October Horrors #2: X… The Unknown (Leslie Norman, 1956)

One strand I want to try to work into my horror marathon this October involves filling in a few gaps re: films I really should have seen by now, but for some reason have not.

Given that I’m a big fan of both Hammer Films and eccentric, black & white British sci-fi movies more generally, the awkwardly titled ‘X… The Unknown’, Hammer’s immediate follow up to the success of ‘The Quatermass Xperiment’ a year previously, and the very first scripting credit from Jimmy Sangster, certainly fits the bill.

Essentially dealing with the travails of a giant, sentient oil slick from the centre of the earth as it rampages around some less picturesque areas of Scottish highlands eating radioactivity (and people), Sangster’s story is an admirably straight-down-the-line, bullshit-free exemplar of a ‘50s radioactive monster movie, but one which still, somehow, remains curiously compelling, touching at least in passing on the kind of Big Ideas and weird thematic resonances which Nigel Kneale reliably brought to his Quatermass stories.

By and large though, the feel of the movie is… dour in the extreme, reminding me somewhat of other military-focussed British films like Cliff Owen’s ‘A Prize of Arms’ (1962), whilst also pre-figuring the ‘Doomwatch’ franchise of the early ‘70s via its emphasis on lengthy scenes featuring blokes in great-coats stomping about in the frozen mud, poking patches of oil, taking Geiger counter reading and talking about science, whilst bored squaddies hang around in the cold awaiting orders. Grim weather, military manners, very few smiles, and no female characters whatsoever.*

A bit less of this kind of thing and a bit more excitement might have livened things up during the first half of the picture, but nonetheless, it’s all very well made (much as you’d expect of a Hammer production of this vintage) and moves at a fair old clip, with a varied and interesting cast (including such notables as Leo McKern, Anthony Newley and - of course - Michael Ripper) all doing good work re: keeping the audience engaged. It’s also worth mentioning meanwhile that, as the token American ‘star’, the bumbling, softly spoken Dean Jagger proves a vastly more likeable and convincing presence than Brian Donlevy did in the Quatermass movies.

The shock / horror scenes, when they eventually arrive meanwhile, are pretty great too. There are some really cool effects, and the black, amorphous crawling creature is genuinely quite unnerving - a totally alien presence, not so far removed from the kind of thing which might have slurped its way up from the depths of some ancient, pre-human vault at the end of a Lovecraft tale.

In fact, it is the few brief moments in ‘X… The Unknown’ which veer into gothic horror territory, splitting the difference between a scientific and occult threat, which prove to be by far the most memorable. 

For all the nuts n’ bolts SF logic of Sangster’s writing, it’s difficult not to feel that some weird, atavistic race memory has been unleashed, as we see the residents of a remote Scottish village cowering for protection in a cold, stone church as an evil, nameless menace which has literally crawled up from the depths of Hades slimes its way through the misty graveyard outside, demolishing the pretty dry stone walls, and narrowly missing an errant toddler who is pulled to safety at the last moment by the heroic vicar.

Great stuff, needless to say, and hey, check out this amazing Japanese poster I found (featuring a far cuter monster, apparently sourced from a different movie altogether, but never mind).

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* Ok, precisely speaking, I realise there’s a nurse who turns up at one point and has about five lines, and there’s the mother of a boy who’s killed by the monster, and some old dears being hustled into the church by the vicar… but we’re pretty much looking at an all-male affair here, perhaps reflective of the same awkwardness / inability to find things for women to do which later became a hallmark of Sangster’s gothic horror scripts?

Penguin Time/Psyched Out Sci-fi: The Squares of the City by John Brunner (1969)

Only marginally qualifying as science fiction, John Brunner’s 1965 novel is really more of a high concept socio-political thriller, taking place in Ciudad de Vados, the purpose-built capital city of the fictional South American nation of Aguazal.

Presumably modelled on President Juscelino Kubitschek’s construction of Brasilia in the early 1960s, the city is the crowning achievement of the charismatic President Vados, and we arrive in its environs in the company of one Boyd Hakluyt, an Australian expert in urban planning who has been engaged by the city’s municipal authorities in an initially rather vague consultancy role.

Upon arrival, Hakluyt soon discovers that  his expertise in the fields of traffic management, industrial rezoning on so on will primarily be put to use in solving the problem presented by the masses of impoverished, disenfranchised rural peasants who are now migrating to the new metropolis, settling in a series of sprawling shantytowns and slums beneath the gleaming overpasses, and rather undermining El Presidente’s vision of a shining beacon of civilised modernity in the process.

Less than enthralled by this task, and unnerved by the evidence of creeping authoritarianism and violent political disorder he sees broiling away beneath the city’s tranquil surface, Hakluyt becomes drawn into a complex web of subterfuge and treachery, crossing paths with bureaucrats and politicians, dissidents and revolutionaries, union leaders, industrialists, media personalities, generals, journalists, gangsters and so on, all engaged in an exhaustingly complicated wrangling for influence and power which seems to eerily mirror the Aguazalian nation’s all-consuming obsession with the game of chess.

And beyond that, I will keep quiet, as ‘The Squares of the City’ is a novel which is very easy to “spoil”. 

Suffice to say that, like much of Brunner’s work, it takes a bit of patience to get into - his prose initially seems quite dry, and his plotting needlessly convoluted - but it ultimately proves a very rewarding read. It is certainly a unique entry within its supposed genre, that’s for sure, and if the above synopsis has piqued your interest, I’d recommend giving it a go.

As to Franco Grignani’s cover illustration meanwhile - well, it’s not one of my favourite examples of his work for Penguin to be honest, but it certainly conveys the novel’s idea of an urban eco-system collapsing into entropic chaos fairly effectively.

Those little white dots on my scan of the cover, by the way, are not stars or any other part of the design - I’m afraid they’re just remnants of damp, of concrete dust, or something, which have become stuck to my copy of the book, suggesting it might have spent some time sitting atop a pile of paperbacks in an attic or similarly insalubrious environment.

As you may have gathered, these Grignani Penguins often ain’t cheap, and my insistence on picking them up for pennies does not lend itself to acquiring them in primo condition - but at least this one was readable.

Penguin Time/Psyched Out Sci-fi: The Traps of Time edited by Michael Moorcock (1970)

 

Remarkably, I don’t think I’ve ever actually featured any of the extraordinary covers produced by Franco Grignani for Penguin’s science fiction line in 1969-70 on this weblog before.

So, having picked up a few of them recently, now seems as good a time as any to rectify that.

According to the invaluable The Art of Penguin Science Fiction website, Grignani, “..was a leading figure in the field of experimental photography, with a career stretching back some forty years to his early work with photograms. From this he progressed to a range of techniques based on standard photography which he then projected and distorted using lenses, shards of glass, pieces of broken mirror, or liquids such as oil and water.”

All of which, needless to say, made him very much the man of the hour when it came to finding a way to combine the precise / modernist Penguin design aesthetic with the mind-bending chaos of the op-art / psychedelic light show era.

Spilling over, as was often the case, onto the back cover (though not, disappointingly, across the spine), ‘The Traps of Time’ showcases one of Grignani’s more menacing and abstract efforts - equally as far out as the era’s most attention-grabbing Penguin Crime covers.

I particularly like the hands on the back cover - suggestive of some technologically enhanced séance which has gone horribly wrong. (Shades of The Devil Commands / ‘The Edge of Running Water’, perhaps?)

As to the book itself meanwhile… well unfortunately, I’ll have to forego the opportunity to bask in the light of Michael Moorcock’s no doubt exemplary anthologising skills for the time being, as the binding on my copy is knackered to point of imminent collapse.

Nonetheless though, you’ve got to appreciate the none-more-new-wave audacity of shoving Aldiss and Zelazny in right next to Borges and Alfred Jarry, of all people.

In fact, the inclusion here of Jarry’s idiosyncratic 1899 text ‘How to Construct a Time Machine’ helps lends ‘The Traps of Time’ a certain level of underground historical significance, as again pointed out by the compilers of The Art of Penguin Science Fiction [see link above].

In view of Moorcock’s connections to the band, it was in all likelihood between these pages that Hawkwind’s resident poet/ideas man/maniac Robert Calvert first encountered Jarry’s essay, which - upon realising that the ‘time machine’ described by Jarry is in fact merely a bicycle - inspired him to compose the lyrics for what became Silver Machine, a work recognised by most right-thinking people as one of the towering achievements of human civilisation. Nice!

Two-Fisted Tales: The Star Witches by John Lymington (Macfadden, 1970)

I was recently hipped to the work of John Lymington via a great piece written by Jacob Charles Wilson in the estimable Books Review of Books (issue # 3, June 2021), wherein Wilson basically makes the case for Lymington as a kind of forgotten idiot savant of British pulp SF, citing his 1965 giant spider opus ‘The Green Drift’ as “..a terrible book and an amazing book. It’s a miracle it was ever published.”

Suitably intrigued, and noting that I already have several Lymington joints stashed unread on my shelves, I chose to begin my investigation with ‘The Star Witches’, because… well, how could I not? It sounds bloody brilliant.

Well, what can I tell you readers - a sense of morbid fascination saw me through to the final pages, but I’m not much inclined to repeat the experience. First published in the same year as ‘The Green Drift’ (though this U.S. edition dates from 1970), ‘The Star Witches’ is, unquestionably, a terrible book. An amazing one though…? I fear not.

Although nothing in the exciting back cover copy Macfadden’s editorial staff managed to wring out of this damned thing is technically incorrect, the arrangement of these events within Lymington’s text is… not quite as compelling as we might hope, to put it mildly.

The Reverend David James, for instance, only discovers that “..a coven of witches was using his church for worshiping Satan..” via a few throwaway dialogue exchanges towards the end of the novel, and he scarcely has much time to be perturbed by the issue amidst the thunderous rumblings, “cold smells”, petty bickering and great globules of misbegotten, barely coherent, shapeless prose through which Lymington attempts to convey the descent of his (far too numerous) cast of characters into a state of supernatural hysteria as they are buffeted by the assault of some kind of incorporeal alien intelligence.

The Reverend James, by the way, is in no sense the novel’s hero or protagonist - instead he is merely one member of an ever-expanding ensemble of pointless and dislikeable individuals Lymington conjures into existence to stretch out his word count, each chiefly defined by their assorted weaknesses and grotesquery. (The Reverend, for instance, is a venal, self-serving type, possessed of prodigious girth, multiple chins, and invariably described as either picking remnants of fish from his teeth or tripping over his impractical ecclesiastical vestments.)

Mirroring both Wilson’s description of ‘The Green Drift’ and the staggeringly uneventful 1967 film adaptation of Lymington’s ‘Night of the Big Heat’, the “action” of ‘The Star Witches’ is largely confined to the interior of one cold, strange, smelly house (the squire’s abode in a fictional Cotswolds village), wherein upward of a dozen characters gradually accumulate and spend the entire first two thirds of the novel fretting about the absence of one Harry Royce, owner of the gaff in question. An amateur scientist, Royce seems to have disappeared, ‘Marie Celeste’-style, mid-way through his dinner, whilst carrying out some vague researches into matter transference and inter-planetary telepathy, or, y’know - something along those lines.

Harry’s dinner, incidentally, was paprika stew, “with the cheese on the steak,” which his housekeeper (a gargantuan, simple-minded West Country stereotype, like all of the book’s working class characters) repeatedly insists he would never have voluntarily left unfinished. And, if you feel it would be beneficial to receive frequent updates on how long this dinner has been left sitting in his study, and what happens to it as it gradually congeals, and to read several discussions on the subject of whether or not it would be a good idea to clear it away, then, friends - John Lymington is the author you’ve been looking for!

A similar dialectic is invoked on a slightly grander scale during the final third of the book, when, after discovering the body of the absent Mr Royce in a trance-like state within a wall cavity, the characters spend most of the remaining pages arguing about whether they should kill him - in order to destroy the ‘bridge’ his consciousness has formed with the evil alien intelligences which are trying to take over everyone’s minds - or alternatively, just, y’know, not kill him, even though they probably should, just due to general milquetoast queasiness and procrastination on the part of the middle class contingent.

Meanwhile, in the grounds of the house, pound-shop Nigel Kneale vibes are soon the order of the day, as reality warps and frays around Royce’s ‘pepper pot’ private observatory, wherein he has trained his high-tech telescope on the distant planet from which the book’s malign, shapeless entities originate. Eventually, the local residents, tiring of both subterranean rumblings ‘spoiling’ the beer at the pub and their assorted husbands and wives failing to return from the indecisive palaver going down at the manor house, do the decent thing and assemble a pitchfork-wielding mob to take care of business.

Spoiler alert: they do not really succeed, and the book ends, hilariously, with a field report composed by one of the extra-terrestrial invaders, who apparently intend to continue sending signed and dated letters to each other and compiling paper records whilst they conquer the globe, despite being shapeless, nameless telepathic beings from a wholly unknown realm of distant space.

John Lymington is credited with having written over 150 books between 1935 and 1989 - not quite matching the output maintained by his fellow British ‘mushroom pulp’ godhead Lionel Fanthorpe during his peak years, but regardless, Lymington also pumps out his prose like a fog of inarticulate, stream-of-consciousness blather, showing little regard for whether the ends of his sentences bear any relationship to their openings. It reads as if he (like Fanthorpe) was simply dictating the novel into a tape recorder, ‘first thought = best thought’ style, as the clock ticked down to his deadline, before sending it straight off to some poor, underpaid typist to be transcribed.

Fanthorpe however was a worldly and charismatic individual, meaning that the random digressions into his day-to-day which inevitably filtered through into his writing often proved interesting or amusing. (I mean, who wouldn’t want to read 200 bad science fiction novels written by this guy?) 

The incessant irrelevancies which accumulate within Lymington’s prose by contrast feel mean, narrow-minded and crushingly banal. It’s all suggestive - though I may be projecting unfairly here - of a kind of culturally blinkered, unhappy existence, the experience of which feels more unhealthy than the writhing, inter-dimensional tendrils of the alien mind-stealers the author rather half-heartedly seeks to invoke in ‘The Star Witches’.

In the first chapter here for instance, we learn that ‘bovine’ housekeeper Clara suffers from wind in the mornings, because her husband Bill puts far too much sugar in the mug of tea he brings her at six o’clock, and which she needs to drink quickly because she needs to get up before seven. We learn that lecherous gardener Bert Gaskin (“known throughout Keynes as a big, blundering, blustering, beggaring knowall”) wears ‘yachting shoes’, because his feet “suffer in hot weather” and “linen shoes can be good for that”. We learn that the doorbell in Harry Royce’s residence is “an original installation from 1850,” and that he “likes original installations”. “Sometimes he had them put in even if they weren’t there when he came,” Lymington would have us know.

Perhaps you think I’m being a bit unfair here. I mean, isn’t it through this kind of detail that all authors develop character, and create a sense of place for their stories? Maybe, but after suffering through a few dozen pages of Lymington, I’d defy you make a case for this excruciating drivel adding up to anything except his daily word count.

It certainly succeeds in torpedoing any promise of the kind of cosmic grandeur which the SF and horror genres are conventionally supposed to deliver, that's for sure, but beyond that, Lymington’s hum-drum eccentricities fail to even register as perversely fascinating or unintentionally funny. Carelessly tossed off, and full of minor lapses of logic so painfully mundane it’s barely worth even registering them, instead it’s all just really annoying. 

Indeed, the main feelings generated by spending 140 pages enveloped in the sweaty, feeble mess of ‘The Star Witches’ are those of futility, tedium, mild revulsion… and a creeping realisation that, even for us most dedicated excavators of forgotten 20th century popular culture, there are some stones which are perhaps better left unturned. 

 

Horror Express: The Beast with 1,000,000 Eyes (David Kramarsky / Roger Corman, 1955)

Over the past few years, I’ve got into the habit of tuning in to ‘50s American sci-fi/monster movies for a dose of comforting, mid-week escapism. Perhaps it’s just me, but somehow, that distinctive combination of remote desert town settings, flat, TV-style staging, woozy theremin music, reassuring techno-babble, clean-cut squaresville vibes and that distant patina of eerie, cold war paranoia… all of this just goes down perfectly with a whisky & soda after a hard day in the office (and the short run-times help, too).

Imagine my consternation then when 1955 ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ brutally overturned my expectations. Despite boasting Roger Corman as an executive producer (and uncredited director), the opening half hour of this extremely low budget, Palm Springs-shot outing feels a world away from the cheery hi-jinks of Not of This Earth or It Conquered the World. Instead, it presents us with a vignette of bleak, psychologically harrowing b-movie existentialism which Corman’s later collaborator Richard Matheson would have been proud of.

Our setting is an isolated, family-run ranch which has been steadily losing money for three years, or so husband/father Allan (Paul Birch) tells us in voiceover. He feels like a failure, having lost his family’s affections as a result of this financial turmoil, but is unable to find a way to reverse their sorry fate.

Allan’s shrewish wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) is meanwhile introduced to us as a seething vortex of negativity. Trapped in a kitchen she clearly hates with every ounce of her being, she spends her days labouring away at the Sisyphean task of trying to bake cakes, repeatedly burning them, and flying into a rage as a result.

So bitter is Carol that she won’t even allow the couple’s teenage daughter Sandy (Dona Cole) to leave to go to college. “Why should she get the chances I never got?”, she demands to know. Sandy in turn bitterly resents her mother for condemning her to a life of drudgery on the isolated ranch, all culminating in an atmosphere which at times feels as suffocating and inescapable as the pit in which the characters toil in Hiroshi Teshigahara’s existentialist classic ‘Woman of the Dunes’ (1964).

As if all this wasn’t bad enough meanwhile, the family’s problems are silently observed by a lumbering, mute simpleton (Leonard Tarver) who - for reasons that are not really made sufficiently clear until the film’s conclusion - lives in a shack adjoining their house.

Charmingly, this fellow is known to the family simply as “Him” (“he can’t tell us his name, assuming he ever had one,” Sandy sneers), and he seems to spend much of his time shivering on an unkempt mattress next to wall covered in girly pictures - when he’s not spying on the family members or lurking about with a wood axe, that is. Allan insists that “He” is harmless, but the women aren’t so sure, treating him with a mixture of fear and outright contempt.

At the heart of this tsunami of bad vibes, Allan himself remains an inert, helpless figure. Staring out into the desert, he meditates on the threat posed by the dry, lifeless expanse which stretches beyond the limits of his unhappy homestead. “Maybe the hate started out THERE…,” he muses, gazing at gleaming animal bones in the sand.

Already living in vision of the American Dream transfigured into a hermetically-sealed, loveless hellscape, it’s safe to say the last thing any of these folks need is the arrival of a Beast with a Million Eyes. Thoughtfully though, when the film’s allotted visitor from another world does eventually make an appearance, it does so in a manner which initially feels more annoying than actively apocalyptic.

The Beast’s ship (or meteorite, or whatever it is - the nature of the vessel is never really made clear) overshoots the ranch house, breaking all the windows, and shattering Carol’s beloved glassware. Her sense of futile, outraged frustration in the face of this inexplicable domestic calamity feels horribly palpable; as she gazes forlornly at the shards of a water jug, it honestly feels for a moment or two that she might be about to slash her wrists.

Long before it deigns to make any kind of physical appearance however, it becomes clear that The Beast’s modus operandi involves taking psychic control whatever ‘inferior’ intelligences happen to be hanging about in its general vicinity of its landing zone, dispatching them on malign and destructive missions on its behalf. (Herein lies the rationale for the creature’s purported “million eyes”, or so I’m assuming, as it sees through the optics of all the local insects and animals, etc etc.).

So, first a flock of suicidal birds attacks Allan’s station wagon, before the film reaches what is surely it’s nadir (in both emotional and cinematic terms) during a sequence in which the family’s beloved sheepdog Duke allegedly ‘turns bad’ under the influence of the alien entity and attempts to attack Carol whilst she is alone in the house.

I should clarify that, up to this point, ‘The Beast with a Million Eyes’ has been reasonably well made on its own low budget terms, but the problem here is that the production obviously had no means of creating the illusion that poor old Duke had gone crazy / become rabid. True, they manage to rustle up a few close-up insert shots of him growling and bearing his teeth, but in the long shots which comprise the majority of the scene, he just looks like a normal, happy doggie, making Carol’s decision to run screaming in fear and subsequently blast him with a shotgun seem entirely inexplicable in visual terms - as well as making us hate her even more in the process - even as we grudgingly acknowledge the idea the script is trying to convey.

Strangely, the catharsis caused by Duke’s death (along with the impact of the other low level disasters the family have suffered) somehow succeeds in bringing them back together, allowing them to escape the depressive fug in which they were previously trapped and reminding them of the familial bond they all share -- and it is here that the essential point of Tom Filer’s screenplay finally becomes clear.

It is soon noted, y’see, that the alien’s hypnotic powers only have an effect on people when they are alone. When we’re together, when we have LOVE, we’re safe! (Like all malign invaders/super-computers/killer robots etc, the Beast is flummoxed by by the concept of love, although its clumsy voiceover here at least acknowledges a distant, historical memory of such a thing once existing on its long-dead home planet.)

Corny as it may seem in retrospect, this grand theme is actually quite effectively unpacked by Filer’s script, aided by a set of characterisations which are more multi-faceted and psychologically realistic than those generally encountered in ‘50s monster movies. Crucially, the core idea that, beneath all the dysfunctions and resentments inherent in family life, we still share an unbreakable bond with our relatives and life partners, is allowed to develop naturally here, rather than just being preached in our general direction, as was more standard in this genre/era.

Unfortunately however, nobody thought to include poor old “Him” in the group hugs, so… you can probably guess how that whole plotline plays out, although there is at least quite an interesting, socio-political twist thrown in vis-à-vis the revelation of who the hell “He” actually is, which I won’t spoil for you here.

Thematically speaking, I found this story’s emphasis on the virtues of togetherness - and its implied rejection of individual agency - quite interesting, in view of the anti-communist / pro-‘freedom’ ideology which (in allegorical terms at least) was pretty much obligatory in American SF films of this era.

But then, if you look at it another way, I suppose the alien entity’s attempt to create a kind of invasive hive mind provides just as good a stand-in for the Reds as anything else, so ok - fair enough. Nothing to see here folks, just a bit of unusually thoughtful ambiguity on the part of the scriptwriter - let’s move on.

Of course, the philosophical resonance and character drama in ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ could have soared to Shakespearean heights of achievement, and it still wouldn’t have saved the film from living in reviled infamy in the minds of the millions of ‘50s monster kids who presumably sat bored out their minds in matinee screenings, demanding to know: where in the fucking hell is the Beast with a Million Eyes?!

Legend has it that this was also the reaction of producer James H. Nicholson, whose American Releasing Corporation financed and distributed the film shortly before morphing into the legendary American International Pictures. True to form, they already had the movie pre-booked with title and poster artwork ready to go, so…. WTF are you trying to do to us here, Roger?

Having committed the cardinal sin of turning in a monster movie without a monster, ‘executive producer’ Corman was thus allegedly dispatched to make right on his mistake with a mere $200 in hand, hooking up with master monster sculptor Paul Blaisdell to produce… well, for the most part, they seem to have resorted to just using a kettle with some flashing lights on the top, to be honest.

Seen in insert shots earlier in the film, this object seems very small (like some kind of sensor or radio receiver or something?), so when we see the surviving characters approach it during the film’s final minutes and discovering that it is actually supposed to be big - like, a spaceship, with a monster in it - the effect is disorientating.

When the door on the side of thing finally opens, we belatedly get a 30 second glimpse of some kind of scary, brain-headed monster thing (with TWO eyes, for the record), somewhat reminiscent of the creatures from the same year’s ‘This Island Earth’. In an attempt to boost the impact of this revelation, these shots are super-imposed with the image of a big, throbbing eyeball, lending them a rather wild, proto-psychedelic quality which could, at a stretch, perhaps be seen as a very early indicator of the direction Corman’s directorial work would take during the 1960s.

All this is actually quite cool, and psychotronic as heck, but it’s likely audiences at the time merely saw it as a load of cheapjack crap - a pathetic, last minute attempt to try to justify the movie’s title and poster artwork, delivering far too little, far too late -forever condemning ‘Beast..’ to the lowest rungs of the monster movies canon.

Viewed with nearly 70 years-worth(!) of hindsight however, ‘Beast with a Million Eyes’ feels like a more-than-respectable addition to the Corman/AIP catalogue. Sure, it suffers more than usual from budgetary constraints, and the lack of a tight directorial hand on the reins allows some extremely clumsy elements (eg, the dog scene and the monster’s ridiculous voiceover) to make it into the final cut, but at the same time, the film’s strong writing and well-rounded characters nonetheless keep us engaged throughout.

As such, it to some extent helped establish a formula which Corman would re-visit again and again over the next few years, with increasing confidence and success each time around. In marking the start of this cycle, it deserves to be viewed sympathetically as a minor landmark in American genre cinema, as well as for its own not insignificant points of interest.

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.

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(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.