The Rottenest Clan in Nazidom

Cymbals crash. Kettledrums thunder. The screen fairly buckles under the image of a belching steel furnace. Then, from the midst of the apocalyptic flames, the title roars with a force that threatens the entire population of the first twelve rows of the orchestra. The Damned, it proclaims, shimmering with the intensity of white heat. A gratuitous parenthesis adds (Goetterdammerung). It is too much. Like the rest of the film, it overpowers and finally overwhelms with its own unabashed sensationalism.

Italy's Luchino Visconti has little love for subtleties or half measures. In such films as The Leopard and Rocco and His Brothers, Visconti has inflated psychological conflict into perfervid librettos of passion, love, deceit, death and a kind of fermenting sexuality. But in The Damned he has outdone himself. The doomed figures of the title are the Von Essenbeck family, an informal assembly of back stabbers, thieves, perverts and murderers who can lay claim to being just about the rottenest clan since the Borgias.

On a February night in 1933, the family gathers to pay birthday tribute to its patriarch, Baron Joachim, head of the vast Von Essenbeck steelworks on the Ruhr. Gathered around the birthday table are Martin, the Baron's deviate grandson (Helmut Berger), an off-again, on-again faggot with an occasional taste for whores and five-year-old girls; Martin's mother Sophie (Ingrid Thulin), a glacial blonde castrator, with her power-hungry lover (Dirk Bogarde); and assorted relatives who reveal such minor personality flaws as criminality, sadism, cowardice, and a timely penchant for Nazism.

All the seeds of evil planted at this banquet eventually take root during the film's two-hour 20-minute running time to produce what Visconti obviously hoped would be an allegory of prewar German history. Although the Von Essenbecks appear to have been modeled rather closely on the Krupps, The Damned is about as potent a parable of Germany as Wagner's Ring cycle, which it outdoes in zestful vulgarity. The actors all perform with an unbridled bravado, the cinematography is properly bilious, and there are enough sex scenes--a good many of them homosexual--to get the movie rated ten-X, like a box of confectioner's sugar. But The Damned deserves the reaction it encourages. It is an outrageous film with awesome pretentions that paradoxically make it far from artistic but close to enjoyable.

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