Canne’s entry in 1947, René Clément’s earlier post-war thriller THE DAMNED boasts a handsome production grandeur of its waterborne set and the verisimilitude inside a real submarine (famously for his stupendous long-take tracking shot within a pokey space), the story is told from the recollections of a young French doctor Guilbert (Vidal) hailed from the newly-liberated port town Royan, who is press-ganged at gunpoint to enter a submarine to tend to an injured woman, which is occupied by a covey of Nazi officers, soldiers and sympathizers, escaping from Oslo to South America, fantasizing to branch out a new territory when the Third Reich is in it last gasp, and the year is 1945.
The titular bunch of “the damned”, is chiefly constituted by the SS officer Forster (Jo Dest, over-eggs his abominable image here), his young sidekick Willy Morus (a glisteningly treacherous Auclair), an Italian industrialist Garosi (Giachetti, a genteel soft touch boards on the wrong voyage) and his German wife Hilde (Marly, glacial and forcibly self-destructive), the aforementioned injured, who has fallen out of love with her hubby and become the paramour of the German army general Von Hauser (a stiff Kronefeld, strangely uncredited), also presented is French journalist Couturier (Bernard, very smooth as a gregarious opportunist), a young Nordic girl Ingrid Ericksen (Campion) and her scholar father (Hector).
Clément and his co-writers carves out a lean but gripping story-line, and makes the most of the claustrophobic space to tease out the bunch’s internecine tension. Right from the off, the power play between Forster and Von Hauser is shown in their exchange about “deadweight”, and Clément gives no quarter in turning the screws on the heinous nature of the Nazi party - especially embodied by Forster’s character, who is obstinate enough to not admit that their days are numbered, and habitually turns murderous at the drop of a hat - to the extreme of instantaneously biting the hand that feeds them in the dastardly climax which grossly provokes s a belatedly mutiny.
Things do not end well for foreigners too, Garosi and Couturier take their polarized plunges as their abandon ship strategies, but their denouement is much of a muchness, so is the German’s South American contact Larga (Dalio, first billed, but only appear for 15 minutes or so), terra firma cannot save him from falling victim to radicals and paranoiacs.
As our protagonist, against our preconception, a weary and leery Guillbert is not cut out to be a hero living among wolves, all his moves are stemmed from pure self-preservation, barely he does anything to accelerate their undoing (in fact, their disintegration begins to tell as soon as those stray curs are corralled together, there is no need for an extrinsic force to set them against each other), and Clément enriches his character with profuse inner asides, an innovative touch of its time, and sits well along the slippery slope that vents his own vehement condemnation.
referential entry: Clément’s FORBIDDEN GAMES (1952, 8.7/10); Jacques Becker’s ANTOINE AND ANTOINETTE (1947, 7.5/10).
