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.

Two-Fisted Tales: Brother Cain by Simon Raven (Panther, 1965)

Though the brightly-hued cover photo affixed to this edition of Simon Raven’s second published novel ‘Brother Cain’ carries a distinct whiff of pop-art / psychedelic chic, Panther’s paperback was actually printed in February ’65, too early to have really hitched a ride on the ‘swinging sixties’ bandwagon, whilst the book itself was first published back in the grey, buttoned up world of 1959.

One of those renowned-in-their-day-but-now-largely-forgotten authors whose work always sparks a certain fascination, Simon Raven (1927-2001 - and yes, that was indeed his birth name) wrote voluminously through much of the latter half of the 20th century, and, read today, his books feel both strikingly modern (in terms of their frank and non-judgemental approach to sexuality and general air of shark-ish cynicism) and hopelessly old fashioned (being largely concerned with a segment of upper crust British society whose values and behaviours now seem entirely alien, probably even to those lucky enough to have been born into it).

Freely mixing elements of personal / social writing and thinly veiled autobiography into popular genre thrillers, Raven’s more noteworthy works include Oxbridge vampire yarn ‘Doctors Wear Scarlet’ (loosely adapted into Robert Hartford Davis’s disastrous Incense for the Damned in 1971) and, on the other side of the coin, the ten volume ‘Alms for Oblivion’ sequence, which follows the lives and loves of a cadre of toffs, set against the changing social and political mores of post-war England. (I read the first few chapters of the first volume of this epic saga a few years back and actually found it quite compelling, but unfortunately I lost my copy on a train and haven’t got around to picking it up again since.)

Throughout his early literary career, Raven seems to have been fixated on the dilemmas faced by male scions of the English upper classes who, whether through conscious rebellion or mere lethargy and personal weakness, have squandered the privileges conferred to them by their noble upbringing and must find alternative paths through life. This theme is certainly front and centre in ‘Brother Cain’, whose protagonist Jacinth Crewe (note the Moorcock-ian initials) finds himself in a predicament closely mirroring that apparently faced by the author himself a few years beforehand.

Having been expelled from Eton on the grounds of moral turpitude and subsequently forced to curtail his studies at Cambridge due to what we might charitably call a self-inflicted lack of funds, the novel joins Crewe as he is invited to offer his resignation to the British army’s elite training academy at Sandhurst, having accrued gambling debts sufficiently gargantuan as to bring his entire regiment into disrepute.

“Honour and dishonour are conventions,” Captain Crewe’s understanding commanding officer advises him during their final interview, effectively establishing the theme of the novel to follow. “They are relevant in the world in which you have so far existed: they will not be relevant in the world for which it is clear you are now destined.”

Retreating to London with his tail (amongst other things) between his legs, Jacinth throws himself upon the mercy of his regiment’s allotted merry widow, one Miss Kitty Leighton, who, after a night or two of wild passion at her Chelsea flat, places a call to a mysterious contact who may be able to assist her disgraced and destitute young lover before the debt collectors come knocking.

Thus, Jacinth is summoned to a lunch date at the Trocadero in Piccadilly (decades before it became the tourist-choked hellhole we know it as today), where he is greeted by dirty mac-clad, brown ale supping “professional messenger” Mr Shannon - a character I found it impossible not to imagine being played by Donald Pleasance.

Though highly suspicious on all levels, the proposal Mr Shannon’s anonymous employers wish to convey to Captain Crewe is entirely too good for the desperate young layabout to resist. In short, his gambling debts will be covered in full, and he will be issued with sufficient funds to allow him to fly to Rome and install himself in the swank Hotel Hassler overlooking the Spanish Steps, there to await further instructions.

What with this being the height of the First Cold War and everything, you’ll be unsurprised to hear that when those orders do eventually arrive, they direct Jacinth to an appointment at a shabby ‘Institute for the Promotion of Mediterranean Art’, a flimsy front for a top secret wing of the British government whose job, to all intents and purposes, is to create new James Bonds.

Which is to say, Jacinth and the other young rascals corralled by the nameless ‘organisation’ are pointedly not being groomed as spies or intelligence agents. Instead, they are basically just hatchet men - proponents of what one of their instructors (who is of lower middle class extraction, and so naturally a graceless, grudge-bearing git) bluntly calls “the cold art of murder”.

Taking a more refined view on things, the Big Cheese of the whole operation, who naturally enjoys the benefit of a ‘proper’ education, instead waxes lyrical to his new recruits about how, in the light of communist infiltration and so forth, the democratic institutions so cherished by western nations can only be preserved through the unilateral execution of acts which the champions of democracy would find impossible to countenance, should they become aware of them.

(Being unfamiliar with Raven’s own political leanings, assuming he had any, it’s difficult to get a handle on whether this justification for extra-judicial murder and mayhem, which continues at some length, is being presented as satire, or simply as a statement of the author’s own beliefs.)

Furthering the Bond parallel, Jacinth and his fellow recruits are essentially allowed to adopt the lifestyles of globe-trotting playboys, so long as they follow their orders precisely, ask no questions, and leave whatever moral scruples they may once have possessed at the door. And, if they have any thoughts of ducking out and taking their chances in civilian life, well…. their more ruthless classmates will simply have an easy first assignment to look forward to, won’t they?

Despite his military rank, Jacinth Crewe is still more a feckless dosser than a cold-blooded killer, and, still bedevilled by confused notions of personal honour and brotherly conduct, he is naturally terrified by the prospect of having to immerse himself in the paranoid, compassionless world promised by his new profession - all the more so when, with a neatness which surely defies mere coincidence, he is paired up for training with one Nicholas Le Soir, the former schoolmate whose charms led to his being expelled from Eton for corrupting the morals of a younger boy. (This incident directly mirrors Raven’s real life expulsion from Charterhouse public school, incidentally.)

Now a qualified surgeon, Le Soir has arrived at the ‘organisation’ after being struck off and effectively exiled from the UK for performing an illegal abortion upon the daughter of a prominent Catholic family (oops), and the plot is further thickened once both Jacinth and Nicholas find themselves drawn into an embryonic love triangle with Le Soir’s promiscuous yet sexually dysfunctional cousin Eurydice, who is also resident in Rome, working for an equally questionable ‘cultural mission’…. and who seems suspiciously keen on pumping her two mixed up suitors for information on the nature of their employment.

And, there I will leave my plot synopsis, but suffice to say, Raven proves himself eminently capable of setting up a fast-moving, exquisitely intriguing yarn here, even if his story’s conclusion - following an incident in a bat-infested railway tunnel, a scheme to virally infect the whores of a high class brothel and a head-spinningly convoluted murder scheme set against the backdrop of a Venetian masked ball, amongst other diversions - eventually veers more toward the kind of existential, internecine futility in which John le Carré would later specialise than the two-fisted action-adventure stuff beloved by Ian Fleming’s fans.

In view of the fact that ‘Brother Cain’ was first published a full decade before the legalisation of male homosexuality in the UK, one of the most striking aspects of the book for modern readers is Raven’s forthright and unapologetic presentation of his male characters’ bisexuality. Not only acknowledging this dark secret of the English public school system, which tended to be referred to only through implication and innuendo by other writers of this era, he seems keen on eagerly exploring its every nook and cranny, pushing the book’s language about as far as the era’s censorship would allow.

“I’m not a homosexual, or at least, not very often,” Jacinth muses to himself as he drifts into introspective reverie in the flight to Rome. (“What shall I do about women? Well I suppose there must be brothels..,” he charmingly adds, as if to bolster his own sense of masculinity.)

As soon as he falls asleep though, he finds himself dreaming of a beautiful American boy he once briefly courted at Cambridge (and who will, of course, play an integral role in the unfolding plot), and as the book goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Jacinth’s most significant and long-lasting relationships have always been with other men.

In spite of its attention-grabbing plotline in fact, ‘Brother Cain’ often reads more like a semi-autobiographical personal novel than it does a thriller. More specifically, it seems like an attempt on Raven’s part to take stock of his life to date, and to redefine his place in the world as he hit his early 30s. As noted, the parallels between the background of the book’s protagonist and that of the author himself are considerable, and, given the multiple accusations of libel which were levelled against Raven as a result of his writing over the years, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that many of the secondary characters in ‘Brother Cain’ were simply thinly veiled versions of his own friends, lovers and acquaintances.

Suffice to say, Raven was presumably not actually press-ganged into committing top secret outrages on behalf of the British crown, but, at a push, you could perhaps see Jacinth Crewe’s recruitment by the ‘organisation’ as a reflection of Raven’s own unique arrangement with the publisher Anthony Blond, who, when the author found himself in particularly dire straits, is reported to have agreed to pay him £15 a week in perpetuity and to publish his books as and when he completed them, on the understanding that he should leave London and never return.

Elsewhere, the book’s story is jammed with sinister, wisdom-dispensing potential father figures and unbalanced, mothering women, whilst Jacinth’s ruthless generational contemporaries all seem ready and willing to trample on his yearning, sensitive soul, creating a maelstrom of weird moral / psychological angst which can only really end with our protagonist becoming entirely consumed by it as he slips helplessly between the cracks separating the world of ‘honour and dishonour’ from the one in which most of us now live, in which such concepts are simply a quaint irrelevance.

Normally of course, I’d be pretty pissed off to find a book which has all the makings of a rip-roaring mid-century thriller derailed by such a load of ponderous navel-gazing, but Simon Raven was such a fascinating character, and the lost world of foppish decadence in which he dwelled such an enticing one to visit, that in his case, I’ll happily make an exception. 

Whatever you may think about his conduct or way of life, Raven was a strange and unique literary talent; even at this early stage of his career, his prose and plotting are crisp, witty and ruthlessly efficient, and I’ll certainly be redoubling my quest for more of his work as soon as the doors of the world’s surviving second hand bookshops begin to creak open once again.

 

Horror Express 2020 #2: The Amazing Transparent Man (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1960)

Over a quarter of a century after ‘The Black Cat’ (1934), and the best part of a decade since The Man From Planet X, Edgar G. Ulmer found himself in even more reduced circumstances than usual, shooting this late doors atom age ‘invisible man’ programmer back-to-back with the same year’s ‘Beyond the Time Barrier’.

Despite working under the contraints of a punishing two week shooting schedule (for both films) however, the indefatigable Ulmer still managed to transform ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ into a haunting rumination on state power, the trauma of war and the malign consequences of scientific brinkmanship, with a touch of sombre, American gothic pictorialism thrown in for good measure – all neatly wrapped up in 57 minutes.

In a scenario highly reminiscent of the Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage, the movie opens with an incarcerated safecracker, the pointedly named Joey Faust (Douglas Kennedy), escaping from the pen (ten bucks says the brief prison break footage must have been stolen from another movie), only to find himself aided in his getaway by an attractive blonde (Laura, played by Marguerite Chapman) whom he’s never seen before in his life.

(Whilst researching this post on IMDB, I was astonished to discover that Douglas Kennedy was actually in ‘Dark Passage’, playing a detective; which seems like a fairly remarkable coincidence, but… if there’s a behind-the-scenes story here, I don’t know it, so let’s move on.)

The imitation of Delmer Davies’ 1947 film continues for at least a little bit longer as Faust and Laura negotiate a police check-point, but things subsequently takes a hard left – both literal and metaphorical – as she proceeds to drive him down a series of ominous, rather bleak looking country lanes, emerging in front of an austere, wood-panelled farmhouse, standing starkly against the landscape like something out of an Andrew Wyeth painting.

Approaching the house, the couple are met by a surly, gun-toting man named Julian (Red Morgan), who ushers them inside, where Faust is granted an audience with Major Krenner (ubiquitous TV villain actor James Griffith), the sinister cat who seems to have been responsible for orchestrating his prison break.

(There’s a great, hard-boiled bit here as Krenner disarms Faust whilst Julian covers him with a rifle; “Y’know what one of these bullets will do from behind? It’ll rip out yr spine and roll it up like a ball of string,” Morgan croaks venomously, channelling a thousand western villains.)

Politely declining to identify the country in whose armed forces he has attained the rank of Major (any guesses?), Krenner informs Faust that if he wishes to remain alive, he will henceforth he required to assist him in his as-yet-unspecified plans, after which he is ushered upstairs to take a look at – you guessed it – the laboratory.

In a cramped, lead-lined attic set jam-packed with outdated mad science clobber, we meet Dr. Ulof (Ivan Triesault), an elderly scientist of apparent Eastern European extraction, and learn that he has been working under Krenner’s command to perfect a form of time-limited invisibility, enabled through exposure to highly unstable radioactive isotopes.

The humans retreat to a lead-lined observation chamber whilst the super-charged atomic x-rays do their work, reducing a cute little guinea-pig to a state of complete invisibility (quite a decent effect actually) - and of course it don’t exactly take a disgraced experimental physicist to figure out that Faust himself is going to find himself strapped to the same gurney PDQ.

As Faust finds himself rendered invisible and forced to break into a series of government research labs to steal a load of even more dangerous nuclear material, it gradually becomes clear that no one in this ill-fated farmhouse is there of their own will; all are being coerced by Krenner through a mixture of blackmail, threats and lies.

Ulof, we learn, is a concentration camp survivor assumed dead by the U.S. authorities. In a horribly surreal touch, Krenner is forcing him to conduct work he feels is dangerous and immoral by keeping his young granddaughter – Ulof’s only other surviving blood relative – imprisoned in a locked room right next to the lab.

The thread drawn between the atrocities of WWII and their continuation in the movie’s present feels horribly palpable in Triesault’s convincingly haunted, emotionally desolate performance, whilst the image of him subsisting on a shabby camp bed, screened off in the corner of the lab right next to the steel door of his granddaughter’s cell, is queasily heart-breaking.

An unusual protagonist, Kennedy plays Faust as essentially a big lug, his actions self-serving and fool-hardy, but he says “yeah” in that same clipped way Warren Oates does, so we know he’s got a bit more than that going on upstairs - or enough base cunning to upset Major Krenner’s unstable house of cards at the very least.

This uncertain struggle for power lends the film a weird noir grit, as characters are repeatedly whacked with bottles, threatened with guns and locked in dark rooms as the interplay between the residents of the house becomes increasingly frantic - whilst all the while, the threat posed by the heaps of lethal fissionable material casually stashed in the attic throbs gently in the background.

Offering up a bleak dose of atomic existentialism, the film’s pessimistic conclusion seems to mirror the blasted, lifeless rural location in which the film appears to have been shot – itself an echo of an imagined, post-nuclear hinterland.

Once Krenner has been overpowered and his mis-matched prisoners have made their escape, Dr Ulof hits Faust with the bad news that many viewers will no doubt have already guessed – namely, that the vast doses of radiation he has been exposed to in the course of the invisibility process has left him with barely days to live. Possessed by a sudden sense of fatalistic moral certainty, he leaves the other surviving characters to drive off toward a decidedly uncertain future, making his way back into the farmhouse for one final conflagration…

Though ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ is not really a horror movie in terms of its plotting, the characteristically doom-laden atmosphere Ulmer brings to proceedings sways it pretty heavily in that direction. Even the swampy terrain Faust stumbles through during his opening prison-break is shadowy and foreboding, whilst the relentless, sawing cello of Darrell Calker’s appropriately minimal score does an efficient job of putting us on edge right from the outset.

Whilst the impoverished circumstances under which the film was produced prevent it from even approaching the same level as Ulmer’s best work, for anyone seeking further evidence to cement his status as classical Hollywood’s favourite underdog auteur, this one is absolute gold dust.

Not only does it find the director throwing in some striking, expressionistic visuals which seem distinctly out of place in the realm of low budget ‘50s sci-fi, but he also twists writer Jack Lewis’s admittedly potent premise toward the same themes which had dominated his work ever since ‘The Black Cat’ and Detour, exploring ideas of imprisonment and inter-personal control, of the trauma of the past contaminating the present, and of inescapable, predestined doom.

Viewed in wider genre terms meanwhile, the film stands as a noteworthy, albeit minor, entry in the lineage of stark, atomic paranoia which runs from Aldrich’s ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ a few years earlier to Joseph Losey’s ‘The Damned’ a few years later, and even, eventually, to Troy Kennedy Martin’s extraordinary BBC drama Edge of Darkness in 1985.

So far as I’m aware, ‘The Amazing Transparent Man’ remains largely unacknowledged by surveyors of this particular sub-genre / sensibility, but I would strongly urge them to track it down. Though a ‘small film’ in every respect, the intrinsic merits of its strange scenario, and of its director’s cracked vision, lend it a rather haunting, morally ambiguous quality which easily surpasses its budgetary shortcomings.

Nippon Horrors: Genocide / ‘War of the Insects’ (Kazui Nihonmatsu, 1968)

Even when writing a weblog that prides itself on plunging headfirst into discussion of some pretty crazy motion pictures, there are some films that just present so much of a WTF it’s difficult to know what to do with them, and here we have a case in point. Quite what was going through the minds of Shochiku studio’s short-lived sci-fi/horror division when they decided to follow up their fairly jaunty low budget kaiju picture ‘The X From Outer Space’ with the cheerily titled ‘Genocide’, I almost think I’m happier not knowing.(1)

So first off, two things I’m usually reluctant to do in the course of reviewing movies: (i) classifying these sort of sci-fi / ‘nature goes bad’ disaster movies as ‘horror’. (I know strictly speaking they kind of are, but y’know… in aesthetic terms, there’re way off from what constitutes ‘horror’ in my mind.) And, (ii), giving in to the school of thought that seeks to frame everything shocking or extreme in post-war Japanese culture as a response to the trauma created by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. (It seems some Western critics like to crow-bar that issue in wherever they possibly can, but much of the time I just don’t buy it, personally.)

Both of those rules, however, are going to be jettisoned whilst we look at ‘Genocide’, a frankly extraordinary venture that resembles a humble genre programmer that’s somehow lost its mind and gone completely insane, beginning in the detached, utilitarian mode common to ‘50s and ‘60s science-goes-bad disaster films, but gradually spiralling off into a kind of beserk, hysterical fatalism, conveying a sense of absurd, nihilistic cruelty that surpasses just about any contemporary horror film, and reflecting the unthinkable reality of an era in which pointless mass death seemed ever imminent.

So how the hell did that happen…? Well, let’s begin at the beginning, shall we.

The very first thing we see in ‘Genocide’ is stock footage of an atomic bomb explosion.“The moment mankind unleashed the power of the atom..”, reads a somewhat gnomic opening caption, “..he immediately began to fear it”. So that’s the second of my above-stated caveats out the window right from the outset, I guess. I also get the feeling that anyone who bought a ticket in the hope of seeing a fun movie about killer insects is already beginning to feel somewhat uneasy.

After a beautifully garish title sequence (rather reminiscent of the similarly insect-filled credits to Teruo Ishii’s equally unhinged Horrors of Malformed Men), we join an American bomber carrying a nuclear payload, flying over Kojima Island in the Anan Archipelago on a routine exercise. The pilot Charly, played by Japanese cinema’s go-to guy for black American roles, Chico Roland,(2)spots a wasp outside the window and inexplicably freaks the fuck out, suffering flashbacks to Vietnam as he thrashes around, assaulting his fellow crew members and trying to activate the release mechanism for the bomb. Temporarily distracted by their colleague’s outburst, the crew fail to notice that they’re flying headfirst into an inexplicably gigantic swarm of insects, whose combined mass burns out the plane’s engines, setting the vessel ablaze.

From a hideaway on the nearby cliffs, a blond Caucasian woman, Annabelle (Kathy Haran, who also did some first-class freaking out in ‘Genocide’s sister film, ‘Goke: Bodysnatcher From Hell’), and her Japanese lover Joji (Yûsuke Kawazu), watch as the plane and its cargo fall to earth.

This Joji, it quickly transpires, is a bit of a creep. We soon learn that he’s been frolicking with Annabelle on the pretext that he’s out hunting for rare insects, leaving his trusting Japanese wife, a hotel maid, at the mercy of her boss, a disagreeable oaf who seems to try to rape her every five minutes. The next time we see Joji furthermore, he’s sailing into harbour in his dinghy, trying to palm off a handful of suspiciously obtained US military watches on the local fishermen. Yes, he’s a bad ‘un alright.

When army personnel make it to the island to investigate the crash meanwhile, they find the plane’s crew dead, having apparently contracted some hideous, bubonic plague-like disease whilst sheltering in a cave. That’s with the exception of Charly, who is found unconscious on the beach, having apparently fallen off a cliff whilst fleeing from his comrades. The wreck of the plane itself, and the H-bomb onboard, remain unaccounted for. So until Charly wakes up, I think Uncle Sam might want to have a quick word with Joji...

Joji’s arrest on some slightly trumped up murder charges brings the whole mess to the attention of Dr. Nagumo of the the Tokyo Biological Research Centre (Keisuke Sonoi), who, with a sense of taste and restraint typical of this film, is introduced to us via a shot that sees him stabbing a large rodent with a syringe full of bright blue fluid, apparently for real. (What can I say, you’ve gotta learn to wince and shrug this stuff off in older movies sometimes..). According to the doc, Joji has recently sent him samples of a rare insect found of Kojima island, one whose poison “..attacks the nervous system, causing madness and death”. Things just keep looking up for our poor islanders, don’t they?

Meanwhile, a world news report on the radio in the hotel bar announces that food supplies in Egypt and India are under attack from unseasonable swarms of locusts, and by the time Charly finally awakens in a hospital bed, portents of both local and global doom are accumulating so thick and fast it’s not surprising folks are starting to get a bit twitchy.

Ah, poor Charly. Rarely have I seen a character who has such a persistently dreadful time in a film as he is subjected to here. From his very first appearance on screen, he’s practically losing his mind with fear, and the catalogue of torments he experiences through the rest of the film beggars belief. After suffering severe head injuries on the beach, he awakens in an insensible state, raving about his fear of insects. So naturally the doctors decide to try to revive his memory by sitting him in a dark room and playing reels of insect footage whilst he screams in abject terror, after which he immediately gets smacked around by the attending US Colonel, who accuses him of being a hallucinating drug addict.

On his way to a military prison, he narrowly avoids being torn apart by machine-gun fire as he is kidnapped by a gang of Communist agents temporarily in the employ of the film’s main villain (who will remain nameless here). Determined to use him to locate the missing h-bomb, they tie him up, beat him and torture him with a cigarette, before trying out a new technique, confining him in a descending tunnel of that kinda gauze-like fabric that bee-keeper’s hats are made of, and pumping in a swarm of those nervous system shattering wasps.

Completely unhinged by this point, Charly is dumped by his captors on the shore of the island; out of sheer malice, they throw him a pistol before they depart, hoping he’ll wreak some kind of carnage before the insects’ poison kills him. Next, we see him staggering toward the island’s hospital, letting off shots in the air and laughing like a loon as he prepares to menace the film’s two heroines, who are within. Suddenly transformed from a hapless victim to a psychopathic monster by the poison, he suffers a singularly inglorious death, shot down from behind as he sets about trying to rape the nurse.

So basically, the unfortunate fellow spends the entire duration of the film in a state of extreme pain, terror and confusion, culminating in a pointless death that leaves everyone assuming he was a violent maniac. And as his corpse leers up at us, we’re suddenly hit with one of the film’s most singularly unglued innovations, as a hideous, electronically filtered voice that we’re apparently supposed to interpret as the ‘chorus of the insects’ begins chanting (in English): “genocide…. genocide…”.

As with the aforementioned ‘Goke’, there is a kind of vicious misanthropy at work in ‘Genocide’. In spite of the massed threats the film lines up against humanity, most of the characters seem incapable of uniting with each other or acting rationally for even a few moments. Dr Nagumo and the Red Cross nurse (Reiko Hitomi) are presented as our standard issue trustworthy, heroic characters, but aside from their obligatory presence, the whole film seems to take place in some upside down moral universe in which people routinely say things like “thank you for the poisonous insects” and “thank heavens for that plane crash”.

Just about everyone in this film’s world, it seems, is motivated either by callous selfishness or horribly misguided ideological fervour… unless, that is, they’re one of the contingent who is actively welcoming and encouraging the forthcoming nuclear/insect/plague apocalypse. Amid layers of political, global, cultural distrust and despair, “kill ‘em all and let god sort it out” seems to ‘Genocide’s general message to the world, a sentiment that is only amplified by a truly jaw-dropping plot twist that occurs midway through the film. Totally crazy and utterly black-hearted, I won't spoil the surprise for you here, but… just you wait.

Strangely enough though, despite all this bleakness, ‘Genocide’ actually remains pretty fun to watch. As an example of formula genre picture that’s gone completely off the rails into uncharted territory, it is astoundingly entertaining, and the weird, sledgehammer ineptitude with which many of its more extreme situations are portrayed, together with the randomised hysterical energy of the whole thing, is a whole lot of “WTF is UP with this movie?!” style enjoyment.

Initially, the basic characterisation, impersonal medium-shots and functional, exposition-heavy dialogue of a more traditional sci-fi / disaster movie predominates, but when the film goes full-on ape-shit following Charly’s death, the situations that transpire swiftly become so twisted, it’s almost as if the two dimensional characters can barely comprehend what’s happening to their little world. Meanwhile, the dry cinematic syntax in turn becomes freakier and freakier, until it practically collapses into an orgy of solarised stock footage, shrieking close-ups, assaultive montages and utterly bizarre psychedelic visual effects (the latter an attempt to portray the ‘mindspace of the insects’, or somesuch, as experienced by victims of the poison before they die).

And so, what could, in a more orderly, less threatening world, have just remained a mildly diverting Japanese answer to ‘Them!’ instead becomes a celluloid equivalent of Colonel Kurtz, gazing deep into the abyss, cackling as flies buzz around the heads on spikes, reflecting on the mad, unending horror of it all. Christ almighty. But, you’ve gotta laugh, haven't you? Just ask Charly.

(1)The original Japanese title, 'Konchû Daisensô', translates roughly as ‘War of the Insects’, a title that was also used for at least one English language release (see the film’s IMDB page for a poster using that name). How in the hell it ended up being called ‘Genocide’ for it’s slightly more high profile US release, I can’t begin to imagine.

(2)Chico Roland is perhaps best known for his appearances in Seijun Suzuki’s ‘Gate of Flesh’ (1964) and Shigehiro Ozawa’s ‘The Streetfighter’ (1974), as well as for playing the rebellious black GI ‘Gill’ in Koreyoshi Kurahara’s pair of cinematic molotov cocktails, ‘The Warped Ones’ (1960) and ‘Black Sun’ (1964). He always seems to present a rather weird, gentle, child-like demeanour on screen, and his frequently bizarre line readings suggest that he wasn’t very fluent in either Japanese or English. Quite who this guy was, and how he ended up appearing in so many awesome Japanese movies, I would love to know.