Sorry to go all contrarian here, but I think the story and screenplay (yes, I noticed it got an Oscar nomination, and for that matter that Fassbinder said this film did for cinema what Shakespeare did for the stage) are just wrongheaded, whether you consider the film as a family melodrama or as some sort of historical allegory about Nazism or a philosophical parable. The actors do their best with it, and the visual imagery is skillfully done, but they can't make a good movie out of this piece of cloth. Really, I think this.
(This review is based on the US English-dubbed DVD, so it's conceivable that I'm missing something that was in the original. But I'd have to be shown.)
Let me get it out of the way first that this film appears to me to be really a bad portrayal of LGBT people, beginning with the famous drag scene acted by Helmut Berger -- which in this film warns the viewer to watch out for Martin Essenbeck, because any man perverted enough to dress up as Marlene Dietrich is perverted enough for any crime, without distinction of age, gender, or relationship -- and leading on to the rather fanciful reimagination of the Night of the Long Knives with rooms full of naked young men getting shot down. Yes, I KNOW that Visconti was gay himself and that Berger is bi, so maybe I, a straight amateur, have no right to criticize here. Maybe this is some sort of satirical subversive reappropriation of the view that gays were to blame for the Third Reich (which you can hear from some voices on the right wing today). I cringed, but I am leaving this factor out of consideration in my rating.
Let's start, then, with the allegory idea. Blurbs here and there say that this film is an allegory of the rise and fall of Nazism, but it isn't. The action starts a month after Hitler's swearing-in, on February 27, 1933, the night of the Reichstag fire, and it closes not too long after the SA purge on June 30, 1934. This is a period in which Nazism consolidated its victory, after its rise; its fall was not even on the horizon yet, and that's true in the film as well.
For an allegory to work, it requires some kind of knowledgeable approach to the subject matter and some kind of apparent argument to make, picture to portray, or other reason to exist. There is supposed to be some kind of correspondence between the characters in the allegory and whatever concepts or entities they are supposed to represent.
How does that work in "The Damned"? To begin with, the context of Nazism is shut completely out of the movie. You hear nothing about the depression; the Communists are mentioned in a word and then dropped. You hardly even see the steel works. The whole enterprise is just a MacGuffin, something for everyone to fight over.
We are shown a family with several different approaches to the Nazi victory of 1933. Joachim, the patriarch, is willing to make a grudging compromise; Konstantin, the son, is a thuggish SA man (a rich baron would have cut an odd figure as an SA leader, but I digress); Sophie, the widowed daughter-in-law, and Friedrich, the works manager and her lover, want to use the Nazis for their own power; Herbert, the son-in-law, resists in words. Aschenbach, the Mephistophelean SS man, plays with them all, and none of the above family members are entirely successful; scum is rising to the top, and it's hard to be the kind of absolutely depraved scum that Aschenbach is looking for. The idea that it would be useful, even to the Nazis, for the manager of a steel works to know something, about, you know, management or steel - this doesn't arise.
If there is an allegory here, it is not a very useful one. It's not about how the Nazis rose (or fell). It doesn't account for Aschenbach. He can have come from Hell or outer space, as far as we know. It doesn't say what if anything to do about Nazis either. It's about who (within this tiny sliver of the privileged) ends up winning the competition organized by Aschenbach to prove oneself most reliable by being the most depraved and the closest to a mathematical human zero.
And all it tells us is that Nazism was a bad thing - watch out for it. True enough, but I don't think it's particularly enlightening about it otherwise.
The film works even less well as a melodrama. The screenplay requires the actors to bellow and snarl lines at each other about their feelings and intentions which are worthy of telenovelas, but it has none of the virtues of a telenovela screenplay. It has no sympathetic or compelling central characters. The central characters are all horrible, and the non-horrible ones are all peripheral. There are no coherent plans that any of them are pursuing that get anywhere. Ashenbach doesn't count, as he has no personal life and is more of a force field than a character.
The best gloss I can put on this is that it is really an existential parable, which is not really about Nazism at all, but about Evil, which if you save your soul it kills you, or if you try to sell it your soul it cheats you and kills you anyway; the only way to survive is to have no soul in the first place. But then there you are with no soul. It's a bleak world-view and not terribly adaptive, but the movie has a right to it, I guess. But I think Nazism was just too horrible and real a thing to be used as just a prop in this kind of exercise.
(This review is based on the US English-dubbed DVD, so it's conceivable that I'm missing something that was in the original. But I'd have to be shown.)
Let me get it out of the way first that this film appears to me to be really a bad portrayal of LGBT people, beginning with the famous drag scene acted by Helmut Berger -- which in this film warns the viewer to watch out for Martin Essenbeck, because any man perverted enough to dress up as Marlene Dietrich is perverted enough for any crime, without distinction of age, gender, or relationship -- and leading on to the rather fanciful reimagination of the Night of the Long Knives with rooms full of naked young men getting shot down. Yes, I KNOW that Visconti was gay himself and that Berger is bi, so maybe I, a straight amateur, have no right to criticize here. Maybe this is some sort of satirical subversive reappropriation of the view that gays were to blame for the Third Reich (which you can hear from some voices on the right wing today). I cringed, but I am leaving this factor out of consideration in my rating.
Let's start, then, with the allegory idea. Blurbs here and there say that this film is an allegory of the rise and fall of Nazism, but it isn't. The action starts a month after Hitler's swearing-in, on February 27, 1933, the night of the Reichstag fire, and it closes not too long after the SA purge on June 30, 1934. This is a period in which Nazism consolidated its victory, after its rise; its fall was not even on the horizon yet, and that's true in the film as well.
For an allegory to work, it requires some kind of knowledgeable approach to the subject matter and some kind of apparent argument to make, picture to portray, or other reason to exist. There is supposed to be some kind of correspondence between the characters in the allegory and whatever concepts or entities they are supposed to represent.
How does that work in "The Damned"? To begin with, the context of Nazism is shut completely out of the movie. You hear nothing about the depression; the Communists are mentioned in a word and then dropped. You hardly even see the steel works. The whole enterprise is just a MacGuffin, something for everyone to fight over.
We are shown a family with several different approaches to the Nazi victory of 1933. Joachim, the patriarch, is willing to make a grudging compromise; Konstantin, the son, is a thuggish SA man (a rich baron would have cut an odd figure as an SA leader, but I digress); Sophie, the widowed daughter-in-law, and Friedrich, the works manager and her lover, want to use the Nazis for their own power; Herbert, the son-in-law, resists in words. Aschenbach, the Mephistophelean SS man, plays with them all, and none of the above family members are entirely successful; scum is rising to the top, and it's hard to be the kind of absolutely depraved scum that Aschenbach is looking for. The idea that it would be useful, even to the Nazis, for the manager of a steel works to know something, about, you know, management or steel - this doesn't arise.
If there is an allegory here, it is not a very useful one. It's not about how the Nazis rose (or fell). It doesn't account for Aschenbach. He can have come from Hell or outer space, as far as we know. It doesn't say what if anything to do about Nazis either. It's about who (within this tiny sliver of the privileged) ends up winning the competition organized by Aschenbach to prove oneself most reliable by being the most depraved and the closest to a mathematical human zero.
And all it tells us is that Nazism was a bad thing - watch out for it. True enough, but I don't think it's particularly enlightening about it otherwise.
The film works even less well as a melodrama. The screenplay requires the actors to bellow and snarl lines at each other about their feelings and intentions which are worthy of telenovelas, but it has none of the virtues of a telenovela screenplay. It has no sympathetic or compelling central characters. The central characters are all horrible, and the non-horrible ones are all peripheral. There are no coherent plans that any of them are pursuing that get anywhere. Ashenbach doesn't count, as he has no personal life and is more of a force field than a character.
The best gloss I can put on this is that it is really an existential parable, which is not really about Nazism at all, but about Evil, which if you save your soul it kills you, or if you try to sell it your soul it cheats you and kills you anyway; the only way to survive is to have no soul in the first place. But then there you are with no soul. It's a bleak world-view and not terribly adaptive, but the movie has a right to it, I guess. But I think Nazism was just too horrible and real a thing to be used as just a prop in this kind of exercise.