Friday, April 13, 2018

Damned

Here's a still from Losey's The Damned, a rather rare cold-war SF-y film to see, at least up to now, from 1962.

I remember where I first saw this shot, published I think in John Baxter's 1970 Science Fiction in the Cinema. People nowadays don't remember such things, but before home video, let alone IMDB, most of the information you could get about films was from survey books like Baxter's, Carlos Clarens' Illustrated History of of the Horror Film, the various volumes of the Barnes' International Film Guide Series, and any number of those Walden Books' pictorial histories.

Make no mistake these were basically picture books, and in the pre-internet days, a good picture would capture your imagination like no collection of words possibly could. And for the most part that was all these authors had. That and old trade reviews, barely remembered viewings when they were younger or other 2nd hand sources. They couldn't exactly rent the things at the local Blockbuster either.

These stills served as visual relics in thin volumes of holy palimpsests. It was only later, when you discovered the late night listings in the TV Guide, your ability to program the VCR, or the rep house 15 miles out of your way, that you pulled those books down again to review where, exactly, you might have first learned about the Quartermas Xperiment.

Or Curse (Night) of the Demon. Or Myra Breckinridge.

You slowly managed most of the films in the supposed "canon," as deemed by these writers and these publishers. There's an entire generation who learned about classic horror films from Clarens, for good or ill, with wonky plot summaries, the mistakes and the omissions practically hard-coded into our (non-)memories of these films. I poured over the Tantivy Marx Brothers: Their World Of Comedy (1968) by Allen Eyles (the 6x6 square British edition) before I ever had access to the rest of the Marx films, trying to make sense of my first accidental viewing of A Night at the Opera one night on TV. Imagine reading that mad and short book about their career before having seen any of their other films (and trying to imagine Duck Soup only through a print description).

Stills from Seconds and The Manchurian Candidate made you hunger for any Frankenheimer you could find.  (Birdman of Alcatraz was your solid base hit.) Atkins went on about Metropolis, with pictures and everything in his book. And would we ever see the uncut The Wicker Man? And who the hell was Carl Dreyer?

Being a film aficionado, let alone a completist, was a long difficult journey, often involving drives to theatres in nearby towns, evenings in scary triple-bill houses on skid-row (how I saw Count Yorga after reading about it in Cinefantastique), and decades.

Danny Peary's Cult Movie books were more specific and unlike many of the others from the '60s, clearly written by someone who had actually seen the films rather than only read about them in other, older books.

When at last you caught up with a film that you had lodged in your head for years, since that first compelling, impossible black-and-white still while browsing the used bookstore shelf, it almost didn't matter whether it lived up to expectations. You began to write your own book in your head, with your own plots, your own omissions, your own canon.

The Damned is due to come out from Indicator/ Powerhouse sometime this year on blu-ray. Finally. It turns out it was already released on a Hammer "Icons of Suspense" DVD collection since 2010.

I could have satisfied my curiosity 8 years ago. Damn it. I'm not sure I want to see it anyway. Its power as a still, with the man in a rubber suit, the child looking at a flower on the edge of a cliff. What power this unseen post-bomb Hammer film from the early '60s has by remaining undefined, unseen. Lost.

Damned to obscurity and a cultural mis-remembrance. Embalmed in a book, out of print, and etched by a still in a generation of older film goers who couldn't see it for 40 years.



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