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"The age of senseless violence" by Joseph Losey. Byron and Hiroshima are among the preliminaries, the tone is set by "Black Leather Rock" ("Crash crash crash..."). A horizontal scan of the Dorset coast segues into a pair of slow vertical spirals (down from Weymouth's Jubilee Clock to a sightseeing Yank, up from a gang of Teddy Boy stompers to a column of royal statuary): Tourist (Macdonald Carey), hoodlum (Oliver Reed), and between them Shirley Anne Field's derrière. Suffocating family bonds, escape by boat, refuge in the seaside lair of the acerbic sculptress (Viveca Lindfors). Abstract carvings ("Sort of unfinished, isn't it?"), underneath them a top-secret government project—a bunker for radioactive children, "a good education" from the paranoid executive (Alexander Knox). "After the first great explosion, strange, wonderful flowers." Modern relationships have become the stuff of science-fiction, reality belongs to the literal offspring of the Atomic Age, thus Losey in HammerScope. Fallout boys and girls, cold to the touch before a schoolroom monitor (cf. Rilla's Village of the Damned, also Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451); their liberation means contamination, an unsettling subjective prowl across their quarters turns out to be a POV from inside a protective suit. Reed the stunted kid on the warpath, the tentative couple on a poisoned vessel in the middle of the ocean, no match for Kafkaesque systems. A strain from The Boy with Green Hair leads to the closing vision (young cries echoing over craggy cliffs), the Figures in the Landscape helicopters are visible. "To whom the goodly earth and air/ Are bann'd, and barr'd—forbidden fare..." Carey the middle-aged expatriate might suggest Losey, but his true stand-in is Lindfors' misanthropic bohemian, who faces inescapable oblivion by defiantly pressing on with art. "Well. Back to work." With Kenneth Cope, Walter Gotell, James Villiers, and Tom Kempinski. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |