Village of the Damned (1960) — Triskaidekafiles

VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED

WRITERS: Screenplay by Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and George Barclay

DIRECTOR: Wolf Rilla

STARRING: George Sanders as Gordon Zellaby
Barbara Shelley as Anthea Zellaby
Michael Gwynn as Alan Bernard
John Phillips as General Leighton
Thomas Heathcote as James Pawle
Martin Stephens as David Zellaby

QUICK CUT: A quiet village in the British countryside invites in a bunch of newborns after a miracle

THE MORGUE

Roger Zellaby - A doctor in the town of Midwich, an older man, in love with his younger wife. He wants to see the best in people.

Anthea Zellaby - Roger’s wife, loves him right back, a doting mother. Tough for her to escape 1960s female stereotypes.

Alan Bernard - Anthea’s brother, a soldier, and more pragmatic than Roger.

David Zellaby - One of the space baby Midwich Cuckoos. Smarter than you. The arguable leader of the group. Has flashes of compassion and connection, but is largely cold and distant.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back Triskelions! To wrap up April, we are going back to Midwich, but this time we’re taking a look at the original theatrical adaptation that inspired Carpenter's remake.

The movie opens on Doctor Gordon Zellaby contacting his brother-in-law, Major Alan Bernard about their weekend plans. He then promptly proceeds to pass out, as does the entire village of Midwich.

We are wasting NO time getting to the village wide blackout, I see. I do appreciate the character-centric approach of spending time with the villagers the remake takes, but cutting right to the chase is nice, too.

Things were just so laid back, back in the day.

Alan hurries to the village, and as he's approaching, he runs into one of the local bobbies, looking for the bus that runs into town, and hasn't shown up.

They see the bus a bit up the road, having ridden off into the ditch. The cop approaches, and as he nears, he passes out.

Alan turns around to get the authorities in on this, and quickly have the location surrounded and marked off.

One of the soldiers gets into a gas mask, with a rope tied around him, to test the boundary. Once he passes out, the rest pull him back over the safety line.

I didn't do much rewatching of the remake, so any parallels I catch are strictly from memory. The soldier testing the limits of the field is a solid and sensible scene to have recreated.

The town doctor arrives just as the soldier is passing out, and he is most definitely not Christopher Reeve. In fact, he's barely even a character in the movie.

Alan has a plane fly overhead, to recon the situation. The pilot sees the whole town asleep, and nothing moving. Alan directs him to slowly lower his altitude, and to pull out the instant he feels anything weird.

Unfortunately, whatever is affecting the town does extend upwards to some extent, and it is too powerful to just pull out of. The plane goes down, crashing behind the trees.

After the crash, cows start waking up, and people are soon to follow, just as mysteriously as when they fell asleep.

Wakes up the instant someone says “walk”.

The whole town reawakens, the military pokes around searching for radiation, gas, devices, anything, and it all comes up nothing.

So time passes, life gets back to normal, and Roger's wife Anthea picks up some pickles from the local grocer. Ah, pickles. We're going for deep cliche, huh?

When she gets home, she finds Roger deep in his work, and he is busily explaining some developments he's found in the plants, when he all of a sudden stops and realises something is up with her. She gives SUCH a delightful laugh. It's just a small moment, but there's a realness and honesty to it, that I just wanted to highlight.

Since I've already covered the remake, and this movie is 50+ years old with several adaptations everyone is familiar with, I won't beat around the bush; Anthea is not the only pregnant woman in town, and this causes no small amount of problems.

We have the virgin pregnancy, but that doesn't really go anywhere here, which was again, a sensible theme to expand upon in the remake. Also, there's the guy who came back from a year traveling, to discover his wife is somehow pregnant

It doesn't take them long to put things together, and bring all the women in for examinations, showing everyone who is capable of giving birth, is now pregnant.

Naturally, Anthea doesn't take this well, and likely others, but we don’t see much from any of the other women. But we at least get to see Anthea freaking out that she doesn’t t know where these babies came from.

So of course we cut to a pub where a bunch of men are hanging around grousing. And if I had one complaint about this movie, and to be fair this is more a sign of the times than a genuine complaint, it sure does focus a lot of its story on how the MEN in this town feel about this situation, and not, y'know, the women carrying the alien babies.

But the real question is, how does this affect ME??

The night of the births comes, and I love the town doctor delivering Anthea's child, exiting the bedroom and IMMEDIATELY asking for a cigarette. Signs of the times, indeed.

We get a scene cataloguing the differences they can detect in the children with 1960s era science, and before you know it, Anthea is screaming as she creates the original arm in the boiling water scene. It's a nice sudden shock to the plot, but I do miss the slow inevitable build up to it in the remake.

A year after their birth, Zellaby pulls out a Chinese puzzle box, has Alan try and open it, and then hands it to his son, David. The child easily opens the box, and retrieves the chocolate inside. Roger then takes the box around to multiple children, and they all open it up, so they theorize they have a hivemind.

I hate that they're right, because this doesn't really demonstrate that, just that the children are all smart beyond their years.

One of the children has the box taken by one of his "brothers" and this is the first time we truly see them use their brain powers to mind control the kid, and make him give the box back.

The plot jumps ahead several years, until the kids are functionally about eight or ten years old. They are ostracized and feared by the town at large, and keep mostly to themselves. The movie later establishes only three years have passed since the incident, just to put a timeline on all this.

We are the Five in One. We’re never alone.

Alan and Roger debate the children's morality because of their actions. Alan clearly sees them as bad, as does much of the town, to one degree or the other. Roger is certain they just need to be taught. Unfortunately, one of the downsides of this movie’s time jumps, is we don’t get to see much of their mischief. We barely even hear any of it, and instead are just told, ‘they’re bad and doing bad, trust me bro!”

We spend a brief moment with David and his mother after he cuts his finger, showing him cold and distant, but oop, we have to cut to a gathering of men talking about the town instead.

They tell us there were other incidents that occurred around the globe, on the same day as Midwich, most of them dead. The military discusses what to do about Midwich, seeing them as a threat, as Zellaby tries to brush it all aside as kids being kids!

There was one incident in Midwich, California, and another in Midwich, Australia. Strange, they all happened in towns with the same unlikely name...

Zellaby does manage to convince them to give him a year, to try and teach the children some morals. If they can be convinced to be good, they could be the answer to all the world's problems.

So, all the Cuckoos are gathered at school, with Zellaby teaching them, and he asks them some questions. Wondering how deep into his mind they can read, do they know about aliens, stuff like that. They establish their powers are strong, and getting better every moment, but remain silent on any sort of extraterrestrial origins.

Later, someone nearly runs over one of the Cuckoos, and they mentally command him to drive into a wall.

Anthea sees the incident, but the children wipe her mind of the events, showing their growing power. She only remembers seeing the man get out of the car, then drive into the wall.

Thanks to her testimony, the court rules the death an accident, but the man's brother doesn't believe it. He shows up later ready to shoot the kids.

The Zellabys and Alan see Jim, and tell him to go home before it's too late. Unfortunately, it is too late, the Cuckoos see him, and make him shoot himself with the rifle. As well as making the other adults watch, making it clear the threat of their power. Even Roger finds it hard to deny the children's malicious intent.

Meanwhile, things are not going well in one of the few colonies that survived besides Midwich. The Russians swiftly wiped an entire town off the map when it was clear they became too powerful. The British military is contemplating the same, seeing Roger is not getting through to them.

Ah, the local mob has finally decided to intervene.

The townsfolk decide to take matters into their own hands, and that goes swimmingly well, until David makes their ringleader set himself on fire.

Alan confronts the children, and they know they're the only ones left. They are determined to survive, much like the alien virus from Evilution. They melt Alan's brain, sending him into a state of shock. It seems like he'll survive, but the warning is clear, even to Zellaby.

Roger reveals he has talked with the military, and they know soldiers aren't the answer, as the children would only make them shoot each other. Which must have been a line Carpenter glommed onto, because he had that exact thing play out in the remake.

David shows up and tells Zellaby that they must leave, and he shall make arrangements for the children to do just that, and find families to take them in. They are almost at the point where they can spread out and "make new colonies".

I can never set these right, always blinking 12…

Much like in the remake, Zellaby puts together a bomb, takes it to the school when he goes to meet with the children, and uses the mental image of a brick wall to hold them off until it's too late.

Unlike the remake, there is no escape, Roger and all the children go boom, and the town reacts to the explosion as the credits roll.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: This looks great. It’s well preserved and presented, with the contrast sharp and solid.

Audio: Perfectly great.

Sound Bite: “It shows I was right to marry your sister, your family has brains."

Body Count: A very light body count this week, which doesn’t help to push the narrative, but here we are.

1 - Twelve and a half minutes in, and the airplane pilot surely dies in his crash.
2 - The children make a man crash his car
3 - James Pawle is made to shoot himself
4 - The children make one of the mob set themselves on fire,
5 - Zellaby blows himself and all the children up.

Best Corpse: Not much is shown, so I have to go with the man on fire. Because have you met me?

Blood Type - F: No real effects here in the way of blood or makeup. The best we get is a light burn from the boiling water, and the glowing eyes. It ain’t that kind of movie.

Sex Appeal: Again, just not that type of movie.

Drink Up! every time the movie has a woman voicing her concerns

Movie Review: I quite like this. It’s a solid, creepy story with a slow build of threat. But it’s not without its problems, mostly due to when it was made, and how stories were told. I mentioned most of my complaints in the main synopsis, and the biggest remains that the focus isn’t really on the women and only barely on the children. It really could’ve used more mischief by the children, as we’re told they’re bad a lot, but see very little. And one of the recurring problems of all the adaptations of Wyndham’s story, is the time jumps. You have to spend at least X amount of time with the town, getting to know them, before the blackout, before the birth, before the kids are old enough to DO anything. This take at least gets right into the blackout, and we spend time with the townsfolk as they react, getting to know them that way, but it’s still a bit before the kids are even in their own movie. But even with these problems, particularly a lack of the kids doing much, the movie does enough, and builds enough, that there is this thread of dread throughout the movie, playing on fears of invasion, being replaced, and the like, that was big at the time. And for a thriller from 1960, it works very well, and the acting is great. This movie is a classic for a reason. Four out of five glowing eyes.

Entertainment Value: Ah the curse of good movies being good. It’s solid, and the acting is good, so there’s not to really laugh at, and it’s more suspense and mood, and no real effects to ogle. It’s just…a good movie. If you key in on how much the movie focuses on the men reacting and the military presence, there’s fun to be had there, but it’s just a decent movie to watch and enjoy. Three out of five puzzle boxes.