The Damned (1969)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.

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.

It's interesting another IMDb reviewer of the "Damned" refers to Bertolucci, because the same parallel was on my mind - though not with "the Comformist" (which I haven't seen), but with "1900". Both movies deal mainly with the rise of respectively Nazism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, both take liberties with historical truth (although Visconti is -remotely- closer to the fact), both are political statements in the guise of artistic extravaganzas, both can boast an international stellar cast... which is a problem in both cases, as for instance Dirk Bogarde is not very believable as a German industrialist (!!) Anyway, while I consider "1900" a total failure, at least "the Damned" makes for interesting viewing. The story shouldn't be taken too seriously -it is completely over-the-top : incest, drugs, pedophilia, murder, cross-dressing with a dash of Shakespeare and politics. But the experience is on the whole visually compelling. The "parti pris" of treating the rise of Nazism as an opera (Visconti was by the way a famous opera designer) is rather successful. Some of the sequences are quite visually arresting -the Night of the Long Knives (which, unless I'm mistaken, was filmed in Bad Wiessee where it actually took place), or at the end, the party signaling the definitive rise to power of the Nazis. Not Visconti's best by far, but interesting (or hugely irritating depending on your frame of mind).Incidentally, for those who enjoyed "the Damned" I recommend watching Minelli's "the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse" which is to a large extent similar -historical silliness redeemed by visual splendor- and rather better.

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.

The movies have used as central topic the second world war, because it had all lot of things that tell, and, as a friend of mine said one time, it can be applied to the worldwide present. "La Caduta degli dei", or the famous English title "The Damned", join this group of movies (Others that belongs to this long list can be "Pink Floyd: The Wall", "Das Boot", "Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma", Roman Polanki's "The Pianist", "The Downfall", "Cabaret", "The Bridge on the river Kwai", "The Longest Day" and of course "Shindler's List"). "La Caduta degli dei" talk about the Von Essenbecks, a family where just one can have all the power. A family that going to fall in the total decadence and selfish. A "damned" family. The factor that produces all this power is a factory of metals. The principal own of this factor is the old Joachim, who begins the indecision of uniting to the Nazi regime. Since here begin a fight of hypocrisy for power until find the total decadence.Since the presentation of that selfish boy in clothes of women (Remembers me a lot of Bob Fosse's "Cabaret" where talk about of the Nazi Germany and it counts with Helmut Griem too) to the depressive wedding, "La Caduta degli dei" is a decadent story of not more than selfishness. Althoug that have some technical errors, it intention is clear and is told in a perfect depressive way. Luchino Visconti's "La Caduta degli dei" is definitely a good movie, with outstanding performances of Ingrid Thulin (As that interested and horrible mother) , Helmut Berger, Dirk Bogarde, Helmut Griem, Renaud Verley, Umberto Orsini and Charlotte Rampling (My God, is the first that i see her... she is beautiful, i think that Anouk Aimée was the woman that heads my list, but this one win her... what a woman!!!)."La Caduta degli dei" is a perfect movie of decadence and selfishness (I think that i made that thing of repetition, repetition, repetition... but its necessary) with and outstanding direction (I love that notable camera approaches, are magnificent and at the same time, give to the movie that saddest touch) and unforgettable performances. Is an undeniably important movie in the history of movies.*Sorry for the mistakes... well, if there any