SnoReptilePlenty Memorable, crazy movie

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

cynthiahost Because of the incest and child molestation and violence it was given an x rating.Then it became the first X rated movie to premiere on t.v in the c.b.s. late show movie on Thursday back in 1973.the next day it drew protest and offense against it being broad cast on public commercial t.v.The movie had no real sex in it.It really p.g.I under stand the story now.A family all owns a steel mill under the third Reich.They are all trying to kill each other so that the other can take control.This is like Dynasty and Falcon crest.Yes Zarah Leander voice make an appearance in the film.I'm wondering if they paid her for it.I don't know if she would have want to remember the bad old days.But it was a sixties modern song ,not in sync with the thirties.It's Gross Pa.Pa's birthday.The head of the steel industry, played by Albrecht Schoenhals, who was originally a doctor and later became a top male lead of German and Austrian films of the thirties and forties,who was older already.One of his grand sons Martin ,played by helmet Burger is doing a Marlene Dietrich drag act, give you the impression that he is gay ! Wrong!He an effeminate heterosexual male who is a pedophile and is emotionally molest by his mother ,played by Ingrid Thulin.One of the magnates sons Baron Konstatin , played by Reinhard Kolldehoff, who is rough macho and mean and wants his son Gunther,played by Renaud Verley , to quit school and work at the steel mill.It turn out that he's the closet queen, the baron .It seems that Luciano was suggesting that because of Roamer , most of the male members of the Nazi party was gay.Well some one kills grandpa so that the relative can take over his job.They accuse a cousin ,Herbert ,played by UmBerto Orsini, so he takes off.The baron goes of to his gay camp on the lake , oh really!,Where he and his throw buddies are surprised attack orchestrated by another cousin Aschnebach,who is member of the S.a., with the aid of dirk, to eliminate another family member taking over the steel company.Martin little girl friend has gotten syphilis from him and she ends up killing her self.Ashnebach black male Martin to give up the stock in the company,but, his Mother played by Ingrid Thulin stops that as she actually has control rove the steel company , she persuade Aschneback ,played by Helmret Griem,who was also chosen to show up in another same type of movie in 1972 Cabaret,almost in the same role Well it is finally revealed who killed Gross Papa.It was martin ,he put Gunther up to it.Now more macho Martin want the job. He ends up raping his mother for revenge He end up joining the guard and pushing his parents to a Nazi wedding,that they end up kill themselves.Imagine if they did a night time weakly t,v show based on this movie," Meet the Essenbecks.Of course they have to change it a bit.It would of been like Hogans Heroes dramatic style.Great Entertainment. 01/04/13

tieman64 Luchino Visconti's "The Damned" looks at the role industrial capitalism had on the madness infecting 1930's Germany. One of the director's best films, it revolves around the Essenbecks, an aristocratic family whose massive wealth and high status depend on a steel works factory. The family head, Baron Joachim von Essenbeck, detests the National Socialists, but nevertheless allies his company with them. His son is already a Nazi member and another Essenbeck woman already has a Nazi lover, so why not side with them? After all, with the German Revolution crushed, this seems to be the way the winds of Germany are blowing.As a communist sympathiser this of course repulses the Baron (the Nazis set about eradicating all communists, Marxists, worker movements and, contrary to their name, weren't remotely socialist), but he must act to protect his wealth, and so reluctantly aligns his company's future to the fortunes of the Nazis, his factories reordered such that they do whatever is necessary to assist the German war machine. As the film progresses, however, the Baron's steel works will be slowly appropriated by the Nazis from within, both the Baron and his son will die and all remaining Essenbecks will be systematically replaced by Nazi figureheads.Visconti was himself a communist and aristocrat (Renoir and Pasolini, whom Visconti admired, were also communists), and so his film is primarily concerned with examining the relationships between Naziism and capitalism, and aligning the excesses of both. This project sometimes tips into sensationalism; Visconti has the Baron's son rape his cousin and then his mother, and the film quite shamelessly dips into homosexuality, drug use, incest and paedophilia.But such morbid topics were common in Italian cinema at the time ("Seven Beauties", "The Conformist" etc), most notably by the great provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini. Pasolini maintained that consumer capitalism was worse than fascism because fascism's oppressions operated openly, its very "visibility" offering something to struggle against. But capitalism, Pasolini believed, was far more insidious. It was invisible, able to disavow its failings, and created a society in which citizens were willing participants in their own consented exploitation.So Pasolini's solution was simply to destroy the traditional family unit. Throw everything vile and debased at it. Why? Because the backbone of capitalism was, at the time, deemed to be traditional family, which itself rested on patriarchal values. Destroy the family, liberate it from itself, from its restrictions, and you win. Of course history has shown such thinking to be severely wrong. Today capitalism both sells conservatism and "empowers" the family to lovingly destroy itself, willingly.But many Italian films of the late 1960s and early 70s which dealt with fascism followed a similar trend, mostly due to the writings of Wilhelm Reich in his book, "The Mass Psychology of Fascism". These films, like Reich, link various sexual and physical dysfunctions to the very anxieties of fascism. Think Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist", in which fascism is nurtured through the anchoring of sexual inhibition in the authoritarian miniature state of the family. The belief was that fascist anxiety stems from these suppressions, which ultimately results in a form of paralysis in which the subject is adjusted to all authoritarian orders and so willingly submits in spite of his degradation.But Visconti takes a slightly different approach. Nazis, especially during this era, were typically portrayed as being either the "id unchained" or perpetually repressed. Most of "The Damned" itself conforms to these trends. Here, when the "masculine ideal" of Nazi Germany comes under threat (by feminism, the literary and artistic Avant-Garde, socialism and sexual deviancy etc), we see it resorting to the fascist repression made possible by violent father figures (Hitler etc), all of whom repress sexual excess and transfer it instead to a kind of violent machismo.Visconti, however, was also influenced by Lukacs, a Marxist theorist who argued against modernism. And so Visconti also portrays the aristocracy and bourgeoisie (ie Old Germany) in various states of decline as they are infected and dominated by the future (Nazism). Visconti's Nazis - the new order - are themselves emblematic of the transmutation of every (sexual) impulse into predation (figured most obviously in the paedophilia of the Baron's son and the raping of his own mother), the drive for power, and finally the death wish (in the Freduain sense; desire cloaks death).This is made most clearest during a scene in which SS troops raid what is essentially a Socialist Alliance "homosexual sex party" and execute everyone present. Here, Nazism's dream of a classless state is revealed to be false. The sexual self (ie, the totally liberated moment or movement) is always contained and then destroyed by the demands of power (be it feudal, capitalist, monarchist etc), an act which itself serves as a metaphor for Hitler's annihilation of certain factions to please others, be they the SS, the military or the Prussian ruling class. So unlike Bertolucci and Passolini, it's not only a case of fascism spiralling out of the authoritarian family, but of fascism legitimising a kind of private deviancy (always aligned with predatory power) inside the family whilst publicly crushing all similar displays. In this way Visconti sets up a weird tension, the SS son molesting children and raping his mother behind closed doors whilst SS gangs brazenly kill SA officials, Jews and homosexuals in public.Beyond this you have the usual pros and cons of Visconti, "The Damned" too reliant on dialogue, boardroom discussions and the format of the nineteenth century novel. Like most of Visconti's films it observes as powerful "families" jostle for position, the "old order" trying to guarantee its future but failing to be absorbed into the "new consensus". Unlike these films, its tone is haunting and nightmarish.8.5/10 - See "The Garden of the Finzi-Continis".

bkoganbing The Damned tells the story about the Nazi consolidation of power from the Reichstag fire of 1933 through the famous Night Of The Long Knives purge in 1934 as seen through the eyes of a prominent German industrial family, the Von Essenbachs. The Von Essenbachs are a Prussian Junker clan who survived World War I with fortune intact. They are a munitions manufacturing outfit based on the real life Krupps and in order to survive the Great Depression and the coming Nazi preventive counterrevolution they make a deal with the new Third Reich.As we know from history the Nazis manufactured an incident with the famous Reichstag fire to spread fear and create the climate for the new Chancellor Adolph Hitler to assume dictatorial powers. The next year was a struggle for power within the Nazi movement as well as the country. The Von Essenbachs have their own power struggles with in the family that parallel the Nazis and the country.Luchino Visconti based some of his characters on some real life German personalities of the day. Dirk Bogarde is based on Hjalmar Schacht the finance minister who in fact was a technician and who did in fact play a large role in German recovery from the Depression. Bogarde is a new man brought in to reorganize the munitions factory and who like Schacht thinks he can ride the tiger. Swedish actress Ingrid Thulin plays the daughter of the patriarch of the clan Albrecht Schoenhals. She's one vicious woman who has bought completely into the Nazi ideology. I believe she's based on Joseph Goebbels wife Magda, one of the most terrifying women in history. Though the two of them indulged in many affairs, they were committed partners in support of Hitler. Magda Goebbels was a woman who along with her husband so couldn't stand the thought of Germany losing World War II and her children living under Russian/Slavic occupation that she and Joe killed their seven kids as well as themselves. One of the sickest people in history and I can definitely see Thulin doing the same thing in the same circumstances.The Damned was nominated for an Oscar in 1969 for Best Original Screenplay, it lost to the more popular Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid. As much as I like Newman and Redford this story is far better. Sadly this was the only nomination for the film, incredibly not even nominated for Best Foreign Film.As Visconti states in the film Nazism may have been born with Hitler and discontented veterans of World War I, but it was incubated in the factories of Germany during the Great Depression. It was fed to the workers by the owners who were in terror of a Communist revolution. In many ways the Nazi takeover was a preemptive strike against that occurring, but it was a horrible price.

patrick powell Anyone coming to The Damned cold who didn't know that the film was made by Luchino Visconti would write it off as a TV movie which would be lucky to get much exposure on TV. At its best it is bad, and at times it is quite simply awful. And this from a director who has, at times, been lauded as one of the world's best. So what went wrong? Well, I don't know. It is quite in explicable. The acting is bad, the dialogue often truly awful and the direction is flat and uninspired. At times the film is lifeless. On paper it will have looked quite promising: show how a ruthless employee in league with the boss's daughter-in-law schemes and murders his way to the top of German steel company. Set it all in the Thirties as the Nazis are consolidating their grip on power to reflect the nature of the regime. Nothing wrong with that, except that the moral - goodness, weren't the Nazis quite awful - is about as unoriginal as you might get. But something, many things, went wrong in the realisation: the collection of English, German and I don't know from where else actors does not work (and I for one have never bought that Dirk Bogarde is even half as good as everyone else likes to say. The man is often a ham). They seem to be acting in different films. It occurred to me that were the actors all Italian, the direction might have just about worked - no, I'm clutching at straws. The dialogue is often so utterly banal and 'audience informing' that it could have been written by bad student director. I'll give just one very telling example of how ill-conceived it all is, how wrong-headed: yes, the Nazis were thugs as the well-documented Night of the Long Knives murderously demonstrated. But Hitler and the rest of his gang were essentially lower-class mediocrities who gained power through a bizarre set of circumstances. And they had a dog-in-the-manger attitude to German nobility, high finance and industrial grandees. So when the authorities come to arrest Herbert, they would not arrive in a battalion of gun-toting, steel-helmeted, black-uniformed soldiers, banging on the door to be let in - especially so early on in the regime when their grip on power was still untested and shaky. That whole scene can serve to sum up just how bad this film is. This gets one star out of ten only because the system doesn't allow for awarding no stars.