Film Court

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August 2007

An American drifter, a scientist with a mistress who is an artist, a motor cycle gang led by a rebel without a cause, a pretty young woman ready for sex, a secret lab, sports cars, motor launches, gray rubber radiation suits and gray unmarked helicopters... and post-apocalyptic art... today it all sounds like a scenario from a J.G. Ballard story... but it is, in fact, Joseph Losey's 1963 anti-nuke film THE DAMNED
[a.k.a They Are The Damned].

Flawed, but with several brilliant sequences and an atmospheric location somewhere on the white cliffs of southern England, this forgotten film stars Macdonald Carey and a young Oliver Reed... and features the disturbing sculpture of (Dame) Elisabeth Frick, an artist associated with "the geometry of fear" style of the 50s and 60s.

"Like exotic cadavers from an atomic test site, these mutilated figures exist as beacons for the grim secret held in the caves below."

"I'd rather be insane and alive than sane and dead."

The Big Combo, 1955. Is this Richard Conte's greatest role? This is one of the last bonafide film noir dramas, was a major influence on Quentin Tarantino. Superb cine by John Alton. Early Lee van Cleef.

"It's the jungle alright, although it's defined by empty monochromatic spaces, shadows, reflected light... a gray world of cigarette smoke and urban fog, the shabby cellar of American modernism."

Brazil. Two young men, one white, one black, and a girl who is mostly white, take a boat down the coast to the "lower city" of Salvador de Bahia. A sex triangle develops....

Says Lawrence Russell: "You could say that the cinematic style of Lower City is typical of today's digi verite movie making, where the hand held camera and fast computer edit gives the action a clandestine look, as if the montage has been assembled from security camera captures. The result is a hi-concept naturalism that places the viewer right inside the action."

"The anticipation which Antonioni's film The Passenger generated prior to its release in 1975 owed something to the counter-culture's fascination with the desert, its mystery and natural minimalism... and of course Antonioni's reputation as a dramatic artist on the same level as Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, unconventional stage writers who seem to have had at least a passing influence on the great Italian muralist. Autistic dialogue, indolent action, mental and spacial alienation... in small doses, dysfunctional humans acting out their psychodramas within beautiful landscapes and designer plazas was an appealing art style... »»

Lawrence Russell takes a retrospective look at Antonioni's La Notte (1961). Much-maligned, this brilliant film is the second in a trilogy that starts with L'Avventura and closes with L'Eclisse... and is perhaps the closing statement of Italian neo-realism. Special attention is given to scenarist Ennio Flaiano who also wrote many scripts for Fellini. "It's Flaiano's sophisticated dialogue with its dry edginess and Pirandelloesque sub-text that makes their films of this period appear to be the work of a single auteur."

Ida Lupino was the first female Hollywood auteur director, and an established actress in the film noir period. LR checks her legendary indie B-thriller The Hitch-Hiker (1953) for the female touch. William Talman is great as the hitcher with an eye that never closes. Baja desert cine by Frank Murusaca who photographed all those Val Lewton B-thrillers for RKO Radio Pictures.

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