Film review

  • The Damned

    Old YorkerFilm review

    La caduta degli dei

    Luchino Visconti (1969)

    An aristocratic, industrialist German family gathers to celebrate the birthday of its elderly patriarch.  The Damned’s early scenes focus on the contest for future control within the Essenbeck clan of their steel business but the larger political environment is instantly clear.  It’s February 1933.  As Baron Konstantin von Essenbeck (Reinhard Kolldehoff) dresses for dinner, a photograph of Adolf Hitler, alongside his own reflection in the mirror, looks back at him from the dressing-table.  The patriarch Baron Joachim (Albrecht Schoenhals), who is Konstantin’s uncle, though he loathes and scorns the ‘upstart’ Hitler, accepts that the Essenbecks need to do business with the new Nazi regime.  (The family and the business, as their name suggests, are based in Essen.)  Herbert Thallman (Umberto Orsini), husband of Joachim’s niece Elisabeth (Charlotte Rampling), is a fervently outspoken anti-Nazi, as he demonstrates during the birthday dinner.  Before it’s over, Joachim has announced his decision to replace Herbert as company vice-president with boorish Konstantin, who’s already an officer in the Sturmabteilung (SA).  Herbert exits the room in high dudgeon.  During the night, Joachim is found murdered in his bed.  The murder weapon is Herbert’s handgun.

    This opening episode gives a foretaste of how Luchino Visconti will direct The Damned.  Most of the actors deliver their lines emphatically – an impression probably reinforced by the dubbed English voices on the soundtrack and certainly reinforced by Visconti’s camera:  reaction shots at the dinner table record the characters’ all-too-easy-to-read facial responses to what they’ve just heard said.  There are two late arrivals at the party, Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde) and Aschenbach (Helmut Griem).  (The latter seems not to have a forename.)  As they drive together to the Essenbeck mansion, this pair’s speech rhythms are relatively natural; once they take their seats at the gathering, Visconti pins down their reactions, too.  Conflicting cultural outlooks are made as immediately, obviously clear as differences of political opinion.  As part of the evening’s entertainment, one of Joachim’s great-nephews, Günther (Renaud Verley), plays a classical piece on the cello, while his younger cousins, Thilde (Karen Mittendorf) and Erika (Valentina Ricci), the daughters of Elisabeth and Herbert, cutely recite birthday greetings to their great-uncle.  But Joachim’s grandson Martin (Helmut Berger) performs a drag act that shocks his old-school grandfather.  Done up as Marlene Dietrich’s Lola Lola, Martin is midway through the ‘Ein richtiger Mann’ number from The Blue Angel (1930) when news arrives from Berlin that the Reichstag is burning.

    Although Helmut Berger has an ‘and introducing’ credit on the film, this wasn’t his first cinema appearance, even in a Visconti picture:  Berger had also had a small role in Visconti’s contribution to The Witches, a 1967 anthology movie.  The two men were in a romantic relationship at the time The Damned was made.  Whether or not that influenced the importance of Berger’s character in the finished product, there’s no doubt Martin becomes the star of the freak show The Damned turns into.  The film’s poster shows him in his Lola Lola outfit under the tagline, ‘He was soon to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany’.  From the word go, Berger gives Martin traditional queer mannerisms but, as Pauline Kael pointed out in her review of The Damned, Martin ‘does just about everything except sleep with a man’.  He sexually abuses his underage female cousins, as well as Lisa Keller (Irina Wanka), a Jewish child who lives next door to Martin’s current girlfriend, Olga (Florinda Bolkan):  Lisa then hangs herself.  Martin eventually has sex with his mother, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), Joachim’s widowed daughter-in-law; the incestuous assault reduces Sophie to near-catatonia.  She has been having an affair with Friedrich, an ambitious high-flyer in the steel company.  In the climax to the story Martin, now an SS officer, supervises his mother’s wedding to Friedrich before instructing the bride and groom to take cyanide capsules, which they seem almost relieved to do.  Martin and, through him, the Nazis assume complete control of the Essenbeck business empire.  Tomorrow belongs to them …

    Visconti includes a morning-after-the-night-before scene outside the Reichstag, including a roll-call of famous writers banned by the Nazi government (as part of the Reichstag Fire Decree).  He later stages, at inordinate length, the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in Bad Wiessee in 1934, dwelling on the cross-dressing and homosexual horseplay of Ernst Röhm’s SA paramilitaries before SS officers descend on their hotel and execute the ‘brownshirts’.  Visconti links the events in Bad Wiessee to the power struggle taking place within the Essenbeck family:  Konstantin, who has been blackmailing paedophile Martin, is among the brownshirt murderees; Friedrich and Aschenbach, arriving as part of the SS contingent, finish him off – though with Aschenbach giving Friedrich the instruction to shoot.  But the SA’s dirty weekend in Bavaria is symptomatic of The Damned‘s confusing (and perhaps confused) approach.  On the one hand, Visconti’s interminable parade of decadence has the worrying effect of substantiating the Nazis’ professed rationale for the Long Knives massacre – to stamp out moral turpitude.  On the other hand, the behaviour of the film’s arch-pervert Martin and his eventual triumph seem meant to serve as a metaphor for Nazism and its rise to power in Germany.

    The director’s complex biography might seem to justify an ambivalent approach to the tale he tells.  Born into the Milanese nobility, Luchino Visconti di Modrone, Count of Lonate Pozzolo, was gay, Catholic and Communist.  Visconti’s The Leopard (1963) was a fine elegy to the aristocracy of nineteenth-century Sicily and it’s worth noting that The Damned is a much blunter title than the Italian La caduta degli dei or its German alternative Götterdämmerung, which suggest a tragic, even regrettable, decline.  According to Visconti’s biographer Laurence Schifano, the real-life inspiration for Martin von Essenbeck was Arndt von Bohlen und Halbach, the Krupp heir whose father worked closely with the Nazi regime – but Arndt von Bohlen wasn’t born until 1938 and never showed the slightest interest in the family business.  When his father, sentenced to twelve years‘ imprisonment at the Nuremberg war trials, died in 1967, ‘Arndt gave up his shares [in Krupp] in exchange for an income of one million dollars a month and spent the remaining twenty years of his life in a whirl of rhinestones and spangles, reigning over a court of young men who adulated him and stole from him what they could, until he died of an AIDS-related disease in the spring of 1986‘.  Visconti may have had some personal sympathy for Arndt von Bohlen but he doesn’t show any sympathy for Martin von Essenbeck – or for any other major character in The Damned.  Without any suggestion that they once behaved more honourably than they’re doing now, there’s no sense either of a fall from grace.

    The script – by Visconti, Nicola Badalucco and Enrico Medioli – is replete with overcooked, tin-eared dialogue.  Sophie to Elisabeth, as the latter prepares to leave the country to join her escaped husband: ‘Don’t dream of coming back one day to find a Germany which was so dear to your heart. … There will be no other Germany but this one, and you will not be able to escape it for it will spread before you know it all over Europe and everywhere!’  Martin to Sophie, as they hurl home truths at each other: ‘It’s you, mother. You, who’s always been my nightmare. You were the oppression, with your will to subjugate at all costs’.  On paper, The Damned is lavishly ridiculous to an extent that might be grotesquely entertaining; in fact, it’s so sclerotic and long-winded that it quickly palls.  But probably just as well to feel alienated by the film, given its grim historical context and the questionable use Visconti makes of this.  There were one or two plot strands I didn’t understand.  Aschenbach, another of Joachim’s nephews but consistently more interested in serving the regime than the steel industry, proves himself an accomplished strings-puller but disappears suddenly from the film, along with Günther who, when he learns that Herbert was framed for the murder of Joachim by the actual killer, Friedrich, joins Aschenbach in the SS.  Perhaps we’re meant to assume that urgent political business leaves Aschenbach and Günther no time for family squabbles, let alone kinky sex.  With Sophie a zombie and Friedrich, once he’s deprived of her support, exposed as a craven man of straw, I wasn’t sure why they needed either to marry or commit suicide – surely Martin, as blood heir to the family fortune, would inherit regardless?   I can’t pretend I was too bothered, though:  by this stage, I was just impatient for The Damned, which runs 156 minutes, to end.

    The film Visconti made lasted even longer – 168 minutes.  The scene of Lisa hanging herself was cut, thank goodness (what remains is just a shot of the child’s dangling legs).  The American censor removed some of the Bad Wiessee stuff – presumably because of the sexual content but it’s hard not to be grateful for the decision, considering how protracted the episode still is.  Visconti himself had already jettisoned some of what he shot.  Dirk Bogarde expressed disappointment that he privileged Martin at Friedrich’s expense – in particular, that a scene in which Bogarde’s character is overwhelmed with guilt for murdering Joachim, ended up on the cutting-room floor.  It was Visconti’s decision to opt for a dubbed English and German version of the film for The Damned’s international release.  It’s so unusual nowadays to hear a dubbed film; although it’s the real voices of all the main actors (except for Umberto Orsini, according to Wikipedia) on the soundtrack, the dubbing gives proceedings an extra layer of artificiality.  Maurice Jarre’s music is a weird concoction:  it’s often melodramatically sinister but Jarre seems not to have quite got ‘Lara’s Theme’ from Doctor Zhivago (1965) out of his system – a similar melody keeps tinkling into the score, most surprisingly in the big incest scene between Martin and his mother.

    The dubbing and the over-deliberate camerawork aren’t the only things wrong with the high-powered cast’s performances.  Ingrid Thulin, one of Bergman’s top actresses, is particularly hard to take, especially when Sophie applies lipstick – an action that Thulin executes so decisively she makes Joan Crawford look subtle by comparison.  Dirk Bogarde isn’t at his best.  This could be because Visconti excised his best moments though I suspect it’s rather because Friedrich, like all the other characters, is too narrowly conceived:  Bogarde expertly signals early on that the man he’s playing is conflicted and weak, and the part gives him no scope to show much else.  It might be thought that, as a pointer to the future, the film is most remarkable for the advent of Helmut Berger, whose feline beauty is undeniably a kind of star quality.  I prefer to think we have The Damned to thank for two superior films of the early 1970s – one a Visconti picture, the other also set in 1930s Germany.   It was presumably their collaboration here that led Visconti to cast Dirk Bogarde as Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice (1971); the international exposure he got through The Damned surely helped Helmut Griem land the part of Maximilian von Heune in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972).  As the suavely steely Aschenbach (presumably a coincidence that he has the same surname as the Death in Venice protagonist), Griem is bound to be more obvious than he would be as the richly ambiguous baron in Cabaret a few years later – especially since Visconti gives him so much to say.  Even so, Helmut Griem’s tonal mobility – in his face and in his voice – is water in the desert of The Damned.

    12 January 2025

     

  • Nickel Boys

    Old YorkerFilm review

    RaMell Ross (2024)

    I haven’t read Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys (2019) or seen RaMell Ross’s widely-praised documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2018).  Watching Ross’s dramatisation of Whitehead’s novel may be a very different experience for those familiar with the source material or Ross’s film-making signature or both:  I found Nickel Boys mostly maddening, sometimes incomprehensible.  As storytellers, Ross and Joslyn Barnes, who shares the screenplay credit with him, seem to have elided much more than the book title’s definite article.

    I gather Colson Whitehead uses a third-person narrative; Ross tells the story from a ‘first-person point of view’ (Wikipedia).  This belongs less to either of the main characters (or any other character) than to an often juddering hand-held camera:  it’s POV as the expression of technique rather than the perceptions of a personality.  Two examples.  A group of African-American lads, inmates of the Nickel Academy reform school, sit round a table eating together.  Ross and his DP, Jomo Fray, show the faces of all but one of the boys but the latter’s voice is heard along with the other voices.  A couple of screen minutes later, the scene is replayed; this time, the boy not seen in the previous version is on camera and his main interlocutor is not.  The dialogue is unchanged and the same goes for the other boys’ reactions, except that they’re now seen from a different camera angle.  The reprise gives the viewer nothing s/he wouldn’t have got from the first version of the scene had Ross not excluded from it one of the main faces in the story.  In the second example, the camera records action on the far side of a swimming pool.  As a white woman walks away, a young Black man removes his trousers before sitting down poolside and dangling his legs in the water.  At first, the camera’s position  is virtually at the level of the water’s surface and incorporates – to arresting effect – a shimmering aqua haze into its viewpoint.  Once the boy’s legs are in the pool, the camera moves underwater in order to make the most of that image.  Here too, the fancy composition tells us nothing more than that RaMell Ross knows how to use a camera ingeniously.

    Hale County This Morning, This Evening, a description of contemporary life in the title location in Alabama, was much admired for its visual complexity and avant-garde form.  Ross’s stated approach – ‘to centralize my new community in documentary’s language of truth’, ‘to participate not capture; shoot from not at’ (Wikipedia again) – may have worked well in a non-linear piece but The Nickel Boys is a very different undertaking.  Nickel Academy, where Colson Whitehead’s action is principally set, is based on the notorious Dozier School, a Florida reformatory that operated for more than a century and was eventually revealed to be the site of appalling criminal abuse of boys in the school, who were beaten, tortured and, in some cases, murdered.  Legal investigations into Dozier led to its closure as recently as 2011.  Whitehead’s narrative moves between the 1960s, when his two protagonists – Elwood Curtis and Jack Turner – are Nickel boys, and the 2010s, when one of them is a businessman in New York City and is forced, through the public scandal that Nickel Academy has now become, to reckon with his own past in the school and who he became once he escaped from it.

    Whitehead’s set-up sounds straightforward enough and Ross’s version of it does include a few relatively conventional elements.  He uses news film to set the political scene and clarify the story’s timeframe:  from the Selma-Montgomery marches of 1965 to Martin Luther King’s funeral in April 1968 and the Apollo 8 moonshot over Christmas in the same year; when Elwood’s grandmother visits Nickel she mentions that Lyndon Johnson is moving forward with the Civil Rights legislation initiated by the Kennedy administration.  The Nickel boys aren’t all African-Americans but in Jim Crow Florida the students are racially segregated and the focus is understandably on the Black majority, who are much worse treated than their white counterparts.  Except that Ross’s fragmentary, elliptical style doesn’t generate real dramatic focus on anyone.  The rationed illustrations of abuse may be a relief for the viewer but they’re a form of soft-pedalling too.  Ross foregrounds the school’s manicured green lawns and stints on its grimmer aspects to create a picture of Nickel that may owe something to Jonathan Glazer’s portrait of domestic life over the wall from Auschwitz in The Zone of Interest (2023).  But Ross’s elaborate montages get in the way of any such picture emerging.  Whenever he does settle into more extended scenes these stand out as incongruously protracted.

    The grandmother’s monologue on her visit to Nickel is virtually uninterrupted:  she proceeds from the good news about LBJ to the bad news that  the lawyer she paid to arrange an appeal against Elwood’s incarceration has made off with her cash and disappeared without trace.  Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor makes a fine job of this big speech but it’s obviously going to be the one chance she’ll get to make an impression.  At the school’s annual interracial boxing event, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), a malign white administrator, instructs a Black kid (Bryant Tardy) to take a dive against his white opponent; the boy either refuses or forgets to do as he’s told, and wins the bout.  (That’s the last seen of the Black boy, who presumably ended up in one of the many unmarked graves discovered years later in the school grounds.)  This boxing match – including the reactions of Spencer et al watching ringside – seems to go on forever.

    Elwood (Ethan Herisse) should never have been in Nickel in the first place.  A promising high-school student in Tallahassee, whose teacher (Jimmie Fails) encourages independent thinking, Elwood wins a scholarship to a college for African-American students.  On the way there, he hitches a lift from a man driving a stolen car; when the driver is arrested, Elwood is pulled in as his accomplice and, since he’s a minor, ends up in Nickel.  By highlighting the plight of someone entirely innocent, Whitehead runs the risk of suggesting the place wasn’t so terrible for boys who’d actually committed petty crimes.  But the friendship between Elwood and Turner (Brandon Wilson), who represent contrasting outlooks, makes good sense.  Elwood is an ardent admirer of Martin Luther King and fervent supporter of the Civil Rights movement; Turner is more worldly wise and sceptical about Black lives getting better, inside or outside Nickel Academy.

    The place erodes Elwood’s optimism but he compiles an exposé of what’s going on there, which Turner reluctantly passes to a visiting government inspector.  As a result, Elwood gets put in the school sweat box and Turner gets wind of the authorities’ plans to murder his friend.  The two boys escape together.  To the bitter end, it’s Elwood who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time:  the boys haven’t got far on their stolen bikes before their armed pursuers shoot Elwood dead.  Turner gets away, though, and travels north.  The NYC businessman (Daveed Diggs) of the early 2000s, anxiously following latest developments in the uncovering of Nickel’s atrocious past, is the middle-aged Turner but his name now, and the values he has tried to espouse in adult life, are inherited from his late friend.  Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson give truly felt performances but they’re always fighting a losing battle for attention with RaMell Ross’s nearly relentless image-making.

    On a couple of occasions, Ross puts on the screen clips from Stanley Kramer’s 1958 The Defiant Ones (1958), a black-and-white drama in more ways than one.  Two escaped convicts, played by Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis, are chained together and have to co-operate in order to stay on the run.  (By coincidence, I’m due to see The Defiant Ones – for the first time – in BFI’s Poitier season later this month.)  It’s hard to tell whether or not Ross’s use of these excerpts is meant to be ironic – or if’s there any significance in the fact that, when it’s showing on Turner-Elwood’s TV, he doesn’t appear to be watching.  Like so much else in Nickel Boys, the Kramer movie clips are part of an artful, uncommunicative design.

    9 January 2025

     

     

     

     

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