The Damned. (18.)
Directed by Luchino Visconti. 1969.
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Berger, Helmut Griem, Umberto Ursini, Reinhard Kolldehoff and Charlotte Rampling 157 mins. Out on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
This story of a rich German Industrialist's family and their decline during the early years of Nazi rule opens with a drag act being cut short - which is always a blessing. The 75th birthday party of patriarch Joaquim Von Essenbach is being ruined by his grandson Martin (Berger) doing a number dressed up as Marlene Dietrich until he is interrupted by news of the Reichstag fire in Munich. In contemporary nutjob vernacular the fire was a false flag operation to legitimise a crackdown on all opposition. It's the moment the Nazis cemented their grip on power and a suitable starting point for Visconti's epic study of the decadence and moral corruption of the Nazis – presumably he was against it, though at times it's hard to tell.
Luchino Visconti was a towering figure in Italian post-war cinema, and Italian post-war cinema was the towering figure in European post-war cinema. Oh, the French will bellyache their supremacy but theirs was predominantly a talking cure. Italian cinema took in everything from neo-realism to Hollywood on the Tibur to Spaghetti westerns to Giallo horror; they gave us Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, Rosselini, Bertolucci and Leone. And whatever it was it was always cinema: not a bunch of yakking with pictures. To stand out in that company is no mean achievement. Visconti started out as a neo-realist before diverting into lavish historical epics that, to me anyway, have something of Sergio Leone to them. Six years earlier Visconti had delivered the greatest of these, the sweeping masterpiece The Leopard. It was another historic tale of a great family tossed around by political upheaval, but while that was a majestic, subtle piece, The Damned is a hysterical, ridiculous venture. But back in 1969, riding on the new cinematic permissive, it was hailed as a shocking, X-rated masterpiece.
The Von Essenbach fortune is built on their steelworks, an operation that the Nazis, represented here by Aschenbach (Griem), an SS officer who has attached himself limpet-like to the family and always has his feet under the table when there's a big meal served. He pits the various pro and anti-Nazi elements in the family against each other. Central to his plans is Frederick (Bogarde), an executive at the steel plant who is having an affair with Joaquim's daughter Sophie (Thulin.) His smooth rise to power though is threatened initially by the nephew Constantin (Kolldehoff) and then by the rogue element Martin.
One of my chief objections to the film is the clunkiness of the storytelling. At one point there is a tussle over the fate of a shipment of weapons, whether they should be delivered to the army or the SA, and as a viewer, you have no idea what the conflict is about, or who the two sides represent. Only a half-hour later is its significance revealed. The script constantly alludes to things rather than make them explicit, which would normally be an admirable approach but as very little these characters do is logical or recognisable human behaviour, it often leaves the viewer adrift.
I think this is clearest in the character of Martin. A slightly effeminate young man, we first see him in drag and it is later mentioned that he has been observed in "certain clubs." A homosexual in Nazi Germany, that would be enough to be going on with, but the film never confirms this. Instead, it gives him a secret female lover and then makes him a paedophile, with a taste for very young girls. And that's just the half of it. It's almost like he's playing a game of degenerate bingo and by the end he's this close to crying house. One of his young victims is so upset she apparently hangs herself. She looks to be about five years old and I had to rewind this section to check that this is what had happened because I just assumed that I'd missed something. What child of that age would be able to construct a noose from a sheet? But that's what the script wants us to believe.
The story is that of a usurper usurped. Bogarde, with the help of Aschenbach, seems to have wormed his way into control of the steelworks, but then Aschenbach dumps him for Martin. Aschenbach claims this is because of his disloyal, which is harsh as right before that he had joined him in killing off the lone figure standing between him and control as part of A Night Of The Long Knives massacre. Machine gun massacres really wasn't Dirk's thing at all but he pitched in and got the job done. Of course, them Nazis were a duplicitous lot and couldn't trust one as far as you could sieg heil them, but dramatically the betrayal is too abrupt, too sudden.
The usurper usurped was mirrored behind the camera with Visconti sidelining Bogarde's character for Berger's, who he was having an affair with at the time. This is detrimental to the film as his performance – at least in the English language version I watched – is the best in the film. He does of course have home-field advantage getting to deliver the line in his native tongue but this was him in his element: he had a real capacity for playing stuffed shirts who gradually have the stuffing knocked out of them.
There are a few decently composed scenes but there is some clumsy camerawork, most notably some graceless zooms. Quite the oddest moment though comes in a scene where Thulin and Bogarde are in bed together – she's in her birthday suit, Dirk's in pyjamas – discussing their schemes for the future. The camera is on her face as she speaks but then suddenly drifts down to focus on her right tit before moving across to take in the two actors. What could possibly be the justification for that? Did the cameraman just get bored of the scene and let his camera drift with his mind?
What the film does capture very effectively is the sense of the old order being corrupted, the speed with which Nazism insinuated itself into every level of society, watching it rot before your eyes. But there's no insight into the appeal of Hitler and his National Socialism. In Visconti's vision the Germans succumbed to this evil because they were evil, or cynical. The few good apples who tried to resist met grim fates.
Visconti's film has a kinship with Fellini Satyricon, released the same year, as a celebration/condemnation of decadence. But Fellini festival of the grotesque was about a society nearly two thousand years old; the horrors of the Nazis were barely two decades away and they deserve something more insightful, and more respectful, than this. In The Damned, 1930's Germany was a furnace filled with evil characters sweating profuselly as they schemed for more power. (Everybody sweats so much you'd think they built the family mansion on top of the steelworks.)
Visconti was a gay, aristocratic communist but in his film, gays and aristocrats are inherently evil and untrustworthy, while the National Socialists are a collectivist force giving control back to the working man. By focusing on the failings of the old order you end up with a film that seems to feel that the German aristocracy was so degenerate they needed to be cleansed, or be put into uniform and their lives given purpose.
New 2K digital restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna and Institut Lumière, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
Directed by Luchino Visconti. 1969.
Starring Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Berger, Helmut Griem, Umberto Ursini, Reinhard Kolldehoff and Charlotte Rampling 157 mins. Out on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.
This story of a rich German Industrialist's family and their decline during the early years of Nazi rule opens with a drag act being cut short - which is always a blessing. The 75th birthday party of patriarch Joaquim Von Essenbach is being ruined by his grandson Martin (Berger) doing a number dressed up as Marlene Dietrich until he is interrupted by news of the Reichstag fire in Munich. In contemporary nutjob vernacular the fire was a false flag operation to legitimise a crackdown on all opposition. It's the moment the Nazis cemented their grip on power and a suitable starting point for Visconti's epic study of the decadence and moral corruption of the Nazis – presumably he was against it, though at times it's hard to tell.
Luchino Visconti was a towering figure in Italian post-war cinema, and Italian post-war cinema was the towering figure in European post-war cinema. Oh, the French will bellyache their supremacy but theirs was predominantly a talking cure. Italian cinema took in everything from neo-realism to Hollywood on the Tibur to Spaghetti westerns to Giallo horror; they gave us Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni, Rosselini, Bertolucci and Leone. And whatever it was it was always cinema: not a bunch of yakking with pictures. To stand out in that company is no mean achievement. Visconti started out as a neo-realist before diverting into lavish historical epics that, to me anyway, have something of Sergio Leone to them. Six years earlier Visconti had delivered the greatest of these, the sweeping masterpiece The Leopard. It was another historic tale of a great family tossed around by political upheaval, but while that was a majestic, subtle piece, The Damned is a hysterical, ridiculous venture. But back in 1969, riding on the new cinematic permissive, it was hailed as a shocking, X-rated masterpiece.
The Von Essenbach fortune is built on their steelworks, an operation that the Nazis, represented here by Aschenbach (Griem), an SS officer who has attached himself limpet-like to the family and always has his feet under the table when there's a big meal served. He pits the various pro and anti-Nazi elements in the family against each other. Central to his plans is Frederick (Bogarde), an executive at the steel plant who is having an affair with Joaquim's daughter Sophie (Thulin.) His smooth rise to power though is threatened initially by the nephew Constantin (Kolldehoff) and then by the rogue element Martin.
One of my chief objections to the film is the clunkiness of the storytelling. At one point there is a tussle over the fate of a shipment of weapons, whether they should be delivered to the army or the SA, and as a viewer, you have no idea what the conflict is about, or who the two sides represent. Only a half-hour later is its significance revealed. The script constantly alludes to things rather than make them explicit, which would normally be an admirable approach but as very little these characters do is logical or recognisable human behaviour, it often leaves the viewer adrift.
I think this is clearest in the character of Martin. A slightly effeminate young man, we first see him in drag and it is later mentioned that he has been observed in "certain clubs." A homosexual in Nazi Germany, that would be enough to be going on with, but the film never confirms this. Instead, it gives him a secret female lover and then makes him a paedophile, with a taste for very young girls. And that's just the half of it. It's almost like he's playing a game of degenerate bingo and by the end he's this close to crying house. One of his young victims is so upset she apparently hangs herself. She looks to be about five years old and I had to rewind this section to check that this is what had happened because I just assumed that I'd missed something. What child of that age would be able to construct a noose from a sheet? But that's what the script wants us to believe.
The story is that of a usurper usurped. Bogarde, with the help of Aschenbach, seems to have wormed his way into control of the steelworks, but then Aschenbach dumps him for Martin. Aschenbach claims this is because of his disloyal, which is harsh as right before that he had joined him in killing off the lone figure standing between him and control as part of A Night Of The Long Knives massacre. Machine gun massacres really wasn't Dirk's thing at all but he pitched in and got the job done. Of course, them Nazis were a duplicitous lot and couldn't trust one as far as you could sieg heil them, but dramatically the betrayal is too abrupt, too sudden.
The usurper usurped was mirrored behind the camera with Visconti sidelining Bogarde's character for Berger's, who he was having an affair with at the time. This is detrimental to the film as his performance – at least in the English language version I watched – is the best in the film. He does of course have home-field advantage getting to deliver the line in his native tongue but this was him in his element: he had a real capacity for playing stuffed shirts who gradually have the stuffing knocked out of them.
There are a few decently composed scenes but there is some clumsy camerawork, most notably some graceless zooms. Quite the oddest moment though comes in a scene where Thulin and Bogarde are in bed together – she's in her birthday suit, Dirk's in pyjamas – discussing their schemes for the future. The camera is on her face as she speaks but then suddenly drifts down to focus on her right tit before moving across to take in the two actors. What could possibly be the justification for that? Did the cameraman just get bored of the scene and let his camera drift with his mind?
What the film does capture very effectively is the sense of the old order being corrupted, the speed with which Nazism insinuated itself into every level of society, watching it rot before your eyes. But there's no insight into the appeal of Hitler and his National Socialism. In Visconti's vision the Germans succumbed to this evil because they were evil, or cynical. The few good apples who tried to resist met grim fates.
Visconti's film has a kinship with Fellini Satyricon, released the same year, as a celebration/condemnation of decadence. But Fellini festival of the grotesque was about a society nearly two thousand years old; the horrors of the Nazis were barely two decades away and they deserve something more insightful, and more respectful, than this. In The Damned, 1930's Germany was a furnace filled with evil characters sweating profuselly as they schemed for more power. (Everybody sweats so much you'd think they built the family mansion on top of the steelworks.)
Visconti was a gay, aristocratic communist but in his film, gays and aristocrats are inherently evil and untrustworthy, while the National Socialists are a collectivist force giving control back to the working man. By focusing on the failings of the old order you end up with a film that seems to feel that the German aristocracy was so degenerate they needed to be cleansed, or be put into uniform and their lives given purpose.
New 2K digital restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna and Institut Lumière, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
- Alternate Italian-language soundtrack
- Interview from 1970 with director Luchino Visconti about the film
- Archival interviews with actors Helmut Berger, Ingrid Thulin, and Charlotte Rampling
- Visconti On Set, a 1969 behind-the-scenes documentary
- New interview with scholar Stefano Albertini about the sexual politics of the film
- Trailer
- New English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by scholar D. A. Miller.
