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DVD The Damned
This brooding, operatic movie about Nazism makes Cabaret look like wholesome family fare. The family in The Damned is a symbol of German society circa 1934. The Krupp-like steel magnate Baron von Essenbeck represents the spineless establishment. The Nazis kill the baron, then frame one heir apparent, a socialist (married to the stunning Charlotte Rampling). A bearish, boorish Essenbeck representing the SA, the Nazis' early goon squad, takes the reins. But Hitler murdered the SA in the 1934 "Night of the Long Knives," providing The Damned with its bravura action scene, a Nazi massacre at a gay SA orgy. The winning Essenbeck is the murderous, pedophilic, transvestite, mother-rapist Martin (sharp-featured Helmut Berger), who represents Nazism. Though he's better in director Luchino Visconti's 1971 Death in Venice, Dirk Bogarde is classy as Martin's stepdad. The Damned got an Oscar screenplay nomination, and Vincent Canby called Berger's Martin "the performance of the year." --Tim Appelo
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 extraordinary energy which allows for powerful and brilliant tableaus throughout the film. But also these actors become an ingenious study in themselves of the already corrupted middle and upper class German life; They are mere refuse from Germany's now dying Weimar Republic.
The story begins in the first year of Hitler's new Germany, and extends through mid 1934, peaking at Hitler's betrayal and massacre of his own idealistic and loyal SA troops headed by Ernst Rhome, a man he had loved.
The essential myopia and self-aggrandizing nature of these ruthless Nazi military capitalists (the trio and their cohorts), blends well with their all pervasive lack of genuine morality. This upper crust elite, abetted by the already effective propaganda machine used by the Nazi party, paints a vivid portrait of Germany's first year adjustment and committment to the fascist state.
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 grasp of just 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 huge size. The costumes are detailed, elegant and elaborate enough to add to the already dramatic story and fanciful sets.
This film is worthwhile viewing if for no other reason than to see the young Helmut Berger in his debut as a character of extreme complexity, evil and deviousness. As a young Nazi, blond and beautiful, he easily reflects the new Germany he is supposed to represent. 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.
Springtime For Hitler
I think I understand what Camp is. "The Damned" is a film taking upon itself the allegorical rise and fall of Nazi Germany in such an overindulgent manner that one cringes and giggles at the same time. I guess Gay folks everywhere can blame Luchino Visconti the "great" director for making a laughing stock out of homosexuals in Nazi SS garb. Mel Brooks realized in his film "The Producers" that Nazi's are damn funny, but not even Brook's vision could foresee the downfall of the Essenbeck family as the currents of early Nazi bloodshed swirls about. The uniforms are Art Deco at its worst. The young blonde, Aryan, cross-dressers are a bathhouse dream until they're lined up against the wall. Rome may have had Caligula, but The Reich had blonde pedophiles. What a thrill to see Helmut Berger swishing about in Marlene Dietrich bodice and stockings. I watched the whole thing and I'm going to end this review to take a shower.
Visconti's grand failure
From the Director of Death in Venice and the Leopard, comes an appalling mess of a film. While it has visual style, superb looking actors and directorial flourish, it simply goes way over the top. Martin - the personification of evil - is both a child molestor and mother fixated as well as being a transvestite.
In the Leopard, Visconti weaved history and cinema together. In the Damned, he creates a parody of that work. The Nazis were one of the great scourges of the twentieth century and 50 million people died to destroy them.
Visconti had a great idea of witnessing the Nazi's rise through a Krupp style family, but he simply lapses into poor taste and high camp too often.
Luchino Visconti's adaptation of the Thomas Mann novel is the very definition of sumptuous: the costumes and sets, the special geography of Venice, and the breathtaking cinematography combine to form a heady experience. At the center of this gorgeousness is Aschenbach (Dirk Bogarde in a meticulous performance), a controlled intellectual who unexpectedly finds himself obsessed by the vision of a 14-year-old boy while on a convalescent vacation in 1911. Visconti has turned Aschenbach into a composer, which accounts for the lush excerpts from Mahler on the soundtrack (Bogarde is meant to look like Mahler, too). Even if it tends to hit the nail on the head a little too forcefully, and even if Visconti can test one's patience with lingering looks at crowds at the beach and hotel dining rooms,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Dirk Bogarde Director(s): Luchino Visconti DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Ossessione isn't just the finest film version of The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain's classic tale of murder, betrayal, and erotic obsession; it's also the first masterpiece of Italian neorealism and a key historical precursor of film noir. A handsome drifter (Massimo Girotti) fetches up at an isolated roadhouse, gets mutually besotted with the proprietor's sultry wife (Clara Calamai), and has soon carried out a plot to murder the older man in an apparent off-road accident. That's only the beginning, of course. In his directorial debut, Luchino Visconti weaves a sensuous, tragic spell, born equally of the stark, sun-struck settings--especially those utterly realistic yet somehow otherworldly highways, elevated above the surrounding marshland--and a dynamic... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Clara Calamai - Massimo Girotti Director(s): Luchino Visconti DVD Release Date: Released the 16 July 2002 Usually ships in 24 hours
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At three brief hours, La Dolce Vita, a piece of cynical, engrossing social commentary, stands as Federico Fellini's timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini (extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence. A man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions (cool but tortured, sexy but impotent), he dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Marcello Mastroianni - Anita Ekberg Director(s): Federico Fellini DVD Release Date: Released the 21 September 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This 1966 masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger) is set in the heady atmosphere of Swinging London, and stars David Hemmings as an unsmiling fashion photographer hooked on ephemeral meaning attached to anything: art, sex, work, relationships, drugs, events. When a real mystery falls into his lap, he probes the evidence for some reliable truth, but finds it hard to reckon with. Vanessa Redgrave plays an enigmatic woman whose desperation to cover something up only seems like one more phenomenon in Hemmings's disinterested purview. This is one of the key films of the decade, and still an unsettling and lasting experience. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vanessa Redgrave - David Hemmings Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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For years now my favorite Luchino Visconti film has been "Ludwig". His grand sweeping epic. I've always felt that was his most ambitious film. True, Visconti has made other film that are great in their scope like "The Leopard", or "The Damned". But, none has touched me on such a personal level as "Ludwig", and then I saw this film. While, I admit, I don't think it's as grand as "Ludwig", "Rocco and his Brothers", is a powerful, emotional, saga.
Luchino Visconti is a director whom I've always had wonderful things to say about. He is one of my favorite directors of all time. And I always feel there is something to admire about all of his films, even those I may not be crazy about, I still found something good to say about them.
