‘The Damned’ or — Carry On Götterdämmerunging?

(Warning — contains strong language, upsetting imagery and descriptions of Visconti movies)

Luchino Visconti’s ‘The Damned’ (1969) is one of the most inadvertently hilarious movies ever made, and considering it’s by the same guy who made ‘Death in Venice’ (1971) then that’s really fucking saying something.

You know who weren’t very nice people? The Nazis. You might have forgotten that so fortunately Visconti is here to remind us of that over two and a half torturous hours.

Germany, 1933, and the Essenbeck family are in the steel business. The patriarch, Baron Joachim (Weimar), is murdered by his widowed daughter-in-law and her social climbing lover (the Macbeths) thus allowing her son (Hamlet) to control the company, a company that will now provide the rising Nazi party with arms and munitions. However, are this scheming couple really the ones in control or are they being manipulated by an even more sinister force? (spoilers — it’s the Nazis!)

So it’s the decline of a decadent aristocratic family set against the rise of Hitler as the Reichstag burns, then books followed by the Night of the Long Knives and culminating in the control of German industry by the National Socialists and all played out with Visconti’s typical operatic flare, visual opulence and fixations with death and decay.

Sounds pretty intense, serious and weighty, right? And it would be if you weren’t too busy laughing your ass off because ‘The Damned’ is creepy, weird, hysterical, sexually all over the place, unhinged and silly. Very, very silly.

The problems are evident from the get-go with Visconti’s pathological lust for death and decay tripping him up and sending him flying flat on his face as soon as the first frame comes up as we’re immediately bombarded with a blaze of fire, Sturm und Drang and bruised colours the hue of rotting fruit. The issue is because it starts with everything already in such a state of terminal decay that there’s no room for further putrefaction to occur. How can you have moral decline when we’re already at rock bottom? And this suffocating atmosphere — lurid lighting, claustrophobic close-ups, painstakingly laborious camera movements — offers no wriggle room for competing contrasts so we start to suspect Visconti of fetishistic wallowing whilst his extreme extravagance soon renders everything uproariously hysterical.

For example — there’s a huge, intimidating photographic portrait of the Baron hanging in the Essenback’s mansion but it’s SO vast, SO imposing and SO ridiculous it looks like a Preston Sturges’ sight-gag.

Or how about when Dirk Bogarde and Ingrid Thulin get married at the end? It should be a scene of deadly seriousness but Visconti has caked poor Thulin in so much death-mask white make-up that you keep expecting her to turn into Kenneth Williams and start yelling out “Frying tonight!” What the fuck, Luchino? What’s ANY of this got to do with German history and the rise of Nazism?

Although the film’s most ill-judged moment of jaw-dropping stupidity comes when the family’s heir, Helmut Berger’s Martin, pops next door to visit the shy, little Jewish…

Okay, I’m not going anywhere NEAR describing this scene with a ten-foot bargepole because you certainly don’t want to read the words and I sure as hell don’t want to type them but let’s just say imagine the worst thing you can think of, then make it worst and then even more so. The problem (well, one of bloody countless ones) is we can feel Visconti deliberately provoking and goosing us and the censors, seeing how far he can push the material and shock factor which means the film starts to feel as though it’s turning into a Chris Morris gross-out sketch. Add onto that Berger running about in a tight-fitting suit and slicked back hair whilst frantically waving his arms about and watching ‘The Damned’ feels more like watching ‘Brass Eye’ meets Pee-wee’s Playhouse. This film is undeniably demented.

And yet what’s also undeniable is Visconti’s stunning control over the material, art design and camera work because despite all the ludicrous idiocy on display the technical aspects are frequently astonishing. The editing is immaculate meaning there’s an incredible flow to the movie and even though the camera movements are excruciatingly exact every single motion, every single detail expertly pushes the narrative forward. Whatever our eye is guiding to — a face, a gesture, a glance — reveals new information, keeps us watching and, more importantly, engaged. The paradoxical result is a tedious movie that’s also shockingly tightly paced, although I think I was more compelled to keep watching simply to see what sort of berserk insanity Visconti was going to try and pull off next.

There are also plentiful moments where Visconti demonstrates the full might of his skill when he pulls everything — narrative, design, movement — perfectly together into sequences of extraordinary power. The Night of the Long Knives episode is profoundly preposterous but it also contains moments of striking beauty and force meaning the film is bizarrely captivating. I was certainly never bored.

Amazingly, ‘The Damned’ was Visconti’s biggest commercial success on its release so it seems the audiences of the 1970’s certainly had an appetite for this sort of outré bollocks. And watching ‘The Damned’ is without doubt a chilling, uncomfortable, challenging and grimace-inducing experience… but so is having a live haddock shoved up your bottom.