Luchino Visconti-La Caduta degli dei ('The Damned') (1969)

A decadent German family of great wealth wallows in its own decay as its factories produce armaments for Hitler and his followers. Warner




The power and fortune of the Von Essenbeck family remained intact even when Germany lost the great war and during the depression that followed. Now it's 1934 and the baron has summoned his family to a dinner that also brings a cousin rising in the Nazi party to the great house accompanied by a rising manager at the baron's company. Two little girls recite poetry in the parlor and then play hide-and-seek with their cousin Martin. Suddenly there is a scream. The baron has been shot with their father's gun and the father flees the country. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0064118/plotsummary)




In the early days of Nazi Germany, a powerful noble family must adjust to life under the new dictatorship regime. The transition from democracy to dictatorship is thus dramatized through the lives of the family which also owns a powerful German industrial firm. Through such characters as a German Baron, a child molester, a Nazi Storm Trooper, an innocent man framed for murder, and a Captain in the German SS, "Damned" thus shows how so called "German Upper Class Nobility" first resented Adolf Hitler, then accepted him, and at last embraced him. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0064118/plotsummary)




This brooding, operatic movie about Nazism makes Cabaret look like wholesome family fare. The family in The Damned is a symbol of German society circa 1934. The Krupp-like steel magnate Baron von Essenbeck represents the spineless establishment. The Nazis kill the baron, then frame one heir apparent, a socialist (married to the stunning Charlotte Rampling)....




A bearish, boorish Essenbeck representing the SA, the Nazis' early goon squad, takes the reins. But Hitler murdered the SA in the 1934 "Night of the Long Knives," providing The Damned with its bravura action scene, a Nazi massacre at a gay SA orgy. The winning Essenbeck is the murderous, pedophilic, transvestite, mother-rapist Martin (sharp-featured Helmut Berger), who represents Nazism....




Though he's better in director Luchino Visconti's 1971 Death in Venice, Dirk Bogarde is classy as Martin's stepdad. The Damned got an Oscar screenplay nomination, and Vincent Canby called Berger's Martin "the performance of the year." (--Tim Appelo - Editorial Reviews - Amazon.com)