In the Flesh: Death Line

“Well there’s a stroke of luck,” inspector Calhoun (Donald Pleasance) says brightly upon learning that a crew of subway workers has been brutally assaulted and killed. “Murder’s police business.” Like everything else in Gary Sherman’s Death Line, the invisible, immutable borders of class and station are everywhere in the film’s exploration of police interest and indifference. Working class people vanish into files of those declared missing. Vanished members of the upper crust are bones of contention between the blue collar constabulary, represented by Calhoun, and his nemesis the genteel and toweringly condescending Stratton-Villiers, MI5 (Christopher Lee). Beneath both parties live a nameless man (Hugh Strong) and his equally nameless lover (June Turner), largely non-verbal cannibal descendants of the survivors of an 1892 cave-in during the digging of the London Underground. As we meet the pair the woman, heavily pregnant, lies dying, succumbing to malnutrition and a strain of rat-borne plague. The decrepit, scab-covered man sobs at her bedside, powerless to help her.

There is an incredible sense of naturalism to Strong’s performance, a loneliness deeper than anything any human mind could endure while remaining sane. He places scavenged trinkets on the breasts of his departed loved ones. He weeps bitterly at his loss. When in a fit of confusion and rage he thunders “Mind the doors!” at the fleeing Patricia Wilson (Sharon Gurney) it is without comprehension or connection to reality, a talismanic phrase preserved across increasingly debased and squalid generations. Be safe. Take care. Come back to me. Sherman lavishes attention on the man’s surroundings, first on the horrors of his larder where human haunches lie half-eaten under seething hills of rats and bodies hang from coat hooks on the walls in varying stages of decomposition, then upon its tragic echo in the bodies of the long-dead miners and their descendants, some still recognizably human, others long since decayed into leathery husks festooned with cobwebs. Men and women lying stiff as saints in ancient bunks. Children who died without ever once seeing the sun.

Sherman’s shots of the world beneath modern London are astonishingly beautiful, landscapes of red brick slicked black with water and the hazy aureoles of flashlights floating through the dark. There is something of The Third Man about them, these endless halls and alcoves, or of the sewer pipes and ruins of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Everything serves to emphasize division. When Stratton-Villiers and Calhoun, one with the joint surname of Anglo-Norman invaders, the other of the conquered Scots, bicker over jurisdiction Sherman neatly snaps the famous 360 rule, positioning each man staring straight into the camera as the shot-reverse shot scene unfolds. If nothing can bring these two men together, what hope is there for the nameless man, for his nameless wife and their nameless, lifeless child who never drew breath, much less felt sunlight on his ulcerated skin? The world of Sherman’s London is pulling itself apart with teeth and fingernails, and woe to those bits torn off and then forgotten.