The Damned [La caduta degli dei] **** (1969, Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Berger, Helmut Griem) – Classic Movie Review 2,232

Luchino Visconti’s rich and ambitious 1969 historical drama film The Damned [La caduta degli dei] stars Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin and Helmut Berger in his breakthrough role.

Director Luchino Visconti’s rich and ambitious 1969 saga of a wealthy interwar German industrialist family works in a most imposing and impressive way. The story, based loosely on the real-life Krupp family of steel industrialists from Essen, follows the family’s dramatic collapse during the Third Reich.

The Damned [La caduta degli dei] is set in 1930s Germany and centres on the Essenbecks, who have begun doing business with the Nazi Party. Their unstable amoral heir Martin is centrally mixed up in the machinations.

The film is propelled by compellingly intense and magnetic performances by Ingrid Thulin as the matriarch Baroness Sophie Von Essenbeck, Helmut Berger as her divinely decadent son Martin, and especially Dirk Bogarde as her ambitious Nazi lover, Friedrich Bruckmann.

Renowned opera as well as movie director Visconti directs in his most operatic, lofty movie style, making it more grandly complicated and elaborate than perhaps strictly necessary but stopping just short of being overblown.

Ambiguously, he seems both repelled by and in love with the smell of decay and degeneracy that’s all over his allegory of power. That’s the dilemma of being a Marxist count. And the only conclusion is that it corrupts of course.

On show among the bizarre scenes that Jean Genet might have liked are Berger impersonating Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel and the full-blooded re-creation of the horrific, real-life military purge, the Night of the Long Knives. Both scenes can certainly be considered among the film’s highlights.

This is a most painstaking, intense and rewarding movie, whose huge budget ensures a startlingly beautiful production, marvellously captured in Armando Nannuzzi and Pasquale de Santis’s loving cinematography. Nicola Badalucco and Enrico Medioli help Visconti with the screenplay and there’s fine work on the score by Maurice Jarre and especially the production designs by Enzo del Prato and Pasquale Romano.

Also in the cast are Renaud Verley, Helmut Griem, Reinhard Kolldehoff, Florinda Bolkan, Umberto Orsini, Albrecht Schoenhals (in his final film), Nora Ricci and Charlotte Rampling.

Helmut Berger received a Golden Globe nomination for Most Promising Newcomer.

Warner Bros, who helped out on the production when things got costly, earned a big return on their investment, so they then backed Visconti’s Death in Venice, where Bogarde is even better cast and showcased.

The Damned and Death in Venice are followed by the 1973 epic biographical drama film Ludwig, which also stars Helmut Berger, the third and final part of Visconti’s German Trilogy.

The Damned, Death in Venice and Ludwig were shot in English to accommodate the different nationalities in the cast.

The Damned is also known as La caduta degli dei and Götterdämmerung.

Principal photography took place in Italy, West Germany and Austria and at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Locations include Attersee Lake, Düsseldorf, Essen, Unterach am Attersee and the steelworks at Terni.. The film opened to critical acclaim and also to controversy for its sexual content. In the US, the film was given an X rating by the MPAA and was only lowered to R after 12 minutes were cut.

The Damned is Helmut Berger’s breakthrough role, with an Introducing credit though he had already appeared in Visconti’s segment of the 1967 The Witches [Le Streghe]. Berger was in a romantic relationship with Visconti. No doubt feeling upstaged, Dirk Bogarde expressed disappointment with Visconti for sacrificing his character’s development for a greater focus on Berger’s. Visconti offered Bogarde the star role in Death in Venice as compensation.

The cast are Dirk Bogarde as Friedrich Bruckmann, Ingrid Thulin as Sophie von Essenbeck, Helmut Berger as Martin von Essenbeck, Helmut Griem as Hauptsturmführer Aschenbach, Renaud Verley as Günther von Essenbeck, Umberto Orsini as Herbert Thalmann, Reinhard Kolldehoff as Konstantin von Essenbeck, Charlotte Rampling as Elizabeth Thalmann, Albrecht Schoenhals as Joachim von Essenbeck, Florinda Bolkan as Olga, Nora Ricci as the Governess, Karin Mittendorf as Thilde Thalmann, Valentina Ricci as Erika Thalmann, Irina Wanka as Lisa Keller, Wolfgang Hillinger as Janek, and Karl-Otto Alberty as Lommell.

Helmut Berger in 1973.

Austrian actor Helmut Berger [Steinberger] died on 18 May 2023, at the age of 78.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2,232

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