Luchino Visconti’s The Damned aka Götterdämmerung is like several seasons of the TV show Dallas run together. It’s big, melodramatic and camp. There’s even a “Bobby Ewing back from the shower” moment.
It’s the first of Visconti’s German trilogy – Death in Venice and Ludwig would follow in 1971 and 1973 – but is in many respects a return to the territory of 1963’s The Leopard, being the story of a great old family’s tussle with political forces beyond its control.
In The Leopard it was the arrival of democracy in 19th-century Italy upending certainties. In The Damned, aka Götterdämmerung, it’s the Nazis. We’re in Germany, it’s the 1930s, Hitler is newly in power and the Essenbeck family, an iron-and-steel dynasty based on real-life magnates the Krupps, are trying to manoeuvre their way around the new regime.
Chicanery, subterfuge, plot and intrigue are what this film is about, out in Germany itself, where the Sturmabteilung (SA), Hitler’s so-called Brown Shirts, are heading, unbeknown to themselves, towards the Night of the Long Knives.
But also inside the family, where its members jockey for position. The old Baron (Albrecht Schoenhals) trying to keep at arm’s length the upstart Austrian and his thugs. His boorish son, Konstantin (Reinhard Kolldehoff), a member of the SA keen to throw the family’s entire weight behind Hitler. The democratically voluble Herbert (Umberto Orsini). Günther (Renaud Verley), the sensitive cello-playing son of the appalling Konstantin. Martin, the sexually dissolute son whose peccadilloes are disregarded because he has a controlling number of shares in the company. But most of all Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), an outsider who has risen high in the company thanks to sheer talent and who hopes to machinate his way still further by marrying Martin’s mother, the Baroness (Ingrid Thulin).
There are other characters circling this pack. Like Elisabeth (Charlotte Rampling, shockingly beautiful), wife of Herbert. And Aschenbach, a relative who is a member of the SS and who will become more prominent as the star of Konstantin (and the SA) wanes. As a side note: Aschenbach, as a name at least, will return in Death in Venice – it’s what Dirk Bogarde’s character in that film is called.
Fassbinder reckoned this was his favourite film. And given that Fassbinder went in for big camp melodramas himself, that’s understandable. Visconti wanted it to be even more magnificent than it is. The title he was saddled with, The Damned, he hated. He insisted it should be Götterdämmerung, and since this is a tale of the “twilight of the gods” (literal translation) that makes sense. He also wanted Wagner and Mahler on the soundtrack but instead had Maurice Jarre foisted on him by the suits. Which might explain why Jarre’s soundtrack is so far back in the mix.
It is all beautifully staged, shot and acted, as The Leopard was, with the film peaking quite a long way before the end, in the exquisitely organised Night of the Long Knives sequence, when a weekend of debauchery by the SA ends in mass death at the hands of the SS. The scenes where the SS arrive to do their murderous work, quietly and slowly on motorbikes and lorries at dawn, is a moment of understatement at its most powerful.
Bogarde thought the film tipped too far away from his character and too far towards Berger’s Martin. There is a lot to be said for this view. Shifting the emphasis away from Friedrich’s attempts to worm his way into the family and towards Martin’s (grim, truly grim) sexual proclivities to an extent pulls the rug from under Friedrich and thus the entire drama. The fact that Berger and Visconti were in a relationship at the time might be significant here. Not to disparage Berger, who is magnificently awful as Martin.
By the end, though, you might wonder, as I did, about Visconti’s artistic choices and have a few questions you’d like to put to him if he were still about. Were the Nazis camp? Should they be depicted that way? And isn’t that a fatal mis-step? How would he answer. Yes, no and yes?
The Damned aka Götterdämmerung – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
