Cahiers du Cinema III: Village of The Damned

A film called "The Midwich Cukoos" is only going to attract Bill Oddie and trainspotters in their weird, sellotape-spectacled version of rehab.

So the not-at-all-spooky-sounding Wolf Rilla was right to rename his reverential cinematic version of John Wyndham's "Help! Our kid's a alien!" novel "Village of the Damned" in order to pull in the Hammer House of Horror crowd, despite what Mrs Boyo rightly noted as its dearth of Mediaeval eschatology.

I showed the film to Mrs B the other night, partly to aid her research into my hinterland ("There's a whole monograph there," she says) and as a cautionary tale about letting our daughter Arianrhod spend so much time talking to bees.

Mrs Boyo seemed to agree with my view that the central thesis of the film ("Blondes are not to be trusted") had held up well over the intervening 48 years. I was pleased that it had retained its pace and tension, revealed much about the dynamics of 1950s village life in England, and included the Greatest Living Dai-aspora Welshmen Peter "Grouty" Vaughan as "fainting deferential policemen No.1".

It was only while discussing Grouty's powerful performance with motor-muddle celebrity blogger Scaryduck over a vat of pig lager that the main plot flaw in the film occured to me.

Silken suave gentleman scholar and poignantly punctual suicide George Sanders concentrates on the image of a brick wall, so that the telepathic pre-teens cannot read his mind and see he's planted a bomb in their midst.

A masterly sequence in the film shows their short-trousered mental efforts to blast the image away, brick by brick, until they reveal the bomb - too late.

In my Fostered epiphany, I realised that Sanders was tragically too old and genteel to recall his own pre-adolescent state. Otherwise he would have ditched his brick wall in favour of the one image guaranteed to distract his charges - Big Knockers.

It's true. If he'd thought of a pair of giant love jugs, the kids would have been transfixed. The boys would have thought "Mmmm, big ones", thereby setting their mental coordinates for the next 60 years.
The girls would have thought "So that's it. Sod deportment, cooking and bridge, if I want one of these apemen to do my bidding all I need is some hankies until Eva Herzigová invents the Wonderbra."

The whelps would have still been pondering the mysteries of the mammary as George's sturdy, English bomb blew their pointy heads to all corners of Watford. He could have sauntered out of the school and celebrated by making normal babies with Barbara Shelley.

And, who knows, the real Sanders might have decided not to leave us in that Catalonian hotel room in 1972, but rather to live on and stop John Carpenter's remake.

And all for want of a D-cup.