Dirk Bogarde

The Night Porter

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A naked Lucia dances for the SS

Problematical movies Exhibit A – The Night Porter. The story of a former guard at a concentration camp who meets up with an erstwhile prisoner some years later and starts a sexual relationship with her. Roger Ebert thought it “nasty”, Pauline Kael considered it “offensive” while Vincent Canby of the New York Times went for “a piece of junk”. Kael also described it as “veneered with redeeming social values”. Is it though? Even that is up for debate. The director Liliana Cavani based the film, so she said, on a conversation she had with a woman who’d been in one of the death camps and had fallen for a member of the SS. … Read more

Our Mother’s House

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Dad and the kids group shot

Our Mother’s House didn’t get the acclaim of Jack Clayton’s previous film about spooky kids, The Innocents, when it debuted. Partly because The Innocents is one of the all-time greats. But also because Our Mother’s House appeared in 1967, and with its message of children going to the bad because of a lack of parental supervision it was out of step with the letting-it-all-hang-out ethos of the age. Lovers of Victoriana, feast your eyes on the interiors of the huge house where seven children and their rabidly religious but mortally ill mother live, with only a daily help in the shape of Mrs Quayle (Yootha Joyce) to keep the show on the road. … Read more

The Damned aka Götterdämmerung

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Interloper Friedrich with Baroness Sophie

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 … Read more

Daddy Nostalgie

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Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Gainsbourg

Dirk Bogarde’s final film, Daddy Nostalgie (released as Daddy Nostalgia in the UK and These Foolish Things in the US), is also, arguably, Jane Birkin’s best one and a reminder (writing this just days after she died) how good she could be away from the shadow cast by Serge Gainsbourg. It’s a small-scale, almost subterranean drama, played out on the sunny Cote d’Azur, where retiree Tony (Bogarde) is recovering from a serious operation. The op might not have worked and Tony might not have long for this world. Time to get his affairs in order, settle things with wife Miche (Odette Laure) and daughter Caroline (Birkin) before the grim reaper turns up. And … Read more