Though few would now put this in the top half of Luchino Visconti’s output (tenth out of his thirteen features?), it was by some distance the most commercially successful on release. Sex & Nazis, violence, nudity & perversion never a drag at the art-house box-office.* And, famous titled Italian Communist that he was, it’s easy to see Visconti’s attraction to the subject matter in his own brief flirtation with Nazis in the mid-‘30s. Less ideology than æsthetics, all those handsome Blonde Vikings in black & white uniforms with a blood-red accent. (A look still drawing them in.) Later, Visconti would come within a day of execution as part of the Italian Communist resistance. If only similar character complication found its way in here. Instead, it’s largely family dynasty drama, inspired by the real-life Krupps, as a couple of generations fight over who controls the metal foundries needed to weaponize the German Reich. Interloper Dirk Bogarde is murdering his way up the ranks to a tune called by his lover, eldest family daughter Ingrid Thulin. Visconti casts Helmut Berger (his exquisitely handsome partner at the time) as her perverse son, a charming psychopath who ‘reads’ gay, dresses a la Marlene Dietrich, but ravishes a young niece, a lower-class bottle blonde and eventually Mom herself. Yikes! The lad always around to pick up any family droppings as he morphs into an S.S. officer while various Nazi divisions begin taking over state & industry. Meantime, Visconti takes subversive pleasure in the orgy/murder known as The Night of Long Knives where the ‘Brownshirts’ (portrayed here as a big gay orgy club) get mown down by leather-clad SS. Handled in a manner unique in Visconti's films, with wildly roving cameras catching the action in hit & miss fashion. The whole film inferring that the decadent elite brought about Hitler’s rise when it was really more the beer-stein mob rather than champagne flute sippers who voted them in. And THE DAMNED winds up a sort of pastiche HAMLET: Berger’s Prince; Thulin’s Gertrude; Bogarde’s Claudius; working thru a family dynamic Lillian Hellman’s Little Foxes would recognize.
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: One odd moment finds composer Maurice Jarre grabbing what sounds like a leftover music cue from his own DOCTOR ZHIVAGO when Berger ‘scores’ with Mom in bed.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Homosexuality still officially (indeed legally) referred to in medical & psychological texts as a perversion in 1970.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Visconti’s other two with Berger are LUDWIG/’73 which is a crashing bore and the much maligned CONVERSATION PIECE/’74, a connoisseur’s piece but, in its own way, pretty special. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2012/06/ludwig-1972.html https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2019/10/gruppo-di-famiglia-in-un-interno.html
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