La Caduta degli dei (1969) - film review

Germany, 1933.  As the Nazis’ grip on their country increases, a family of wealthy industrialists strive to turn the situation to their advantage.  Shortly after he announces his retirement, the head of the von Essenbeck family, Joachim, is killed.  His murder is blamed on the Communist sympathiser, Herbert, who flees, leaving behind his wife and two young daughters.  With the support of von Essenbeck’s ambitious daughter, Sophie, Frederick Bruckmann takes control of the family’s vast steel making enterprise, hoping to win favours from the Nazis along the way.  Bruckmann is opposed and ultimately betrayed by the other von Essenbecks, who are motivated by greed, ambition or revenge.  In the end, the family company passes to Martin, an unhinged sexual deviant who has sold himself, body and soul, to the Nazis.

Luchino Visconti’s portrait of a dynastic German family succumbing to Nazi evil and reaping the consequences is a shocking yet totally absorbing work, arguably the director’s most overtly political and controversial film.  The character of Martin von Essenbeck (magnificently portrayed by Visconti’s protégé Helmut Berger) is the pure personification of evil – a drug-addicted paedophilic bisexual whose every act is a provocation against nature and the established order.  He comes to symbolise Nazism in all its grim brutality and inhuman perversion, the physical manifestation of the very power which draws the von Essenbecks to their doom, like moths drawn to a candle.  Konstantin, Sophie and Frederick all believe they can further their wealth or their position by allying themselves with the Nazi cause, but none of them know what they are dealing with, until it is revealed in the face of Martin, at the end of the film.

With its dark Gothic sets and moody photography, The Damned shows Visconti at his most joyously operatic.  Intentionally melodramatic and rather stylised, this is a far cry from the staunch realism of the director’s earlier films, yet it is just as effective.    Most shocking is the sequence where a battalion of the SA (the popular Fascist front) is slaughtered by the SS immediately after an evening of debauched drinking and gay orgies.  These scenes (representing the Night of the Long Knives), deliberately provocative in their relentless intensity, yet having the character of a lurid dream sequences, are what most define this film.  They show a Germany which is drowning in the mire of its own sickening decadence being purged by an unthinking fascist brutality.  It is immediately apparent what the fate of the von Essenbeck family will be.  They misguidingly think they can turn this power to their advantage; in truth it will exploit them and obliterate them when they cease to have any further use.

The Damned is one of cinema’s most explicit portrayals of human corruption by and complicity with evil.  Whilst it is easy to fault the film for its theatrical excesses and lack of narrative coherence, it leaves a deep and lasting impression on its spectator.  The film’s opening sequence resembles more a scene in Hell than a steel foundry and provides an appropriate metaphor for the fate in store for anyone who believes he can profit from an evil as great as Hitler’s rampant Nazism.

© James Travers 2004

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?