The Damned: Damned if You Do It

Yet it was not this Buddenbrooks-ish story, nor its anticollaborationist message, that made The Damned the most scandalous—not to mention profitable—film Visconti ever made. He had, after all, covered similar themes before to uncontroversial acclaim. His masterpiece, The Leopard (1963), had definitively told the tale of an old order yielding to a new, and a decade before that, the sumptuous Senso (1954) had traced in detail an Italian aristocrat’s moral decay as she betrays her nation for her lover. But The Damned, a self-consciously late work, gives this legacy a provocative turn. It is routinely said to initiate the director’s “German trilogy,” also including Death in Venice (1971) and Ludwig (1973), but the label is best understood as code for the homosexuality running through these films under the aegis of things Germanic. Like the films that followed it, The Damned was born to be banned, or at least heavily censored. Its instantly iconic ad campaign showed us Martin cross-dressed as Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel under the legend “He was soon to become the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany.” We got the picture. Though there had been gay Nazis on-screen before—notably in Roberto Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945) and Germany Year Zero (1948)—these were closet cases, well matched to a cinematic portrayal whose own discretion on the subject amounted to a mere whisper campaign. The Damned would replace guarded insinuation with sensational demonstration. Under the name of Nazis, we were going to see Homosexuals; and, in 1969—if I may bear personal witness—the prospect under any name would have been thrilling.

We got the picture, but not quite the film. True, early on, at Joachim’s birthday party, we seem to have met the Homosexual in his classic flamboyance and family dysfunction. Martin not only comes onstage in the Dietrich drag, he even belts out her demand—super-shameless on male lips—for “einen Mann, einen richtigen Mann” (a man, a real one). Mutti Sophie, who has helped her son dress, ecstatically watches his feminization from the wings, while Joachim shakes his venerable head in the front row. Lisping and camping even out of costume, Martin seems a walking, talking open secret. But the birthday dinner has hardly ended before he’s on track to molest little cousin Thilde under the piano, an offense he will reiterate with Lisa, the little Jewish girl who lives next to his girlfriend, Olga (Florinda Bolkan). And then he rapes his mother for having turned him, with wigs and lipstick, into a girl! Encouraged by Berger’s spot-on mimicry, we had believed that Martin was an effeminate gay man impersonating a woman; he proves to be only a psychopath impersonating an effeminate gay man.

But the gay throne Martin abdicates gets plenty of claimants at the film’s high point, an epic dramatization of the Night of the Long Knives, the SS blitz on the SA in the Bavarian town of Bad Wiessee in 1934. It was the first sequence Visconti shot—even, uncharacteristically, before he had an exact shooting script. One has the strong impression that he made the film solely to frame this episode. Here, certainly, he piloted the hallucinatory camera work that marks the whole film. But for a long while, this centrality was clouded; the key scene was also the one that censorship boards most wanted to cut. Their tiny knives butchered it. Even so, in the U.S., The Damned was damned with an X rating.

The sequence, presented in its original form on this release, is almost unbearably dreamlike, in part because it is formally cordoned off from the rest of the film. It has little dialogue (which, at Visconti’s insistence, remains in the original German in both English and Italian versions), and, except for Konstantin, none of the principals appears until its very end. The action is carried largely by extras, the mise-en-scène, and the camera’s weirdly overintimate transactions with both. In an anthology of “pure cinema,” this would be the Visconti selection.

“The Damned is decidedly a world of tough erotic choices: if sex isn’t perversion, it’s nothing at all.”

It begins in the bright outdoors at Bad Wiessee, where Hitler has sent the SA on holiday. The arrivals are in high spirits. The officers reminisce of Munich, while their men revel in target practice, boating, and skinny-dipping. With as many brown shorts as shirts, this pastoral might be a congress of Boy Scouts. Later in the day, everyone crowds into the inn’s public rooms, where, under party streamers, they drink and sing and drink and dance and drink and drink. Eventually, some carousers put on women’s clothes, do a cancan, and fall over themselves dead drunk in puppy piles. We may still be within the bounds of allowable male bonding, but barely. The camera has already been suggesting—and performing—an odd perspectival dissipation. Even when the men are singing the “Horst Wessel Lied” and standing at attention, a pan shows them looking this way and that offscreen. Can these men be concentrating on one another? When it comes time to call it a night, and the camera moves upstairs to the showers and bedrooms, no viewer remains in doubt. Undressing or in towels or stark naked, men are pairing off for sex. This reunion of street fighters stands revealed as a gay orgy.