Damned, The

By: Amos Lassen

"THE DAMNED"
Subversive Visconti
Amos Lassen

"The Damned" is the most savagely subversive film by the iconoclastic auteur Luchino Visconti. It uses the mechanics of stylized melodrama to portray Nazism's total corruption. With Hitler's rise to power, the wealthy industrialist von Essenbeck family and their associates - the scheming social climber Friedrich (Dirk Bogarde), the matriarch Sophie (Ingrid Thulin) and the perversely cruel heir Martin (Helmut Berger) descend into a self-destructive spiral of decadence, greed, perversion and all-consuming hatred as they fight for power over the family business and over one another. We see a garish world of decaying opulence in which a family's downfall represents the moral decadence of a nation.

"The Damned" is a complex Nazi soap opera that recreates ancestral castles and SA Brownshirt orgies. When released in 1969, the movie got plenty of attention because of how it portrays depraved behaviors. Set in 1933, German steel magnate Joachim Von Essenbeck (Albrecht Schönhals) is murdered on his birthday, the day the Reichstag burns. It is part of a power plot for company executive Frederick Bruckmann to climb to the top. He is aided by his romantic partner Sophie Von Essenbeck, a schemer who thinks she can control the actual Essenbeck heir, her son, weakling Martin Von Essenbeck. Framed for the murder, Essenbeck nephew and Communist sympathizer Gunther (Renaud Verley) is into exile, while nephew Konstantin, a Brown Shirt SA commander (René Koldehoff) tries to himself into power by framing Martin with his secret crimes. The mother and son relationship borders on the , and under Sophie's influence, Martin has chosen Frederick to run the company. Pulling the strings behind all of this intrigue is SS officer Aschenbach (Helmut Griem), a ruthless schemer who knows how to use the vices of the Essenbeck family to gain the steel industry for the Third Reich.
The script is its intelligent and dispassionate script and what is missing in melodramatic surprises, it makes up in believability. If this isn't the inside story of exactly how the Nazi SS consolidated corporate power in Hitler's Germany, it could be very close.

The collapse of the Essenbeck empire plays out against a backdrop of Nazi power plays - the burning of the Reichstag, the Night of the Long Knives when the SS eliminated the leadership of the SA, a rival military . The Nazi politicos could not wipe out the Essenbecks as they did most other elements of German society yet although they think their essential steelworks make them untouchable, the Essenbecks are totally vulnerable to attack from within.

Aschenbach is a completely self-contained schemer, Bruckmann is an ambitious fool who begins with a strong hand but quickly shows his weaknesses. He unwisely takes some relationships for granted, especially the goodwill of his SS mentor Aschenbach.
The is filled with Essenbeck excess and depravity. Foolish liberal Herbert Thallman mouths off against the Nazis, and thus cannot hold the presidency of steel mill or defend himself when Bruckmann frames him for murder. Martin is a degenerate of young girls and his mother Sophie is a monster who has dominated her son since childhood to serve her own wish for power. Konstantin makes his big play for power by blackmailing Martin.

Aschenbach plays all of these greedy aristocrats, getting them to eliminate one another and compromise themselves. By making the surviving Essenbecks accomplices in Nazi crime, Aschenbach steals the independence that the patriarch Joachim had preserved so well. Bruckmann and Sophie think they are being groomed to become industrial monarchs, when the Nazis simply want them eliminated. Aschenbach finds it easy to marshal the disillusion and hatred of the youngest Essenbeck, Gunther. The Essenbecks are reduced to being Nazi pawns, and their steel empire becomes an unofficial state enterprise.
Today, the film seems very tame even though they show perversity. Martin starts things off with a drag version of a Marlene Dietrich song. Joachim tolerates the display only makes sense in a family where is practically out in the open, along with Martin's victimizing of the tiny daughters of the company president. Visconti carefully details the disturbing molestations, which while off-screen, imply everything, especially when Martin drives a diminutive Jewish girl to a terrible death.

The centerpiece of the film is an elaborate SA orgy at a lakeside resort, a restaging of the historical Night of the Long Knives when Hitler's elite SS eliminated the grass-roots SA organization, the thugs that brought him to power. The SA men chase women around but mostly they indulge in a big homosexual bash that's equated with Nazi evil. All the sex in this film is Evil. The vicious power plays show extreme family stress. Sophie has an emotional breakdown that involves a . The film ends with a hellish wedding attended by SS degenerates and their prostitute girlfriends.

The acting is excellent throughout and the detail gives most of the cast the opportunity to sweat profusely as each is put on the spot. The main story of cold-blooded murder schemes and power grabs is chilling enough and doesn't need 'perverse' scenes. Visconti based his film on the real-life Krupps. He directs in his most operatic, lofty movie style, making "The Damned" complicated and elaborate. He seems both repelled by and in love with the smell of decay and degeneracy that's all over this allegory of power.

Special features include a new 2K digital restoration by the Cineteca di Bologna and Institut Lumire, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray; an alternate Italian-language soundtrack; an interview from 1970 with director Luchino Visconti about the film; archival interviews with actors Helmut Berger, Ingrid Thulin and Charlotte Rampling; Visconti: Man of Two Worlds, a 1969 behind-the-scenes documentary; a new interview with scholar Stefano Albertini about the sexual politics of the film; a new English subtitle translation and English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing; plus an essay by scholar D. A. Miller.