You are damned
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | You are damned |
| Original title | The Damned |
| Country of production | United Kingdom |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1963 |
| length | 91 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Joseph Losey |
| script | Evan Jones based on the novel The Children of Light by HL Lawrence |
| production |
Anthony Hinds Anthony Nelson-Keys |
| music | James Bernard |
| camera | Arthur Grant |
| cut | Reginald Mills |
| occupation | |
| |
You Are Damned is a 1961 British drama film. The film was directed by Joseph Losey and is based on the novel The Children of Light by HL Lawrence.
action
Simon Wells, a middle-aged American tourist cruising the south coast of England, makes a brief stop in Weymouth . While strolling through the lively streets of the city, in front of a clock tower, he meets the much younger Joan, who gives him a brief moan from the side, whereupon Simon, fascinated by this girl, follows her. Little does he know that the 20-year-old is a member of a motorcycle gang called Teddy Boys, which is led by Joan's brother King. This gang targets unsuspecting tourists who can be robbed. Simon, who has just left a marriage in the States and has given up his well-paying job as an insurance manager in order to be able to start again elsewhere, is now being guided to a quieter part of town by Joan, the victim of King's unrestrained brutality. His boys beat up Wells and steal from him. King himself doesn't get his hands dirty. Two gentlemen pick up the beaten up Simon and first take him to the nearest café so that he can freshen up and relax there.
Here Wells meets the mysterious Bernard, who heads a nearby military facility, and his partner, Freya Neilson, an artist. The next morning, Joan has the audacity and visits Simon on his boat, which is still anchored in Weymouth Harbor. The American is amazed at her presence and receives Joan, who he now knows is in league with the Teddy Boys, initially coolly. The gang members who had temporarily lost sight of Joan soon join them and force Simon's departure. Joan has somehow found a liking to the much older man and also loves it to provoke her brother King, who is not ready to tolerate this contact. Joan runs away down the hall and jumps on Simon's boat, which is in full speed. A gang member tries to do the same and falls into the harbor basin. Then the motorcycle hooligans downright hunt down the American. One lurks on the coast and watches the boat with binoculars. Simon follows Joan's request and drops her a few kilometers further on the coast. Meanwhile, Bernard has returned to the strictly shielded military facility and, as he does every day, is holding his question-and-answer session with children in a lower class room via a television monitor. As always, he has the same evasive answer to your most urgent question, why you have to live so shielded here: namely that the day will come when you will understand all this.
Wells and his 20-year-old travel companion have gone ashore and are climbing up the rocky coast. They break into the artist's studio of the sculptor Freya in the middle of the barren coastal landscape and want to spend the next night there together. King's Coast Guard has returned to Weymouth and tells his boss about Simon's and Joan's shore landing. King rounds up his gang members. In the middle of the night, Simon and Joan are pinned up by the sound of an engine. They escape the house at the last second and flee outside, assuming that King and his pack have tracked them down here. But it is only Freya who returns to her house. Then King appears out of nowhere and asks Freya excitedly where Joan is. A heated argument ensues between the two, in which King, beside himself with anger, hits one of their statues with an ax. Meanwhile, Joan and Simon sneak away in the dark. Chased by King and his people, they are cornered more and more until they come to the chain link fence of Bernard's top-secret military compound. Surrounded by the hooligans, Joan and Simon decide to climb over the fence. The alarm is automatically triggered in the system and soldiers with guard dogs move out. One of the Teddy Boys is arrested and interrogated by Major Holland. He's just as wet and snotty as he is clueless.
King followed his sister and the American. In the dark of night, all three of them did not see the end of the coastal plateau and fell into the depths. The children from the classroom found them outside the coast and are taking them to a complex of several rock caves that is connected to the bunker system of the military base. These nine children, all eleven years old, all have one and the same quality. They have icy temperatures and thus look like dead. King, doggedly on the hunt behind Simon, fell like the other two adults from a cliff into the sea. He, too, is rescued by a boy from this mysterious group of children and taken to the cave. All nine children are well dressed and well fed; none of them seem seriously ill. Initially, the adults do not know that the children are under constant video surveillance by Bernard's people and that they are part of a top-secret experimental project. The children are regularly visited by men in special suits designed to protect against radioactivity. The girls and boys refer to these people as the "black death". Project leader Bernard has given the children a room without video surveillance, and due to the lack of cameras, they believe that this particular room is unknown to their guards. So they put Joan and Simon there, on the assumption that the two are their parents who have now returned and must be protected from the military. There the fled adults are also provided with food.
Simon and Joan are shocked by the living conditions of the eleven year old. You realize that here children are being abused in the name of science and with government support for an ethically deeply reprehensible research arrangement. The American-British lovers devise a plan to save the hypothermic children from science. The selfish king is persuaded to take part in this action. But Bernard has long known about the unwanted new three guests in the children's cave and presses them via television to deliver the adults to him. For the first time, the children rehearse the revolt against their dominant master and destroy the surveillance cameras in their classroom, where the children are instructed by "Big Brother" Bernard via screen. Thereupon Bernard sends three of his men in dark anti-radiation suits downstairs to bring the cave dwellers to their senses. But the men are overwhelmed by King and Simon, who are now pulling together for the first time. In self-defense, King shoots one of the men with a machine gun that he had taken from another man in a radiation suit. Simon takes a Geiger counter from one of Bernard's men, Major Holland, and finds, to his greatest horror, that everything down here, especially the bodies of the little ones, is radioactive . Wells orders the escape and lets King Major Holland tie up.
The path to freedom is suddenly stopped by numerous other men in protective suits, who catch everyone and bring the wriggling and screaming children back to the bunker. Freya witnesses what has happened and makes serious moral reproaches to Bernard, who has joined him. Bernard allows Simon and Joan to leave the area, knowing they won't get very far. The children in the cave had been exposed to atomic radiation for too long. Meanwhile, King wants to pull away with Freya's car. The boy who saved him from the water the day before gets into the car with him. The ionizing radiation quickly makes King feel sick. Two helicopters bring him to a stop. Men jump out of the helicopters and grab the boy. King drives on with his vehicle, but eventually gets into a police cordon. He shoots his car through a bridge railing and deliberately falls to his death.
Wells and Joan take Simon's boat out to sea, but they too are overwhelmed by severe nausea. A helicopter appears above them too. Joan is the first to suspect that she will soon die and lies down while Simon continues to steer the boat. There is a violent dispute between Bernard and Freya. Bernard explains to her that the children were born contaminated, as their mothers were once victims of a nuclear accident. The children had now, to his regret, really become prisoners when they were allowed to sniff the air of freedom for a few seconds. The radioactively contaminated children are supposed to ensure the survival of the human race on a nuclear devastated earth in the event of a nuclear strike, which Bernard regards as "inevitable". The entire project serves this goal, explains Bernard. Freya is deeply shocked and disgusted. Given their reaction, Bernard sees no option but to shoot Freya. In the final scene, the desperate screams of the imprisoned children echo unheard along the coast: "Please, help us, someone help us, please !!".
Production notes
They Are Damned was made in 1961 - at the height of fear of a global nuclear war (from the Berlin crisis in 1958 to the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961) - on the English filming locations of Portland Bill and Weymouth (both in the county of Dorset) and in the Bray Studios in the county of Berkshire . The world premiere took place on May 19, 1963 in London; in Germany, the thriller was first shown on September 23, 1973 as part of a Joseph Losey series on ARD. The cost of manufacture was around £ 170,000.
Michael Carreras was the line producer for this production, which was produced as part of the family-owned Hammer Films . Hammer film chief architect Bernard Robinson created the sparse film structures .
Reviews
In the lexicon of the international film it says: “The exciting protocol of a no longer just utopian psychological terror, with which Losey demonstrates the danger of an" internal violence "which he repeatedly attacks and at the same time criticizes the military and a science of logistical simulation games. The children are not described as innocent, ignorant victims of adult arbitrariness, but rather try, albeit ultimately in vain, to evade programming and repression by the adults. "
“His next work,“ You are damned ”, was an extremely cleverly designed and shivering piece of cinema with a completely unexpected twist. What began as a seemingly harmless story about the love between an American and the sister of the leader of a 'Teddy Boy' gang suddenly and radically turned into a harrowing horror story about the catastrophic consequences of a state-sanctioned, criminal experiment by ethically unscrupulous scientists . "
Halliwell's Film Guide characterized the film as follows: "Absurdly self-important, depressing and confused science fiction melodrama."
"The American director Joseph Losey (" The Mediator ") understands his cool, stylized science fiction film (1962) as a" didactic piece about internal violence "and a" vision of the total domination of humans ": children, through a nuclear explosion radioactively contaminated and since then immune to radiation, are held captive in a cave hiding place with state approval and programmed for their duties as the last survivors of the "end times catastrophe". "
Individual evidence
- ↑ You are damned. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed October 17, 2015 .
- ^ Leslie Halliwell : Halliwell's Film Guide, Seventh Edition, New York 1989, p. 242
Web links
- They are condemned in the Internet Movie Database (English)