The Damned

 In HBO's acclaimed, and highly popular, series Succession, there is an ambitious, if obtuse, heir to the family fortune named Roman.  A former drug addict, Ken schemes to seize power from his father, a baroque tyrant named Logan.  Two of his siblings are allied with Logan and, one of them, Roman, I think, mocks Ken for his "silly little walk" -- a sort of constipated strut accomplished with a rigidly upright torso, robotically moving arms, and small, hen-like steps.  Luchino Visconti's grandiose The Damned is a German version of Succession -- or, more properly stated, is a source for the HBO show even, though, perhaps, no one associated the TV program has ever actually seen the 1969 Italian movie:  of course, you have DNA from people that you've never met.  At the turgid climax of The Damned (actually called Goetterdaemmerung in its European version), Helmut Berger, who was then Visconti's boyfriend, struts around in an SS uniform, a beautiful blonde beast resplendent in his black togs -- but he walks with tiny prissy steps and his military bearing is bogus and you can't help giggling at his pretensions.  Unfortunately, giggles are few and far between in Visconti's long, leaden movie and, mostly unintentional.  

In theory, The Damned  sounds like it could be good, tawdry fun.  But the movie's pacing is funereal and its politics, particularly those of the sexual kind, are so muddled that it's impossible to tell what is meant by some of the film's more lurid sequences.  The film's subject is internecine squabbling, literally murderous, between family members aspiring to power in a family business, Gusseisen (that is "poured metal"), an enormous foundry that occupies a grim, grey industrial site the size of a small city.  With a few exceptions, the action takes place in a colossal palace that is all interior -- I can't recall any shots of the exterior of this vast manse, a place with corridors as long as a soccer pitch and enormous great rooms with marble fireplaces and somber furniture that looks weightier than a luxury sedan.  Obviously, Visconti is channeling family history from Krupp dynasty, the firm that supplied iron for armaments to the Nazis -- there's apparent anxiety about the source for the story (the Krupps were still very much around in 1969) and, so, the film comes with a prefatory title that any resemblance to the living or dead is purely coincidental.  Really?

Visconti is famous for long party or celebration sequences in which all characters can be gathered to interact with one another while wearing gorgeous gowns and perambulating through spectacular and palatial sets.  The Damned begins with such a scene:  it's the birthday party of Joachim, the patriarch of the Von Essenbeck family.  At dinner, members of the family discuss the rise of National Socialism and, indeed, the festivities are interrupted with news that the Reichstag is on fire -- the film takes place over the course of a year that seems to be very, very long, that is, between February 1933 and July 1934.  The oldest son, Constantine, is a Nazi sympathizer -- he's also a thuggish brute.  His son Gunther seems more genteel but feckless.  Herbert is a liberal and, in  the course, of the evening, he resigns his position in the family firm gets accused of murdering his own father-in-law, and has to flee with Nazi assassins on his heels.  Sophie, presumably  Joachim's youngest child, is a widow.  But she has an ambitious boyfriend, Aschenbach (played by Dirk Bogarde) who is scheming to become president of the firm.  Sophie's son, Martin is the villain of the piece, a weird conglomeration of just about every imaginable sexual perversion.  During the long opening sequence (it follows a showy prelude in which molten iron spews fire in all directions), Joachim's granddaughters recite a celebratory poem; one son performs a somber cello solo, and Martin, who is a homosexual cross-dresser, imitates Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel singing a cabaret song about needing a richtiger  (real) man while dressed in a black garter belt and tight-fitting corset-like bodice.  (Needless to say, the old patriarch doesn't exactly warm to this performance.)  The festivities end with Martin attempting to molest one of the granddaughters under a table (it turns out that he's a pedophile as well as transvestite), the old man gunned down in his bedroom, and Herbert on the run, accused of killing Joachim -  in fact, the patriarch was shot by Aschenbach.  This is all sounds fun on paper, but it's not executed in an appealing way -- the mise-en-scene is tedious, the camera placements are obvious, and every shot drags out its interminable and weary way; sometimes, Visconti uses zoom shots into close-ups, a device that within the enormous, echoing void of this movie seems somehow cheap and meretricious, as if the film technique of Taiwanese kung fu picture has found its way into this moribund Teutonic gloom.  Things go from bad to worse.  Martin rapes a child who lives in the apartment next door to his glamorous fashion-model mistress's digs-- the tenement seems to have plush apartments next to squalid low-rent rooms in the same building.  Martin's sexuality makes no sense at all -- first, he seems to be a flamboyant queer, then, we find that he's a child molester, and, ostensibly, heterosexual as well.  By the end of the movie, he's shooting morphine and bedding his own mother.  It's with good reason that the other characters regard him with dismay.  The child that Martin is raping, a toddler Jewess that Visconti sexualizes in an alarming way, hangs herself.  The virtuous Herbert has an  equally virtuous wife played by Charlotte Rampling -- at this point in her career, Rampling used her exotic beauty to specialize in playing depraved women, but here she is cast against type.  Of course, she ends up in a concentration camp at the behest of Constantine, her brother or brother-in-law (I'm not sure which).  Constantine, who is also bisexual, attends a weekend with Roehm's SA boys -- this involves lots of skinny dipping, Bavarian dancing complete with lederhosen-clad lads slapping their thighs as they hop about in circles,, and, then, a spectacular homosexual orgy.  At dawn, when the boys are all tuckered-out, the SS appear and machine-gun everyone, spilling, as the appalled Pasolini wrote in a critical open-letter to Visconti, "liters of red dye".  This massacre, the so-called "Night of the Long Knives" turns out to be orchestrated by Martin, now resplendent is his SS uniform wit the ambitious Aschenbach..  (These two villains have contrived to have poor Herbert and his wife sent to Dachau.)  With Constantine riddled with machine bullets and out of the picture, the line of succession runs through Aschenbach so long as he can become nobility, a von Essenbeck by marriage.  Therefore, he arranges to marry his mistress, Sophie.  But, on the eve of her wedding, Sophie ends up in bed with her own son, Martin who is half-crazed with morphine.  A weird sex scene ensues with Martin burying his head in mom's lap while she peers in the dark with a comatose expression on her face -- there's lots of foot caressing adding to Martin's impressive repertoire of perversions.  A zombie wedding follows in which Sophie, her face painted Kabuki-white, is wed by Aschenbach, understandably distraught since it's apparent that these nuptials with his narcotized bride will end up with his death -- it is, as they say, a "blood wedding."  A group of depraved folks invited to the wedding get half-naked and lounge around the great room in the mansion necking in a desultory way -- it's like an outtake from a Fassbinder film.  No one is having much fun, including Martin's mistress who dances with her handsome SS boyfriend and pervert.  Martin supplies his mom and stepdad, Aschenbach, with cyanide capsules which they obligingly take, ending up in a macabre tableaux as grotesque mannequin-like corpses.  The "blood wedding" at the end of film is symmetrical with the birthday party with its murderous climax at the start of the movie.  And the picture ends with fountains of molten metal poured out of vast black cauldrons.

This all sounds campy, ridiculous, and amusing,  But it's not.  Visconti takes a bit too much pleasure in staging incest, child molestation, and, of course, the spectacular, if ridiculous-looking, massacre, at the end of the film.  By the evidence of the movie, Visconti was a self-hating homosexual.  He luxuriates in the blood bath at the Bavarian resort -- his SA men wear garter belts and hose, have baby oil on their handsome chests, moon around in the dark, gazing up into the sky and drunkenly singing the Horst Wessel Lied.  The movie is probably worth watching for the bravura slaughter of the SA men -- but Visconti seems totally confused:  is the massacre a good thing or a bad thing. Similarly, the film puts back the cause of homosexual liberation by a generation -- the queer protagonist, Martin, is also a child molester, drug addict, a mother-fucker in the literal sense, and an enthusiastic Nazi.  The Damned was a famous movie in its time, on which the US movie industry bestowed an X rating -- it would be considered soft R today.  The film is handsomely made and well-acted within the limitations of its rather operatic genre -- it's like Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind, full of strange garish lighting effects and melodramatic perversion but without the fun.