Helmut Berger

Ludwig

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Helmut Berger as Ludwig

As mad and excessive as the king it portrays, Luchino Visconti’s Ludwig – about the “mad” King Ludwig II (1845-1886) of Bavaria – is a vast, sprawling and endlessly sumptuous display of the excesses of a monarch who’s clearly off his chump. It got absolutely hammered by the US critics when it opened there in 1973 – Roger Ebert gave it one star and described it as “lethargic and persistently uninteresting”. The New York Times said it was “bereft of ideas”. And neither of them had seen the full-length four-hour version. At least 30 minutes had been lopped for its US distribution. Which is a pity, because the sheer unwieldy size of the … 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