The Damned (film)

Infobox_Film
name = The Damned
imdb_id = 0064118
writer = Luchino Visconti
Enrico Medioli
Nicola Badalucco
starring = Dirk Bogarde
Ingrid Thulin
Helmut Griem
Helmut Berger
director = Luchino Visconti
producer = Ever Haggiag
Alfred Levy
distributor = WB
released = October 14, 1969
runtime = 155 min
language = English/German
budget =

"The Damned" (Italian: "La caduta degli dei", German: "Götterdämmerung") is a 1969 film by Luchino Visconti.

"The Damned" has often been regarded as the first of Visconti's films described as 'The German Trilogy'. The others are "Death in Venice" (1973) and "Ludwig" (1973). Henry Bacon (1998) specifically categorizes these films together under a chapter 'Visconti & Germany'. Visconti's earlier films had analysed Italian society during the Risorgimento and postwar periods. Peter Bondanella's "Italian Cinema" (2002) depicts the trilogy as a move to take a broader view of European politics and culture. Stylistically, "they emphasise lavish sets and costumes, sensuous lighting, painstakingly slow camerawork, and a penchant for imagery reflecting subjective states or symbolic values," comments Bondanella.

Plot

The film centers around the Von Essenbecks, a wealthy industrialist family who have begun doing business with the Nazi Party. On the night of the Reichstag fire, the family's conservative patriarch, Baron Joachim von Essenback, who represents the old aristocratic Germany and detests Hitler, is murdered. Framed for the crime is the family firm's vice president, Herbert Thallmann (married into the clan through his beloved wife Elisabeth (Charlotte Rampling)), a liberal who openly opposes the Nazis. He escapes the grasp of the Gestapo, but his wife and children are sent to Dachau concentration camp in an effort to lure him to return. The empire passes to the control of an unscrupulous relative, the boorish SA officer Konstantin (René Koldehoff). Waiting in the wings is his son Gunther (Renaud Verley), a sensitive and troubled student, and his nephew, Martin (Helmut Berger), an amoral and corrupted playboy who is secretly molesting his young cousin as well as a poor Jewish girl. He is dominated by his possessive and manipulative mother, Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), the widow of Baron Joachim's only son, a fallen World War I hero. Martin's drag performance as Marlene Dietrich in "The Blue Angel", at his grandfather's birthday celebration, notorious at the time of the film's release, has since become an iconic image in cinema history.

An employee of the family firm and Sophie's lover, Friedrich Bruckmann (Dirk Bogarde), manages to ascend in power despite his lowly social status, thanks to the SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), a cousin of the family, who pits family factions against each other to move the family's steel and munition works into state control. Konstantin is killed by Friedrich in the SS coup against the SA during its 1934 meeting to deal with its dissatisfaction with Hitler. Known as The Night of the Long Knives, the SA meeting and the subsequent executions of its leaders by the SS is luridly portrayed as homosexual orgy and bloody gangster-style in Visconti's film. Friedrich, who now controls the family fortunes, is dismissed by Aschenbach as a weak social climber and not a loyal Nazi. Aschenbach subsequently makes a deal with the discounted and ignored heir, Martin, to remove Friedrich and his mother (who has mentored and encouraged Friedrich's rise) from control, so that he may get what is owed him. Martin sexually assaults his mother who subsequently falls into a catatonic state. Now in the SS, he allows Friedrich (who has managed to get a decree giving him the name and title of von Essenbeck) to wed his demented mother, and then hands them the poison to kill themselves. The film clearly references "Macbeth", "Hamlet", "Faust", aspects of novels by Thomas Mann, and Richard Wagner's opera cycle "Der Ring des Nibelungen", but this very lavish and operatic melodrama can also be understood as an allegory on the collapse of the embattled Weimar republic and the rise of Nazism. Each member of the family comes to represent a particular sociopolitical aspect that self-destructively falls to or supports Nazi consolidation of the nation.