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This unbelievable if ultimately frustrating production fuses two motifs familiar from earlier Visconti works: the historical spectacular (Senso, The Leopard) and the family saga (La Terra trema, Rocco and His Brothers) . But there almost any similarity with the director’s early films ceases altogether. The Damned is history as Walpurgisnacht, focusing upon the peripeties of a German family of industrialists-evidently modeled upon the Krupps–whose secret repository of vices gives recent meaning to the stock phrase “skeleton in the closet”. On the eve of the Reichstag fire, the Von Essenbecks, owners of an considerable steel factory with finish aged ties to the military, regain to celebrate the birthday of the family patriarch, Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals) .
The heir to the dynasty is the glowing, amoral Martin (Helmut Berger), the only child of Joachim’s son who has died in World War I and the aesthetic, unscrupulous Baroness Sophie Von Essenbeck (Ingrid Thulin) . Sophie is enamored of the ambitious Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde), and plans to employ her son as a pawn to promote Friedrich’s rise to power as head of the family business. Yet Sophie, in spite of her passionate treasure for Friedrich, is pathologically attached to Martin, who in turn has a psychopathic attraction to miniature girls. To guarantee the Nazis’ control of the steel works, Friedrich conspires with the diabolical SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem) in the killing of mature Joachim, and later in the assassination of Martin’s uncle Konstantin (Rene Koldehoff) during a homosexual orgy of SA followers on the Night of the Long Knives. But Friedrich’s petty Machiavellian schemes to come his beget personal fortunes are readily outmatched by the marvelous cunning and ruthlessness of the Mephistophelean Nazis with whom he has sealed his Faustian pact.
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It would be an understatement to report The Damned as oppressive. One of the standard conventions of older Italian films about fascism had been to pit bestial Nazis against numerically corrupt but morally pleasurable adversaries-the prototype is Roberto Rossellini’s Initiate City. However, in this movie the forces of cross seem invincible. The film concludes-after Friedrich and Sophie have been forced to commit suicide following their nuptials-with images of a blast furnace: history being transformed into an inferno by the power of the total station.
Visconti further reinforces the pervasive mood of suffocation, an asphyxia nearly as great physical as apt and political, with a pleasing utilize of color mise en scène, emphasizing brown, shadowy, and red shades, brilliantly realized by his directors of photography, Pasqualino De Santis and Armando Nannuzzi. Ever since shooting Senso, the director had shown a sensitivity to the expressive possibilities of color, but here he really outdid himself, without ever falling into the pictorialism that mars The Leopard as well as Death in Venice, and even more Ludwig. (Anyone who writes a book on the history of color cinematography one day will have to devote an entire chapter to Visconti.)
In his early films, Visconti seemed as worthy rooted in the 19th century as D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, or John Ford, a committed leftist who nevertheless owed as worthy to the humanistic realism of Alessandro Manzoni as to the economic and political doctrines of Karl Marx. But his career underwent a mutation in the1960s, signs of which are more evident in the febrile Sandra (1965), with its incestuous brother-sister relationship, than in the pallid, pious adaptation of Albert Camus’ The Stranger (1967) . The unique, apocalyptically charged title of The Damned is La Caduti degli dei or The Descend of the Gods, an allusion to the final opera in The Ring of the Nibelung, bringing in both Richard Wagner-one of the spiritual godfathers of Nazism-as well as Wagner’s vision of a fiery consummation of human history in the conflagration of Valhalla.
Yet Visconti’s world ends in The Damned neither with a bang nor a whimper, but a fascist travesty of the heritage of European civilization, from art of feeble times down to the German cinema of the 1920s and 1930s. In this regard, the movie adopts the overtly deconstructive stance of postmodernism towards the past by showing how once viable cultural traditions can be corrupted and thus irretrievably lost. More of an allegory out of Sigmund Freud or Wilhelm Reich than a historical characterize, The Damned does not at all grasp up where The Leopard stopped, but anticipates in both dramatic strategy and style Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, which in a memorable sequence juxtaposes the choral finale of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony-already made grotesque by being performed on a synthesizer-with images of Adolf Hitler strutting before his rapt admirers extracted from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
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In my absorb view, Visconti was one of the tremendous directors in the history of the cinema, but The Damned is an agonistic work rather than an accomplished one, the characterize of an artist’s struggle with his gain personal demons. Quiet, The Damned is far more impressive than any of Bernardo Bertolucci’s psychosexual exercises in interpreting history-not to mention a rebuke to such Fellini psychedelic schlock as Julietta of the Spirits or Satyricon–and Visconti got invaluable wait on from his cast, especially Ingrid Thulin and Dirk Bogarde, although some viewers may have a jam with Helmut Berger as the epicene Martin. Warner Home Video asks quite a stiff notice for this tape, which does not seem to me wholly justified. The represent quality is adequate in copies I have seen, but this version is the R rated one, missing some footage deleted to change the unusual X-the IMDb gives the Italian running time as 155 minutes– and the aspect ratio is not 1.85 letterbox as it should be, but chubby mask television.
Directed by Luchino Visconti in 1969 (during a period of exceptional fecundity of controversial and political films) this film stars Dirk Bogard, Ingrid Thulin and Helmut Berger. This trio has an incredible energy which allows for noteworthy and shining tableaus throughout the film. But also these actors become an ingenious gaze in themselves of the already corrupted middle and upper class German life; They are mere refuse from Germany’s now dying Weimar Republic.
The yarn begins in the first year of Hitler’s unique Germany, and extends through mid 1934, peaking at Hitler’s betrayal and massacre of his bear idealistic and real SA troops headed by Ernst Rhome, a man he had loved.
The indispensable myopia and self-aggrandizing nature of these ruthless Nazi military capitalists (the trio and their cohorts), blends well with their all pervasive lack of splendid morality. This upper crust elite, abetted by the already effective propaganda machine stale by the Nazi party, paints a radiant portrait of Germany’s first year adjustment and committment to the fascist space.
Hauntingly revealing of the nature of creature human’s ability to not know what s/he knows. Not unlike today and the average person’s minimal take of honest what the military industrial complex is doing within this Country as well as outside this Country.
Visconti’s sets are often authentic structures or painstakingly exaggerated replications. To increase the drama and sheer size of these sets, some were built with walls slanting inward to agument their ample size. The costumes are detailed, sparkling and define enough to add to the already dramatic tale and fanciful sets.
This film is worthwhile viewing if for no other reason than to gawk the young Helmut Berger in his debut as a character of gross complexity, scandalous and deviousness. As a young Nazi, blond and elegant, he easily reflects the fresh Germany he is supposed to picture. Visconti’s “The Damned” is a film that is as contemporary with human lesson and meaning today as it would have been had it actually been made in Germany in 1933 and 1934.
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Michael Meyers