Revisiting ‘The Damned’ (1962) - literally.

 Black leather, black leather, crash crash crash…

When I began this blog way back in 2009, one of the first films I felt compelled to review was Joseph Losey’s ‘The Damned’ (aka ‘These Are The Damned’, 1962), which at that point I’d just discovered via a bootleg DVD acquired from the much missed ‘Up The Video Junction’ stall in Camden Market.

In the years since then, the film has remained a firm favourite of mine, and has, I believe, accumulated a steadily growing cult following through subsequent legit releases and screenings.

Revisiting ‘The Damned’ with a more critical eye via Indicator’s definitive blu-ray release earlier, I can certainly appreciate the film has a few ‘issues’. As in a number of Losey’s ‘60s films, the narrative has a tendency to grind to halt in order to allow a succession of male / female couples engage in protracted bouts of inscrutable navel-gazing, their dialogue rendered in vague and faintly preposterous terms by screenwriter Evan Jones. In the grand tradition of Brian Donlevy in Hammer’s ‘Quatermass’ films meanwhile, imported American ‘star’ Macdonald Carey makes for thoroughly dislikeable ‘hero’ figure - an ineffectual middle-aged chauvinist with Hemingway/Henry Miller pretentions who spends the bulk of his screen-time trying to molest a clearly uninterested Shirley Anne Field. (1)

Leaving these quirks aside however, the film’s disorientating car crash of mismatched genre tropes (rock n’ roll delinquency, paranoid cold war SF, arthouse existentialism) remains bracing and unique, whilst the photography, locations, music and action choreography are all exceptional, and a young Oliver Reed practically melts through the celluloid with smouldering malevolence.

It is the film’s considerably darker second half that really gives ‘The Damned’ its staying power though, as the focus turns to the science fiction elements, and the intractable moral dilemma faced by the character played by Alexander Knox - sombre, aesthetically-minded civil servant fanatically dedicated to preparing mankind for “when the time comes,” as he euphemistically puts in in his faintly sinister, Ivor Cutler-esque Scottish brogue.

Pre-empting the terrible grandeur of Troy Kennedy-Martin’s BBC mini-series ‘Edge of Darkness’ (1985) by several decades, the events which transpire once Carey, Field and Reed crash in on Knox’s antiseptic underground facility soon become truly harrowing. Expanding the movie’s emotional/thematic scope far beyond the realm of the cheap n’ cheerful ‘Village of the Damned’ cash-in Hammer presumably envisioned when they commissioned it, Losey and Jones propose the idea that there is simply no sane response to a world which remains perpetually on the brink of nuclear annihilation - merely violence, cruelty and chaos, as any notion of rationality crumbles in the face of an unimaginable (and, the ultimate nightmare for a bureaucrat like Knox, unmanageable) reality.

Rarely has a subject been more suited to the kind of hyperbole which tends to infect the director’s work, and when Knox, gazing upon the mighty slabs of Portland stone strewn jaggedly around the landscape surrounding his cottage, observes that, “a force has been unleashed which will melt these stones,” it is difficult not to feel a chill run through you as the matter-of-fact accuracy of this seemingly fantastical statement sinks in.

Thankfully for us all however, the Isle of Portland on England’s south coast (within which Knox’s fictional outpost is located) and the neighbouring town of Weymouth, (where much of the rest of the film was shot) not only survived the era of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but remains unmelted to this very day.

I can personally vouch for this furthermore, because - to finally get to the point - my wife and I visited the area in May this year for a long delayed seaside holiday, thus giving me the opportunity to undertake my very own ‘The Damned’ location tour.

Before we begin, I should acknowledge that the work undertaken by the Reel Streets website proved invaluable in pinpointing some of the shooting locations used in the film, and that my own efforts have essentially added little to the material already gathered by their contributors… but nonetheless, I hope that my photos and observations carry some kind of psychogeographical interest for fans of the film and/or the Dorset coastline.

“What’s the matter, never seen a clock tower before?”

Most of the Weymouth landmarks used in the first half of ‘The Damned’ are pretty easy to spot - not least the memorial clock tower where Macdonald Carey first encounters unlikely urban warrior Shirley Anne Field (complete with a knife in her belt!)

As you can see, background biddies remain a constant sixty years down the line.

“Last one to the unicorn’s a cube!”

Though not quite as accessible as it apparently used to be, Weymouth’s towering memorial to the town’s erstwhile patron George III remains present and correct, including the heraldic unicorn which serves as Reed’s gang’s favoured assembly point.

(Interesting incidentally to note various people - including what looks like a bunch of blokes in the process of delivering some carpets - stopping to watch the filming in the second screengrab above.)

And where there’s a unicorn of course…. here’s the lion on the other side of what is generally referred to as The King’s Statue, with King himself (Reed) lurking beneath, plus a bit of a view of the junction of Westham Road and St Thomas Street, leading onto the town’s shopping streets.

The name of Reed’s character, his violent and high-handed behaviour, and the focus Losey places upon this ostentatious bit of royal statuary, are surely no coincidence, methinks. Indeed, whilst Weymouth’s seafront certainly has its charms, the uneasy atmosphere which results from the town’s long-standing association with royal patronage, an extensive naval/military presence in the surrounding area and the Esplanade’s continued function as a magnet for aimless youth and passing biker gangs (the latter admittedly now of a more wholesome middle-aged / middle class demographic)… all this makes it a pretty inspired location for the depredations of the umbrella-wielding King and his strange band of quasi-militaristic Teddy Boys / proto-Droogs.

Unfortunately, remodelling of the exterior of the 18th century Gloucester House on Weymouth’s Esplanade means that the conservatory-style hotel bar in which Alexander Knox meets Viveca Lindfor’s bohemian sculptor character is no longer really extant / accessible, but visitors can at least thrill to the sight of the surviving gatepost adjacent to the steps outside. 

Over in Weymouth’s harbour area meanwhile, The Royal Oak pub on Custom House Quay - which gets quite a lot of screen-time in ‘The Damned’ after Carey moors his boat outside it - happily still abides as a thoroughly unpretentious boozer. (An extension added to the Ship Inn opposite now covers most of the car park / bomb site area seen in the third screengrab above.)

Incidentally, the former home of the Devenish Brewery, whose wares are proudly advertised on the frontage of the pub’s 1962 iteration, can be found on the other side of the harbour in Hope Square (coincidentally home to what I’m confident in hailing as Weymouth’s best current pub, The Red Lion). An impressive Victorian edifice, the brewery was subsequently home to Weymouth Museum, and is now undergoing redevelopment into the usual flats-plus-god-knows-what.

 

Hopping up the steps toward Town Bridge, Losey’s crew used the elevation to get a great, high-angled shot of King’s gang departing after their confrontation with Carey.

Nice to see that the railings and phonebox are still present and correct, but the goods train seen chugging past in the background of the 1962 shot (presumably used to transport unloaded goods from the harbour) is most definitely a thing of the past.

Panning over to the bridge itself, the gang saddle up. 

And, just to bore you further, here’s a quick shot from earlier in the film of Field’s bike whizzing ‘round the corner by the Crown Hotel, just opposite the bridge.

Which brings us, finally, to Portland, a mile or two down the road, in which most of the rest of ‘The Damned’ was shot. This vast, rocky outcrop of elevated land existed as an island until the mid-nineteenth century, when an artificial sandbank was created to expedite transportation of the island’s titular stone to the mainland via a purpose-built rail line.

A strange and fascinating place by anyone’s estimation, Portland’s identity is defined by an unlikely combination of insular, coastal gothic (ancient cottages, derelict medieval churchyards, Roman remains, weird superstitions), heavy industry (the ubiquitous quarrying) and sinister institutional secrecy (former and current prison buildings, small military facilities of uncertain purpose, weather stations, incongruous brutalist barracks etc).

Checking Portland’s Wikipedia page [linked above], I was delighted to find a quote from much-loved theorist and documentarian Jonathan Meades, who in his 2012 book Museums Without Walls wrote: 

“Portland is a bulky chunk of geological, social, topographical and demographic weirdness. It is the obverse of a beauty spot. ‘Beauty’ in this construction implies the picturesque. Portland is gloriously bereft of this quality. It is awesome. There is nothing pretty about it.”

Having visited the place, it is difficult not to see this ‘weirdness’, in all its monolithic, misbegotten glory, mirrored in the unsettling mash-up of genre tropes executed by Losey and his collaborators in ‘The Damned’, suggesting that the location itself might have played as great a role in inspiring the form and ‘feel’ of the film as any of its human contributors.

The location which forms the focal point of much of the action in ‘The Damned’ - the “bird house” which Knox allows Lindfors’ character to use as a studio - is, it transpires, an outbuilding at the rear of a remote property known as Cheyne Cottage (which also appears in the film), still clearly visible halfway down Portland’s east coast.

Unfortunately, the building is not accessible to the public (it’s on private land, and stands on a steep plateau impossible to scale without climbing gear), meaning we were unable to get a closer look or check out the interior. From the nearby Cheyne Weares car park and viewpoint though, bolder visitors can at least scrabble a few hundred yards through the undergrowth to get a better view, and to access the lower quarry area which was also used extensively in the film (from the atmospheric cliff-top opening sequence, right through to the harrowing conclusion, in which our assorted characters struggle with the radiation-suited functionaries rounding up the cold-blooded children). 

(One of the only significant changes to the landscape since the film was shot is the fact that I’m pretty sure the path which once allowed vehicular access to the quarry area - as shown in the second screengrab above - has now been blocked off. Otherwise, I’m sure we would have followed that path back to the road / viewpoint rather than scrambling back up the hillside - encountering a bloody great adder along the way, incidentally.)

Further on down the coast toward Portland Bill, I’m fairly sure that the scene in ‘The Damned’ in which one of the children rescues Reed’s character after he falls from the cliffs must have been filmed on these flat, rocky stretches of shore - their forbidding and inaccessible location in the film rather undercut by the fact that turning the camera 180 degrees would have revealed rows of cosy, brightly coloured wooden beach huts. File under ‘magic of the movies’.

(It’s a shame incidentally that ‘The Damned’s crew couldn’t find an excuse to crowbar the nearby Portland Bill Lighthouse in the movie -- if only to allow it to be paired up with David Greene’s The Shuttered Room on an unlikely double bill of “arthouse-adjacent ‘60s British genre films in which Oliver Reed menaces an aging American actor involved in an inappropriate relationship with a younger woman in close proximity to a lighthouse”.)

After rounding the horn of the island (as it were), having a look around the lighthouse and enjoying a few much needed refreshments at the café, the return leg of our journey around Portland took us back along the island’s west coast, which has a considerably bleaker and more foreboding feel to it than the comparatively tourist-friendly east side.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a direct match for the entrance to the film’s ‘Edgecliff Establishment’, but the kind of hurricane fencing seen in both of the above screengrabs remains a ubiquitous presence around the south-west quarter of Portland, shutting off various areas and creating an odd network of self-contained compounds, each dotted with lonely pre-fab buildings and military vehicles.

All perfectly innocuous I’m sure, but it can’t help but make the place feel like catnip for UFO nuts or conspiracy theorists in search of precisely the kind of scary, underground facilities which ‘The Damned’ chose to locate here six decades ago. (Indeed, the film’s nocturnal chase scene, in which King’s gang pursue Carey and Field around the perimeter of Knox’s ‘establishment’, still capture the ‘feel’ of this area uncannily well.)

Located more or less slap-bang in the centre of Portland meanwhile, the suitably imposing St George’s Church is bordered on one side by the dust and desolation of a working quarry, and on the other by the outskirts of the town of Wakeham.

 

As you can see, the church yard now appears to be maintained more actively than was the case in 1962, although unfortunately, I was unable to locate either of the monuments Oliver Reed clambered upon to whistle commands to his gang members. Either they’re no longer extant, or murky reference pics and general exhaustion prevented me from locating them.

(The idea of King using this location to marshal his troops will have been recognised by locals as a complete nonsense incidentally. The church is not on raised ground, and is the better part of two miles from the other locations used in the film… but what director could resist the appeal of a location like this sitting just around the corner..?)

After this detour, our original plan had been to hoof it up to Portland’s northern settlement of Castletown to try to find the quiet side street in which King’s gang beat up Carey at the start of the movie (another geographical absurdity of course). But, suitably chastened by the weird awesomeness of Portland’s monolithic totality and bone-tired after a full day of hoofing around its fearsome coastal paths, the call of the nearby bus-stop and a swift return to the comforts of our Weymouth B&B could be resisted no longer.

---- 

(1) Just as a quick side-bar, I seem to remember that in my original 2009 post on ‘The Damned’, I spent some time criticising Shirley Anne Field’s performance - a foolish judgement on my part which I would hereby like to formally retract. I now believe she is actually pretty great here - charismatic, smart and self-possessed, despite having to contend with reams of deathless dialogue, questionable motivations and some distinctly uncomfortable scenes with Carey. What was I thinking, etc.

The Great Jess Franco Location Tour, Part # 1: Calpe.

Whilst visiting friends and attending a music event on Valencia’s Costa Blanca in Southern Spain this September, I naturally made sure that we put a day aside to pay a visit to the town of Calpe [Calp in its alternative Catalan spelling], which lies but a short drive East along the coast from the high rise nightmare of Benidorm and the idyllic historical town of Altea.

Although there are a number of equally sacred spots for Jess Franco fanatics scattered around Western Europe, Franco returned to Calpe to film again and again throughout his career, giving it, I think, a pretty good claim to being the director’s spiritual home – helped no doubt by the fact that Alicante and the Costa Blanca was also his actual home and base of operations for the last thirty plus years of his life.

Whilst it is still to some extent a working port town with a small fishing fleet, Calpe in 2016 is largely resigned to its status as a tourist town, if thankfully one with a slightly more refined and low key character than the nearby ‘fleshpots’. The gleaming, recently built towers of the town centre and shopping district have a rather bland, comfortable feeling about them, which extends unchallenged through the rows of identikit tourist restaurants that line the pristine beach-front, leading to the slightly lower and shabbier high rises of the older hotels around the harbour. (And who knows what kind of shenanigans Franco might have filmed within them over the year, although unfortunately trying to identify forty year old hotel interiors is likely to prove a pretty tough gig.)

One feature of Calpe that is definitely neither bland nor comforting however is the astonishing Peñón de Ifach, the titanic limestone rock formation that overlooks the harbour, its shape visible along the coastline for miles in either direction.

Wherever you are in Calpe, the Peñón will invariably draw your attention – it dominates the town to an extent that is almost surreal, with its sheer size becoming almost head-spinning at close quarters. As such, it’s no wonder that it requently caught the eye of Jess Franco’s ever-roving camera lens, often appearing like some weird totem before he pans down and across into an establishing shot of the harbour area.

This is how the Peñón de Ifach appears in what is (to my knowledge) the earliest film Franco shot around Calpe, 1966’s Cartes Sur Table / ‘Attack of the Robots’:

And this is as close as I could get to recreating that shot in September 2016:

Spinning around to a reverse shot meanwhile, this harbour will be all too familiar to Francophiles…

…and, I’m pretty sure that this must be the road on which the ‘final girl’ character in Bloody Moon (1981) has a run-in with an unconvincing falling ‘boulder’ and subsequently instigates a health & safety-related altercation with the local police. No doubt she’d be pleased to see they now have a warning sign up there.

Turning back toward the ocean meanwhile, the lighthouse at the end of the spit that forms the entrance to Calpe’s harbour appears to have been slightly remodelled since 1973 (perhaps as a result of storm damage?), but is still clearly recognisible as the port from which Robert Woods and Tania Busselier cast off, bearing Lina Romay to the “island” of Count and Countess Zaroff in that year’s Countess Perverse.

Although both ‘Countess Perverse’ and She Killed In Ecstasy (1970) create the illusion that the iconic ‘Xanadu’ building designed by architect Ricardo Bofill stands alone on a remote island, it is in fact located on the mainland, about a twenty minute walk along the beach-front from the harbour pictured above, in a heavily developed clifftop area just on the other side of the bay around which the town is built.

This imaginative reordering of the local geography must have proved pretty disorientating for any viewers familiar with the area, but for visitors following the path of Franco’s characters by land, the right road to follow is pretty easy to spot once you reach the far side of the beach;

After a few minutes journey along the cliff-top path, we turn a corner…

…and lo and behold – there it is!

Helpfully, there is an information board for visitors, with English text included, which saves me from having to fill you in on the pertinent details myself.

Descending those spine-tinglingly familiar steps down the cliff-face to the shore (see below), my first order of business is to solemnly tread the same ground Soledad Miranda herself once stood upon, as her character gazed out to sea mourning the death of her husband in ‘She Killed in Ecstasy’.

Whilst my cheap digital camera couldn’t really compete with the low angle majesty of Franco’s camerawork, the shots below are about as close as we got to matching up with my reference pic. (Many thanks to Satori for her modelling assistance here – as you can see, she picked her finest mod threads for the occasion).

In the opposite direction meanwhile, collapsed paving stones now make it difficult to stand on the exact spot from which Soledad once looked out to sea, but you’ll notice that the small outcrop of rock in the lower half of both of the pics below, which remains recognisible almost fifty years later.

(Note too the manner in which Franco has framed his shot to drastically crop the top of the facing headland, hiding the other buildings from view in order to maintain the illusion of a ‘private island’, whilst also making the fairly gentle cliff face look taller and more severe into the bargain. Low budget ingenuity at its finest!)

Returning to ‘Countess Perverse’, the sandy beaches and jagged rocks upon which the victims of the Zaroffs are initially seen landing upon the “island” must be located elsewhere (as the preceding photo demonstrates, the shore directly beneath the Bofill complex is actually pretty sparse), but thereafter we can at least retrace the characters’ progress toward the house up those magnificently sinister steps.

Beginning with a few shots of Kali Hansa making the ascent at the start of the film, we will subsequently move onto a few shots from later portions of the movie.

As pictured in some of the preceding shots, the circular stone archway through which Count and Countess Zaroff (Howard Vernon and Alice Arno) are seen viewing boats approaching their island in ‘Countess Perverse’ can be found halfway up the stairway leading to Xanadu. Note again how Franco’s frame is carefully arranged to disguise the fact that the headland visible on the far left is in fact the all-too-familiar Peñón (which is of course supposed to be situated far away on the “mainland”). Once again, Satori steps in the model for the third picture below.

Another part of the Xanadu / Bofill complex that Franco used extensively is the single-storied, round-windowed stone building overlooking the ocean at the bottom of the stairway. I’m unsure whether or not Ricardo Bofill actually played a role in designing this building, but it apparently used to function as a restaurant (or at least, cooking and dining area) for the residents of the apartments above.

It is here that the Zaroffs’ cannibal feasts take place in ‘Countess Perverse’, and it is also where Soledad Miranda stalks Paul Muller’s character in ‘She Killed In Ecstasy’.

Regrettably for the present day residents of Xanadu and La Muralla Roja however, 2016 finds this building in a pretty sorry state. Entirely ruined and left open to the elements, it seems to have become a haunt for vagrants and/or local teenagers. Covered in graffiti, it carried a pungent aroma of rotting trash and sun-baked urine on the blisteringly hot day upon which we visited, although the shade it provided was welcome, at least.

[Intriguingly, the closest I can get to a viable translation of the graffiti on the roof is possibly something like “with you until the moon forgets your face”..? Any Spanish speakers out there able to clarify?]

For me personally, seeing the site of such mod-ish Mediterranean ‘70s grandeur reduced to little more than rubble proved quite affecting, even as the chance to spend some time exploring a quintessential part of Franco’s unique interior geography, feeling it transform into an actual, physical space before my eyes, was simultaneously exhilarating. A strange mixture of feelings.

Here then are a few comparisons I attempted with frames from the meal scene in ‘Countess Perverse’, followed by a few additional shots illustrating the current state of the round-windowed dining room.

[Note the ‘elder sign’ graffiti in the last picture.]

I’m not sure whether Howard Vernon’s Count Zaroff made use of the barbeque / oven adjacent to this dining room to prepare his “speciality” dishes in ‘Countess Perverse’ - having re-checked the film, all we’re offered are close-up insert shots of a slab of meat sizzling on a grill, its location unclear – but it would certainly be nice to think the Count did his cooking here.

In Franco’s 1980 version of Eugenie - which was shot almost entirely in the vicinity of the Bofill buildings - we learn that, at that point in time at least, the ‘restaurant’ building also incorporated a swimming pool and sun-bathing area (which, needless to say, Franco’s characters proceed to make full use of for some erotic shenanigans).

Again, to survey the ruins of this lost corner of the Costa Blanca high life, memories of its former glory inadvertently kept alive by diehard Franco fans as bootleg VHS transfers of the film travel between servers and hard drives across the world, it a strange feeling indeed.

Of course, for those visiting the ‘Carrer Ricardo Bofill’ primarily as modernist architecture aficionados, Xanadu and its curious annex will be little more than a warm up for the main attraction, which stands adjacent to them in a slight natural valley – the extraordinary ‘Muralla Roja’. (The reference pic below is also taken from the 1980 ‘Eugenie’.)

In actual fact, Franco featured the exterior of La Muralla Roja surprisingly rarely in his films. Although Stephen Thrower’s book reveals that he began shooting an unfinished project named ‘El Misterio del Castillo Rojo’ there in 1972, the aforementioned ‘Eugenie’ is one of the few extant films in which it is used as a primary location. Conversely though, views of the building’s interior turn up frequently through the ‘70s and ‘80s.

In particular, Franco seems to have been fascinated by the network of bright red, Escher-esque interlocking staircases that connect the building’s apartments. These are used to represent an expressionistic ‘descent into hell’ in numerous Franco films, from ‘Countess Perverse’ (it which the local geography is further warped by the suggestion that the staircases connect the Xanadu building to the dining room beneath it) to the surrealistic conclusion to Los Noche de los Sexos Abiertos (1983), which posits it as the interior of some kind of coastal tower / lighthouse (presumably located elsewhere in this area, although I’m not sure where exactly).

Much to my disappointment however, the interiors of La Muralla Roja are very much off limits to casual visitors in the 21st century. The current residents of the complex evidently value their privacy, and the building is surrounded by security fences, locked gates bearing anti-trespassing notices and, in some places, thick rows of trees that seem to have been deliberately cultivated to block the view from outside.

At the time of our visit, some of the residents were busy preparing tables for a formal meal in the grounds of the complex, and, given that none of them gave any indication of looking favourably upon the nosy foreigners skulking around outside their gates wielding cameras, any hope I may have entertained of stealing a glimpse of those famous staircases, or indeed the equally iconic crucifix-shaped swimming pool on the roof, was firmly off the menu.

Whilst these circumstances regrettably forced me to abandon any attempts to match up any particular shots from Franco’s films, the exterior façade of La Muralla Roja remains jaw-dropping – one of the most striking and beautiful 20th century buildings I have ever seen in fact, as the following shots will hopefully to some extent testify. (And if not, a far more extensive and professional range of photographs can be enjoyed on Ricardo Bofill’s website here.)

And so, this brings us to the point at which, exhausted by our sight-seeing exertions and feeling our skin practically sizzling under the sun’s assault, we bid farewell to this otherworldly corner of the Mediterranean dream, and retreated at full speed back toward the beach and the air-conditioned comfort of the nearest tourist restaurant, where ice cold beer and reassuringly tasteless pizza awaited.

Shortly thereafter, our schedule dictated that it was time to bid farewell to Calpe. It would be nice think that I will be able to return at some point in the future, perhaps spend a bit more time soaking up the atmosphere, scouting some less obvious Jess Franco shooting locations, perhaps even try to book in advance for a few nights in the one no doubt highly coveted holiday apartment within La Muralla Roja.

In reality though, who knows then I will be back. As mentioned in my introductory paragraph, there are so many other Franco Location Tour hot spots to hit over the course of future holidays… and if any spendthrift publishers in the audience want to consider covering my travel expenses for a coffee table book on noteworthy Euro-horror locations, well, I’m all ears.