Imperfect and excessive -- and also essential.
The Damned (1969)
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Reviews Counted:11
Fresh:10
Rotten:1
Average Rating:8/10
Runtime: 2 hrs 37 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Synopsis: A family's decline coincides with Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s and serves as an allegory for German society as a whole in this intoxicating work from Luchino Visconti. The Essenbeck family... A family's decline coincides with Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s and serves as an allegory for German society as a whole in this intoxicating work from Luchino Visconti. The Essenbeck family runs the German steel industry and the nervous patriarch attempts to appease the Nazis by appointing a successor sympathetic to their cause. But his choice sets off a round of in-fighting as his children battle for control of the company. His young grandson eventually takes charge, but his drug addiction wreaks havoc on his family when he brutally rapes his mother and turns her into an addict. By the end of the film, the Nazis, including the party members in the family, are on the verge of taking over Europe. [More]
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Berger, Helmut Griem
Starring: Dirk Bogarde, Ingrid Thulin, Helmut Berger, Helmut Griem
Director: Luchino Visconti
Director: Luchino Visconti
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Reviews for The Damned
By boldly confronting the psycho-sexual depravity of the Nazi mindset, all the way through to is inevitable incestuous nature, Visconti creates a specific cinematic vernacular for viewing and discussing Hitler's manic ideology.
The Damned is a lot of things – bilious and perverse are the two first adjectives that spring to mind – but one thing it is not is a film of half-measures.
Occassionally overflows with self-indulgence and didacticism, weakening an otherwise and often potent critique
By the end of the opening sequence, the film has already indulged in pan-sexuality, corporate backstabbing, anti-reactionary suppression, pedophilia, and murder plots.
the script feels like it's written by a graduate student doing a research paper on Mein Kampf
A spectacle of such greedy passion, such uncompromising sensation, and such obscene shock that it makes you realize how small and safe and ordinary most movies are.
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