was removed,
to be later reassigned to another Hammer project, The Damned.
Although the film was made in 1961, it was shelved due to
political considerations, including Losey’s sympathies, but also because of its
comments on contemporary British culture, until 1963, with several minutes cut
from the original. When it was finally released in the United States as These Are the Damned in 1965, the film
was further cut from its original 96 minutes to 77 minutes, creating a
confusion of character actions and motivations and the removal of some of its
philosophical considerations.
The film begins with just such a mugging,
during the musical accompaniment of an almost comical gang sing-along:
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
Attracted to a young woman lurking about
the streets, Joan (Shirley Anne Field), the wealthy American Simon (MacDonald
Carey) attempts to pick her up, only to be waylaid by the gang, headed by
Joan’s brother, King (Oliver Reed). Beaten and robbed, Simon is rescued by two
local military men who return him to the town’s hotel, overseen, it appears, by
Bernard (Alexander Knox), a local celebrity who is also in charge of a top secret
military experiment. Bernard’s mistress, the bohemian artist Freya (a wonderful
Viveca Lindfors) has just returned to Weymouth from London, and, after meeting
Simon, poutingly scolds Bernard for his secrecy. He warns her that he dare not
involve her in his secret life for it may me “condemning her to death.”
Accordingly, we immediately sense that
this seeming charming community is loaded with dangerous figures who clearly
are not fond of any kind of intrusion. King and his gang continue to goad the
recovered Simon at the very moment that Joan has joined him as he prepares to
take out his boat.
King, pathologically protective of his
sister, demands that she leave the boat or he will hurt Simon. She unwilling
does so, but, as the boat begins to move out into the bay, she suddenly jumps
aboard to rejoin Simon, infuriating King and his delinquent friends who are not
determined to kill the American.
Thus far, Losey’s film seems to be pointing to the kind of intimidation
of innocents by bullies that we can observe in other films of the day such as
Marlon Brando and his gang in The Wild
One (1953) or the school gangs’ attacks on James Dean in Rebel without a Cause (1955). The
situation is tense, but hardly earth-shattering in its moral consequences. The
question that arises is simply how will Simon and the strange half-wild girl to
whom he is now attracted survive. They may be threatened and even face death,
but we can hardly define them or the the
evil-minded Teddy Boys as “damned.”
The odd couple break-in to the apartment,
watched without their knowledge by King and his gang, and share, for a short
while, the joys of sexual intercourse—evidently the first time that Joan,
unbelievably, has been able to escape the watchful eye of her brother, who has
trapped her, so it seems, in a nearly incestuous relationship.
As the couple retreat further into the
cliffs, they fall into a small stream, as does King as he attempts to follow
them. Simon and Joan are “saved” suddenly by a group of children, who take them
inside the mountain through a kind of magical (futuristic) door, where they
discover that their saviors are incredibly cold to the touch.
King is later saved by one of the young
boys of the group.
We have already been shown, just previous
to this event, these children, locked away in the military fortress, are being
schooled by the evil Bernard. And we soon discover after the three intruders
entry, that the children were all born on the same day to radioactive mothers who
died soon after. The children miraculously survived, and are now being kept by
the military for the day when a nuclear explosion will likely destroy all of
mankind. These educated, trained beings, which Bernard refers to as “buried
seed,” will, thereafter, be freed to begin a new race of humans able to survive
the “brave new world” they will be forced to face.
Meanwhile, the
children have been proffered only bits and pieces of information, which they
have gradually expanded to comprehend that there may exist a world outside of
theirs or that they inhabit a spacecraft on a long trip to another planet. The
appearance of three new humans in their midst at first give them the hope that
they may be their parents come to claim them, or, later, that the strangers may
help them to escape.
Losey, in short, has created in this film
a bi-level world of violence consisting of destructive teenagers who serve,
perhaps, merely as a reflection of a far more pernicious and terrifying world
of adults and the governmental authorities they represent. It is a cynical
world on both levels, but particularly in Bernard and the military’s case, who
are convinced that there is no alternative to world destruction but a new breed
of mankind.
Simon and Joan, returning to their boat,
are seen circling in the ocean with helicopters circling overhead. Freya, who
refuses the brutal vision of the future espoused by her lover, is shot to
death.
Losey’s split terrorist-tale and
science-fiction flick combine two genres to reveal the multiple
interconnections between the mindlessness of certain kinds of juvenile violence
and its consequences in the authoritarian imprisonment of innocents. The
blinded righteousness of both generations close off any normal possibilities of
love, family, community, or open-minded culture. It is not a great leap to
perceive that the children’s “differentness” has led directly to their
imprisonment and isolation, just as the wild hysteria of McCarthy’s and the
red-baiters’ political fears fed into a system of disenfranchisement and open
hate of those who stood against the standard American values. In both cases,
the future is damned!
Los Angeles, August 22, 2104
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