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 family 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, as well as 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 its 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.
You get a clear sense from this opening episode 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: a long succession of reaction shots records 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). As they drive together to the Essenback mansion, this pair’s speech rhythms are relatively natural; once they take their seats at the birthday dinner table, 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), to his old-school grandfather’s shock and discomfort, performs a drag act. 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’. Berger gives Martin traditional queer mannerisms – from his flouncy irritation that the Dietrich routine is cut short onwards – 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 who is having an affair with Friedrich, an ambitious high-flyer in the steel company. Martin’s incestuous assault reduces Sophie to near-catatonia. 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 now 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 particular power struggle taking place within the Essenback family – Konstantin, who has been blackmailing the 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 SA decadence has the curious, 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 also a gay Catholic 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 Essenback – or for any other major character in The Damned. Without any suggestion that they once behaved more honourably than they’re doing, there’s no sense either of a fall from grace.
The script – by Visconti, Nicola Badalucco and Enrico Medioli – is replete with sententious, 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’. It’s hard to believe the problem here is just a matter of awkward translation. On paper, The Damned is so lavishly ridiculous you’d think it might be grotesquely entertaining; in fact, it soon palls, thanks to its sclerotic long-windedness. 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 just meant to assume that both have better things to do now than join in the rest of the family’s kinky games. With Sophie a zombie and Friedrich, without 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 the blood heir to the family fortune, would inherit without his mother and her lover doing either? 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 the dubbed English and German version of the film for The Damned’s international release. It’s unusual nowadays to hear a dubbed film; although it’s the real voices of all the main actors that we’re hearing (except for Umberto Orsini, according to Wikipedia), 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 tinkles along 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, not, I suspect, because Visconti excised his big moments, rather because the character of Friedrich is, like everyone else, too narrowly conceived: Bogarde’s expertise 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 Helmut Berger whose feline beauty is undeniably a kind of star quality. I prefer to think that we have The Damned to thank for two better films of the near future – 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 (I guess it’s a coincidence he has the same surname as Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice protagonist), Helmut Griem is bound to be more obvious than he would be as the richly ambiguous baron in Cabaret. Even so, he shows a welcome tonal variety and facial mobility that are water in the desert of The Damned.
12 January 2025
