While filming "The Damned," Joseph Losey was approached by the Hakim brothers to direct an adaptation of James Hadley Chase' s novel. Loathing the first script, Losey fashioned a new screenplay, transferring the location from Hollywood to Venice, and with his stellar cast, filmed and delivered a cut that ran about two hours and forty-five minutes.

The producers withdrew the film as Italy's official entry at the Cannes film festival until Losey agreed to reduce the movie to about two hours, though by that time bad blood had developed between the Hakims and Losey.

KINO's DVD contains a mixed bag of elements that present the only versions of Losey's arty, and indulgent drama; yet they reveal the flaws of the director's excessive fixations on visual ornamentation, and his gift for a directorial style that would later coalesce with better restraint in "The Servant."

The menu defaults to the English version that was released in Britain and the U.S. (retitled as "Eve") with a more regional English dub track over some of the surviving Italian-language exchanges with Virna Lisi; in the longer version, actress Anna Proclemer provides a more natural English dubbing that's matches Lisi's performance.

The longer version is taken from a beat-up, high contrast Scandinavian source (apparently the only print of the 119 min. cut in existence), with burnt-in Swedish & Finnish subtitles for all non-English dialogue; the shorter version, with the Rank logo, has non-removable English subtitles for the non-English dialogue.

Overall, the longer cut has a number of extra scenes between Stanley Baker ( last seen in Losey's "The Criminal" ) and his masochistic courting of bitch supreme (played with bravado by Jeanne Moreau), though missing is a dock scene (oddly present in the shorter English version) where Baker injures his hand before the film's final confrontation between himself and angry Moreau. That continuity gap is one of a handful viewers will sense, though Michel Legrand's mimic of a Miles Davis/Gil Evans jazz album (Losey had originally wanted Davis to score the film) is less brutalized than the short version.

Both versions, however, aren't anamorphic and the English version is taken from a PAL master without proper time corrections to smooth out the sped-up look of what's otherwise a crisp transfer. The mono mix in the longer version is pretty much a muddy, harsh, garbled mess, while the shorter version sports a very clean mix that retains a better balance between music, dialogue, and Losey's precise sound effects design.

It's a real mixed bag of elements, but until there's a desire to mount a proper restoration from surviving elements, this is as close of a sampling that Loseyphiles will get of the director's legendary art flick.

© 2002 Mark R. Hasan