The Damned (Losey, 1961) & Figures in a Landscape (Losey, 1970)
Roxy Bar and Screen, 7pm
This great Joseph Losey double-bill comes courtesy of FilmBar70 and you can find out more about the film club and tonight's screening here.
Time Out review of The Damned:
'Certainly the strangest Hammer film ever made, this combines apocalyptic sci-fi, teen rebellion, and portentous philosophising to awkward but riveting effect. Set, strangely but successfully, in Weymouth, it begins as a rather mundane romance, with Carey and Field threatened by local Teddy Boys, before spiralling into a dour mystery about a scientist's experiments with radioactive kids. The performances are universally weak, and Losey's clearly ambivalent attitude towards the demands of the genre ensures that the film is never exciting. But as an ambitious oddity, it exerts not a little fascination.' Geoff Andrew
Here is an extract.
FilmBar70 introduction for Figures in a Landscape:
Long neglected, Losey’s idiosyncratic and spectacular take on the chase movie is possibly the greatest example of the existential actioneer, combining elements of Tarkovsky, Beckett, Bresson, Antonioni, MacLean and McTiernan with equal aplomb. Two men (Robert Shaw and Malcolm MacDowell) flee across an unknown and rugged terrain, running from an unknown crime, constantly pursued and harassed by an unknown nemesis personified in the form of a black helicopter. With a screenplay by Shaw himself (that draws upon Pinter’s elliptical style), ‘Figures’ is oblique, exciting, strange and surprisingly funny. Featuring incredible cinematography that documents a truly sublime and vertiginous landscape, an intense performance by Shaw (that prefigures his character in ‘Jaws’) and stunt work (performed mainly by the two leads) that can be described as utterly insane, ‘Figures’ expertly fuses art and action to create a quintessentially ‘70s cinematic experience.
Here is an extract
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