13 FOR HALLOWEEN #9: Children of the Damned

Anton M. Leader’s ‘Children of the Damned’ continues the rigorous science vs. brute force debate established in Wolf Rilla’s ‘Village of the Damned’, but in all other respects this is a sequel that utterly up-ends its predecessor.

One plays out against the quaint cottages and open fields of its rural setting, the other in the cramped and sunless streets of London. One confines its drama to country houses and spic-and-span cottages, the other to grimy bedsits and abandoned buildings. One has a pragmatic retired professor as its protagonist, the other a younger impassioned psychoanalyst. One has a group of almost identical children, the other children of different nationalities. One implies that these children are the progeny of something alien, the other that they were virgin births.

And, crucially, one casts its otherworldly children firmly as villains, the other as misunderstood innocents.

Perhaps ‘Children of the Damned’ is best approached not as a sequel but a flipside or a reinterpretation. The film starts in media res with six children – variously Chinese, Nigerian, Russian, Indian, American and English – brought together for study by a UNESCO committee on child development. Tom Llewellyn (Ian Hendry) and David Neville (Alan Badel), respectively a psychologist and a geneticist, are researching the background to the English lad, Paul (Clive Powell). Their access is hampered by his mother who is hysterical and adamant that she has no business having a son since no man has ever touched her. Tom and David, in something of a sweeping generalisation, correlate her profession as photographer’s model with licentiousness and initially disbelieve her story.

Later, following an unfortunately (and mildly suspicious) road accident, Paul enters the care of his sympathetic aunt, Susan (Barbara Ferris). The children, swiftly cohering into a telepathic unit, employ mind control over Susan to assist them take shelter in a disused church. So far, so ‘Village of the Damned’. But it soon becomes apparent that Paul and his comrades are only using their mental powers when threatened, and that their coercion of Susan is merely a temporary requirement and they mean her no harm. While still crossing a certain line in terms of social norms, their behaviour is far removed from the show of force that the children of Midwich delighted in reiterating in the first movie.

A crucial narrative development has Tom initially convince the children to leave the church and report to their nations’ embassies. The callous political brinkmanship of the adult world immediately becomes apparent: their ambassadors welcome them delightedly, keen to remodel them as weapons. Telekinetics prized for their use in some potential psychic war. It can only be speculated how much inspiration ‘Children of the Damned’ had on ‘Scanners’. As with ‘Village of the Damned’, there’s a sense of the film as pre-Cronenberg Cronenberg. If anything, Cronenberg’s visceral disgust at the human condition and his major theme of God as an absent landlord is even stronger in ‘Children of the Damned’.

Naturally, the children respond to threat by using their powers against it and, several dead ambassadors later, they’re back at the church. The house of God as social realist Alamo. Yes, that’s a distinction worth emphasizing: if ‘Village’ uses its sleepy rural setting as an effective counterpoint to its fantastical concepts, then ‘Children’ is sci-fi dystopia as kitchen sink drama.

‘Children of the Damned’ uses a broader canvas and asks thornier questions than ‘Village’. It’s 15 minutes longer yet spans a shorter timeline and contains arguably less incident. It lacks the precise craftsmanship of Wolf Rilla’s direction while John Briley’s script takes longer to debate its big themes than Stirling Silliphant’s. Together, they complement, offset and challenge each other. ‘Village’ is arguably the more superbly crafted work, ‘Children’ the more intellectually satisfying.

PERSONAL FAVES: Get Carter

 

Mike Hodges’ career has had its ups and downs, but fuck me if the man didn’t make a stone cold classic first time out. ‘Get Carter’, adapted from Ted Lewis’s stark novel ‘Jack’s Return Home’, is arguably the great British crime movie. A slice of grim and unflinching northern noir, it boasts authentically gritty locations, an unapologetically amoral aesthetic, and a career-defining turn from Michael Caine. 

I’ve neglected the Personal Faves project for a while. ‘Get Carter’ is a punchy and uncompromising choice to get back into the grove with. 

 Jack Carter (Caine) is a London-based villain whose associates aren’t too keen on the idea of him taking a sabbatical in his old stamping ground of Newcastle, but Carter’s insistent. His brother Frank has died – ostensibly in a car accident, ostensibly while drunk – and Carter’s convinced he was murdered. On the train up from London, he reads Raymond Chandler’s ‘Farewell My Lovely’, and what follows is as complex in its plotting and character interrelationships as anything by Chandler, even though Carter eschews Philip Marlowe’s laconic style for a brutally direct investigative approach. 

He starts out by bracing Eric Paice (Ian Hendry), a “face” from the old days. Eric is evasive when it comes to questions about Frank, and won’t say who he’s working for now. Carter wastes no time in determining that Paice is employed as a chauffeur for gang boss Cyril Kinnear (John Osborne). He also has some probing questions for Frank’s bit on the side, Margaret (Dorothy White). Carter’s expectations that Margaret will take care of Frank’s teenage daughter Doreen (Petra Markham) – who, it is heavily intimated, might well be Jack’s daughter – are met with reluctance. 

   

Carter’s blunderings earn him the disapprobation of the local underworld and increasing pressure is exerted on him to return to London. Meanwhile, bent property developer Cliff Brumby (Bryan Mosley) tries to coerce Carter into disposing of Kinnear in order to extricate himself from the mobster’s extortion. Aided by the booze-addled Glenda (Geraldine Moffat), sometime plaything to both Kinnear and Brumby, Carter’s search for the truth is given a nudge in an unpalatable direction by her offhanded revelation that she’s appeared in blue movies for Kinnear. 

‘Get Carter’, for all its plethora of characters and complexity of narrative, is an incredibly lean movie. Its aesthetic is stripped down. The cinematography is an exercise in documentary realism. The milieu is bleak. The dialogue, though mainly sparse, offers some eminently quotable dialogue: “A pint of bitter – in a thin glass”; “Get yourself a course in karate”; “You bloody whore!”; “You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. For me, it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself.” All of these lines are the more memorable for their context. No spoilers, but Caine’s delivery of “I know you didn’t kill him. I know!” is just as chilling as the action that accompanies it. 

Anyone even remotely familiar with the film won’t need me to tell them, particularly after the above quoted moments, how much of a bastard Jack Carter is. Caine’s interest in the role sprang from the people he’d seen, in his youth, dragged into crime as an escape from poverty, a fate that could easily have been his. He referred to Jack Carter in interviews as “the ghost of Michael Caine” and described the character as a corrective to the tendency, in British cinema, to portray gangsters as comedic or inept. As Caine pointed out in a much-quoted turn of phrase, “gangsters are neither funny nor stupid”. Carter certainly isn’t. Carter’s cold, ruthless and entirely self-serving. He uses violence without a second thought, yet the violence in the film is sudden, brief and not overused. There’d be no point in a man like Carter overdoing the violence. It’s a means to an end, as is virtually everything else in his life – nothing more.

 

 Caine’s is not the only terrific performance. Ian Hendry, struggling with alcoholism, his career marooned in TV while Caine was soaring high on the big screen, is a study in malevolent contempt as Paice; Hodges played on Hendry’s resentment to draw a performance from him that stands as a career best. Softly spoken playwright John Osborne was an offbeat choice for Kinnear, but kudos to Hodges for going with him – Osborne exudes menace, and the quieter he talks (some of his dialogue is a real strain to hear), the more threatening he seems. Tony Beckley and George Sewell – the latter British television’s hard man of choice in the 70s – deliver the goods as a couple of heavies who try to take Carter down in a dockside shoot-out. Bryan Mosley, who would go straight from ‘Get Carter’ to playing a greengrocer on soap opera ‘Coronation Street’, is suitably oleaginous as Brumby. 

Passing over Britt Ekland and her nothing role as gangster’s moll Anna (quite why she gets third billing for what’s essentially a cameo is a mystery), the ladies of the cast acquit themselves just as admirably, particularly Rosemarie Dunham as Edna, the landlady whose guesthouse Carter uses as his HQ. His ejection of two hoods at gunpoint from said establishment, while naked and during a Girl Guides march-past, is one of the highlights in a film not exactly robbed of highlights. 

Seriously: how many gangster movies – in fact, how many movies in general – have so many great scenes? ‘Get Carter’ boasts probably the best car chase in British cinema, at least two on-foot chases that capture the adrenaline and the breathlessness of pursuit, an act of brutal retribution at a multi-storey car park, the aforementioned gunplay on and around a ferry, a bit of business involving a sports car and the River Tyne, some nastiness at a bookie’s shop, and a blunt and unforgettable finale set against the backdrop of an aerial ropeway dumping buckets of slag out to sea. 

   

‘Get Carter’ ends, with a sense of the inevitable, on the least glamorous beach in the history of cinema. Which is apposite since ‘Get Carter’ embraces a genre so often beholden to iconography and showy set-pieces and boils it down to its harshest, bluntest elements.