The Damned / La caduta degli dei

Visconti envisioned a film about “a family in whose bosom crimes are committed that go virtually unpunished”: National Socialism provides the breeding ground for this morbid melodrama about a noble family that seeks an alliance with the new rulers in order to restore its fortunes, but instead stumbles toward ruin. As the industrialist von Essenbeck family (a reference to Krupp AG), a star ensemble celebrates a dance of death in perverse shades and decadent excess. Visconti's variations on the marriage of realism and opera culminate in a “Götterdämmerung” of Wagnerian proportions, but the tragedy is also a travesty (legendary: Helmut Berger's first appearance in a Marlene Dietrich garter belt costume). Once scandalized as a “Nazi soap opera,” Visconti's monstrous grotesque, aestheticized in colors of decay, remains one of the most complex films on the subject. We are showing a gravure Technicolor copy. (C.H.)